John Green: "I devoured the Sweet Valley High books in the 1980s"

American author inspired by Kurt Vonnegut, late Jane Austen, and the brilliance of Robert Penn Warren. In the highly sexualized reading days of the 1980s, I knew those books were for girls, but they

I remember learning to read with boring stories about Jane climbing a hill, but my earliest exciting memories are reading series like The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High. Back in the heavy reading days of the 1980s, I knew those books were for girls, but I devoured them.

In addition to the girls in The Kid Club, I loved books about survival and endurance, especially The Island by Gary Paulsen, in which a boy discovers an isolated island and goes there to learn about the natural world.

When I was 16, I read Toni Morrison for the first time: The Bluest Eye and Sula and Song of Solomon Quickly. Literature has always felt a little distant (and maybe even a little dead) to me, but Morrison helped me see that books are vital and exist. I always knew they could carry me, but Morrison showed me that books could also transform me.

In my youth, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut played a large role in the development of my values and beliefs. His radical humanism—his belief that humans may not be good news yet, but they may still be good news—inspired me then and continues to inspire me today.

The book that made me want to be a writer

Reading Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon made me want to write a book. I've never come across a novel with quirky main characters or such a vibrant sense of contemporary youth, and this novel made me want to tell similar stories.

When I was in high school, I found Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye annoying and whiny. I enjoyed the book but I thought Holden just needed to come out of it and realize how lucky he was to be a rich kid in New York City. Revisiting the story years later, it blew me away. The sadness of that novel and Holden's vulnerability only became apparent to me as an adult.

I just re-read Lily King's Lover's Heart and enjoyed it even more the second time around. I re-read a lot because I'm fascinated by how different a great book is every time you go back to it. The text hasn't changed, of course, but I have.

I feel no immediate need to return to the works of Ayn Rand, whose poor designs only serve to reinforce flawed ideas about how humans organize and cooperate.

I didn't read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice until I was an adult! How I wish I could have met Lizzie Bennet when I was younger, but nevertheless, I love that book and return to it often.

It's about astrophysics, called How to Build a Universe, by Dr. Katie Mack. I'm anxious for anything that can help me—in this case, a way out—to understand that mine is not the only life (and indeed, my galaxy is not the only one).

When I need to be reminded why I love reading and what it is about language that turns me on, I turn to Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, a brilliant novel about US politics and the South, but most of all about the inexorable march of time.

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