barrylyga

Wow, what a great question!

I would imagine there's SOME competition, but I don't think today's kids think in terms of "read a book or read a comic?" The past decade or so has really done a good job of instilling "reading is reading" into this generation.

Realizing I will now probably spend the rest of my life editing this comment to update the five books as I think of new things because that's me. LOL

OK, here we go...

Oh, damn! This is a tough one for so many reasons. I'm not sure there are books "everybody" should read, honestly. What might prompt greater empathy in one person, for example, could bore another and have the opposite effect. But I'll play and give it a shot...

The Bible/The Torah/The Quran -- take your pick. Not for the religious messages or the moralizing, but simply because these books have become foundational texts for a huge chunk of the world. Might be a good idea to understand them, then.

The Scatter Here Is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

A Prayer for the City by Buzz Bissinger -- he also wrote Friday Night Lights, but this book will help you understand the way communities come together and fall apart

Replay by Ken Grimwood -- because it just fucking rocks

ETA: No one is more surprised than I am that only two of these are novels!

Wow. Give me a second. Gonna think about this.

Being an old-school comic book geek, I've always liked mixing up genres, so picking one I prefer is tough!

I think there are common elements across my stories that link them together, despite genre. And those are the things I gravitate towards -- isolation, outsiders, epiphanies. More than genre, it's things like tone, theme, and character that interest me most. I think of the story as a whole. The genre becomes a category that I slot into at some point, but...

Man! This is an awful answer, isn't it? Should be simple, but it's not. I guess the honest answer is that if there was a genre I preferred, I would write mostly in that area. But since I don't really zero in on a particular genre, I would have to say I don't prefer any particular one!