I’m thinking about how much of one’s intellectual development, something that in retrospective feels so inevitable, often happens by random chance. In college, I remember having to decide whether to take a class on Hawthorne or Marlowe in my senior year. (1/5)

The Marlow class was very crowded, I couldn’t find a seat on the first day, the room was stifling, and so I dropped it and chose Hawthorne. We read The Marble Faun, and I fell in love with the way he wrote about art. That aesthetic absolutely influenced my novel. (2/5)

In 2012, I was traveling in Chicago and went into a bookstore. They had a copy of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. I was drawn to the cover, a painting by Poussin, and even though I’d never heard of Powell, Wikipedia said he was famous, so on a whim I bought it. (3/5)

Today, I’ve read the whole series twice, and it’s completely shaped the way I think about literary depictions of history and autobiography. (4/5)

Finally, in 2014, a friend started a book club and chose The Crying of Lot 49 for the first book. I’d never read Pynchon, and I almost didn’t go. Now, he’s one of my favorite writers, and he’s influenced in a very fundamental way how I think about politics in literature. (5/6)

I like to think about other authors who might have been set down their definitive intellectual paths by complete happenstance. The idea that finding a copy of Dickens (or whoever) in a library and then totally changing your life. (6/6)