Caroline Paul

I really love Peter Heller’s book The Dog Stars. I picked it up because I love the stars, basically. I was like, “Oh, the main character will be an astronomer and I’ll learn something about the stars.” It turns out it’s an apocalyptic book. It’s beautifully written. The main character is a pilot and, since I fly a lot of different things with varying degrees of success, I loved the book. But these are books I’d give just to say they’re amazing stories and you’ll probably learn something from them.

Oh, it’s a beautiful book by a writer who fought in Vietnam. When he came back, he became a writer. A lot of his writing, at least initially, was about Vietnam in thinly veiled autobiographical form, but fiction. That book actually got me back to reading. When you go to college, reading gets kicked out of you a little bit. You have to read all of these things and I didn’t read until my friend Eric, a whitewater rafter with me, handed me this book. He said, “This is great.” I started reading again after that.