Tobias Caroll is the author of the novel "Reel," which was named one of 2016's best books by Nylon, and the collection "Transitory." During the recording of this episode, Tobias was doing a short residency on Governor's Island, and he’s the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. The list of books and writers that he sent me before we spoke was long and varied — but as we spoke, a couple of themes presented themselves. See a list of all the books he mentions at thespineshow.com/shownotes.

QUOTES

"American Pastoral for me is...there are things in it that I did not realize were possible in a work of fiction, like the way it involves its narrator as a character and you're not exactly sure how much of the novel is what actually happened or the narrator's supposition of what happened.... And the fact that that is sustained while all of the other conflicts in the book are sustained, I just think is absolutely fantastic."

"[In high school], I looked at, OK, there's science fiction and there's fantasy that I read, and then there's realistic fiction. You're either realistic or you're not. That's it: No ifs, ands or buts. And so I think reading a book that's so absolutely stylized as Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison was this absolutely brain exploding moment."

"There would be books that I would read that would give me the same thrill of the unknown and the mysterious [as punk and hardcore]."

After receiving a compliment about his sharp memory: "I would be hard-pressed to remember anything I learned during my sophomore year of college other than [that] I took a course on medieval Italian history and I know that there were people called Guelphs and Ghibellines, but that's pretty much it."

"I like to think that reading has made me more empathic. I'm an only child from a small family, so I think there's also that sort of means of using books as a way to discover a wider world and to help understand the lives of people whose circumstances in life are different from mine."