My most memorable reading experience of the last ten years? I assume we are talking about published writing. And therefore the letter from my mother that I first read upon her death last spring — twenty-three handwritten, yellow legal-pad pages, sixteen years in the making, repeatedly amended, filled with the usual necessary but banal details about the disposition of stock certificates and soup tureens as well as breathtaking asides about the meaning of life — doesn't count.

And the last ten years? The last ten years? That time frame is a little problematic.

I think one's supremely memorable reading experiences almost necessarily occur when one is young. And I'm minutes from turning fifty. So every one of my dozen most memorable, electrifying reading experiences — Huckleberry Finn, Bleak House, 1984, Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Emerson's essays, Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones, discovering National Lampoon, discovering the New Yorker, Mark Helprin's Refiner's Fire, Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins and Don DeLillo's Americana — took place between 1967 and 1977, the decade of my extended adolescence.

The other problem with the last ten years is that for eight of them I've devoted myself to becoming a novelist. And so I think I've gone out of my way — not quite consciously but pretty effectively — to limit my Memorable Reading Experiences. When I'm at the feverish work of trying to write a good novel, I want to avoid the risk of undue influence or anxiety that might be provoked by reading great ones.

So I have two answers. Lawrence Wechsler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder was the last piece of narrative non-fiction that astounded and pleased me intensely and became immediately hard-wired into my personal epistemology. Unfortunately, if I were to describe it here in any detail, I would spoil its fun a little for people who haven't read it. The book's pleasure — its maximum memorability — depends on a certain slow reveal of its secrets. So: trust me: read it.

The other work that has fairly staggered me recently is not a book at all, but the Online Etymology Dictionary (www.etymonline.com). It was created — is being created — by an heroic writer and historian named Doug Harper. I stumbled across it a few years ago when I began researching the nineteenth century for my second novel. But I don't just consult it — I browse, I read, I revel and wallow in its troves of English language archaeology. I adore words like thwack, hullabaloo and scrunch, and I loved learning that they're 500, 250, and almost 200 years old, respectively. I have delighted in assembling a kind of core sample of particular historical moments, such as 1848, when (give or take a year) the words up-and-coming, randy, guy, cardboard, exam, moniker, and snob all popped into the language.
About Kurt Andersen
Kurt Andersen hosts Public Radio International's Studio 360, an examination of arts and culture heard on public radio stations nationwide. He is also an author; his first novel, Turn of the Century (Random House, 1999), was called "wickedly satirical" by the New York Times. Andersen began his career at Time, as an award-winning writer on national affairs and criminal justice, before becoming the magazine's architecture and design critic. His writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, and Architectural Record. He regularly appears as a commentator on The Charlie Rose Show, CNN, and MSNBC. Andersen graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and lives with his wife and daughters in New York City.