Nate Coen's 6 favorite books

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company). There is no doubt in my mind that David Foster Wallace was one of the most brilliant minds of the last century, and no one has or ever will write quite the same way he did. It really speaks to the extent of his intellectual scope that he's able to talk eloquently and thoughtfully about adult video award ceremonies, lobster festivals, presidential campaigns, and grammatical controversies in the Dictionary of Modern American Usage with a brilliant wit and sense of humor that makes you immediately captivated and forget that you had zero prior interest in any of those things.

Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov (Penguin). I feel like I'm cheating a little bit with this anthology of short stories, but with Asimov it's always impossible to pick any one thing. This collection includes some of my all time favorite stories, "The Last Question" and "The Last Answer". There's just something about the way Asimov creates visions of the future that are at once kind of melancholy but also breathtakingly hopeful. I would recommend this book to anyone who has every thought about the universe or anything in it.

The Way Things Work by David Macauley (Dorling Kindersley). I didn't really read a lot when I was a kid, but I had a copy of this book that I remember being obsessed with. I could spend hours looking at all the pictures and learning about the mechanisms behind how things like locks and elevators and car windows worked. It's amazing how it makes some really complex marvels of technology and innovation accessible to a 10-year-old.

Ubik by Philip K. Dick (Doubleday). Like all the best Philip K. Dick books, this one is an intense, hallucinatory, and exhilarating mind trip of a metaphysical mystery that defies summarization. It's got alternate realities, telepathy, musings on the nature of life and death, and it's just a lot of fun. I just inhale this book every time I pick it up, and I always discover something new to love about it.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (McClelland & Stewart). This is the second book of the Maddaddam trilogy, which should be read and savored in its entirety, but this book stands out for me in particular. It takes place in a dystopian world in which the vast majority of people have died off from a plague, and the post-apocalyptic vision that the always brilliant Margaret Atwood has conjured up in this book feels somehow unsettlingly prescient.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Viking Press). I think I was extremely fortunate in that I wasn't forced to read and try to cluelessly analyze this book in school as a teenager but rather found my own way to it as an adult. Formative experiences a little more rare when you're in your 30's than in your teens, but reading this classic American epic for the first time was one for me.

— Screen actor Nate Coen, whose screenplays include Promised Land and the upcoming The Hollars, has teamed with a co-author to write his first mystery series for young readers. Nightmares! and Nightmares! The Sleepwalker Tonic, both from Random House, are the first two books of the planned trilogy.