Bill Parsons

Oh, yeah. OUTSIDERS. It was 1973 and required reading for my sixth grade class. The first thing I read that made the biggest impact on me, however, was Steven King's CARRIE. I was 14 and in reform school. I used to read it only at night in the dorm in the dark when everyone was asleep and it scared me half to death; especially that mean o' mother. That was when I fell in love with King. Don't much get into horror anymore, but in my opinion King can't be beat as a writer. King, his writing, character development - they are always so realistic - and even some of the topics touched on in his writing was what set me afire. Major, major impact.

National Geo, Bible, NA big book. The last book I read was a book about the battles in the pacific atolls during wwII. It wasn't fiction. The dude lived the battles and described them in the most realistic terms:the bodies that rotted in the sun and after a few days turned into the muck into which they had decayed because the Americans were trying to take hills and were penned down by the Japanese, making corpse removal very dangerous and deadly. Wish I could remember the book title and author. Loved that book.