What the AI Thought About My Reading Habits

Based on the Books and Comics That Shaped Me

If you really want to understand a writer, don’t ask them about their influences.
Ask them what they consumed when they were too young to know they were forming a worldview.

When the AI looked at the books and comics that shaped me, it didn’t see a scattered pile of genres. It saw a pattern—a surprisingly consistent emotional map stretching from childhood to now. Everything I loved, even the things I read half by accident, pointed toward the writer I would eventually become.

The first thing it noticed was that my shelves were filled with stories that placed ordinary people in extraordinary pressure cookers. Stephen King, Clive Barker, Anne Rice—none of them were ever just about monsters or blood or sex or fear. They were about loneliness, identity, shame, desire, trauma, and the invisible forces that shape us. Even when the horrors were supernatural, the terror was always human. I didn’t read those books for the spectacle. I read them for the ache underneath.

Then there were the books like Forest Gump, which I encountered far too young to understand its commentary, but not too young to feel its emotional punch. It’s a story about innocence dragged through the machinery of history; a childlike heart moving through a world far too complicated for it. The AI pointed out, almost gently, that this theme has followed me everywhere since. So many of my characters are people who don’t quite fit the worlds they inherit. People whose sincerity is mistaken for stupidity. People who are overwhelmed but keep going anyway.

Alongside those novels sat The Chronicles of Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, and endless shelves of Star Wars and Star Trek paperbacks. These weren’t escapist fantasies for me; they were attempts to understand scale—how small a single human life is, how strange the universe can be, how fragile meaning becomes when you zoom out too far. The AI said this was the first clue that recursion, metaphysics, and mirror logic would one day feel natural to me. I was always drawn to thresholds, boundaries, thin places where one world pressed up against another. I didn’t yet have the vocabulary for it, but my imagination was already restless in the direction of the cosmic.

And then there were the comics. Batman and Superman, sure, but also RoboCop, random horror titles, and anything I wasn’t technically supposed to read. The AI pointed out something I’d never consciously realized: even in superhero stories, I was drawn not to the heroes but to the failures—the flawed men trying to live up to impossible standards. Maybe that’s why my own early superhero comic—the Clawed Crusader—was about a man who meant well but had absolutely no business saving anything. I thought I was parodying the genre. Looking back, I see I was telling the truth about myself.

But the deepest emotional lineage in my reading life didn’t come from novels or comic books. It came from comic strips. Calvin & Hobbes, Peanuts, Garfield, Looney Tunes—all of them taught me different dialects of humor long before I knew I’d use humor to survive adulthood. Calvin taught me imagination as philosophy. Peanuts taught me sadness as conversation. Garfield taught me apathy as punchline. Looney Tunes taught me timing, escalation, and the inevitability of impact—someone always gets smashed by the falling anvil.

The AI looked at all of that and saw the throughline immediately: I have always loved stories where innocence and chaos collide. Stories where the heart is earnest, the world is unkind, and the only thing that bridges the gap is humor. Stories where the universe is too big or too strange to comprehend, and yet the characters keep trying anyway. It said I was drawn to narratives in which the moral order was shaky, where justice couldn’t be relied on, where meaning wasn’t guaranteed and had to be invented on the spot.

In other words, the AI saw me before I saw myself.

I used to think my reading habits were random, the product of whatever was lying around the house, whatever the library had available, whatever comic happened to be in the spinner rack at Eckerd’s. But seeing them through the eyes of a machine that doesn’t care about nostalgia or self-protection made me realize they weren’t random at all. They were gravitational. They revealed a mind pulled toward certain kinds of stories again and again: stories where sincerity is dangerous, where absurdity is honest, where pain and humor coexist without canceling each other out.

The AI said something that stuck with me:
“You weren’t reading for entertainment. You were studying human fragility.”

I didn’t consciously know that, of course, but it explains everything—my memoirs, my metafiction, my satire, my dystopian comedy, even the comics I drew in college before I had any real craft.

It turns out your bookshelf is a kind of prophecy.
It quietly tells the story of who you’re becoming.

And mine said this:
This man is going to write about people who try to make sense of a world that refuses to make sense back.
This man is going to laugh at the things that hurt him.
This man is going to believe in innocence even after innocence is impossible.
And this man is going to weave chaos and compassion into the same sentence, because that’s what life has always looked like to him.

I didn’t choose my reading habits.
They chose me.

And in doing so, they created the writer I eventually became.