Annie Meikle asked Jean Hanff Korelitz:

This is a run of the mill question, but I just inhaled The White Rose and You Should Have Known (in a weekend). I wondered which authors have most influenced you? I loved the historical backstory in The White Rose and it made me think that you were into 19th century authors but both books were quite different. Judging by your bookshelf you also read quite widely. How do you choose what you'll read next?

Jean Hanff Korelitz Hi Annie. Well, you've actually answered a question of MINE which is: how much of my goodreads reading list is public? Answer, obviously, all of it. I am not very connected on Goodreads and really only use it to keep track of my own reading, so I'm going to investigate how to make it private. In fact, I only found your question because I was looking in my spam folder for a lost email. But I'm glad I did! Thanks for reading those two extremely different books. And you're right, I tend to swing back and forth between literary and literary/suspense. I have a great and sustaining love for 18th and 19th century fiction, as you've guessed. Most influential authors: Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Molly Keane...but also Thomas Perry, Chaim Potok, Nevil Shute. So many more. A lot of what I read is determined by what books are upcoming on the Pop-Up Book Groups I run with authors (and now that we're doing them online, you should join us: www.bookthewriter.com Just join the mailing list. You'll get all the information.) I also listen to a lot of books on the free library app -- Libby -- so a lot of what I listen to is determined by what's available at that moment. I'm also obsessed with filling in the holes in my reading, so if I learn about an important writer I've never heard of I'm all over it, especially 19th and early 20th century people who are mostly forgotten now. It's a lifelong journey, right? "You Should Have Known" is about to be an HBO series called The Undoing, by the way. It's excellent, but quite different from the novel. A new novel, "The Plot", is coming out in June. Thanks for writing.

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