Frank Bruni comes to Books at Noon next Wednesday, March 18 to discuss his latest work, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. We asked him six questions about what he likes to read.

When and where do you like to read?

Almost anytime, almost anyplace, provided that there is time, and provided that there's a measure of quiet. It's easier for me to say where I don't like to read. The beach, for one. Books and iPads don't benefit much from sand, the lighting isn't controllable and there are too many distractions. And the subway can be a bit too crowded and chaotic, plus I like it for music listening and people watching. But planes and trains: I love the excuse they give one to disappear into a book or magazine. And of course bed at night: there's nothing better than being under the covers, savoring the embers of the day and devouring great prose.

What were your favorite books as a child?

I remember loving two books in particular, The Island of the Blue Dolphins and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

What books had the greatest impact on you? 

Different books had huge impacts at different times. In college, I remember two books that I read outside of class and that probably wouldn't have risen to the level of being taught in any of the classes I took as an English major. One was Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance. The other, not a book but a series, was Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. For a young gay man in the mid-1980s, they were crucial confirmations that there was a world out there in which many people felt as I did, in which there would be company and courtship, and in which there could and would be plenty of joy. And what literature does at its very best is to make life less lonely, to forge and point the way toward connections.

Would you like to name a few writers out there you think deserve greater readership?

I'd love to single out one: Joe Keenan, a comic writer and satirist who has written a serial trio of novels, the most recent of which was My Lucky Star. He's hilarious. These books are pure pleasure, written by someone with a wicked command of the language.

What was the last book you recommended?

It isn't a new book, but I'm a movie lover with many movie-loving friends, and I've been telling many of them to read something I found my way to only six years after it was published, Pictures at a Revolution, by Mark Harris. It's a terrific look at the change in American moviemaking in the 1960s and it tells behind-the-scenes stories of the makings of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, among other movies.

What do you plan to read next?

I just downloaded a collection of short stories (We Live in Water) by Jess Walter that he published after Beautiful Ruins, which I loved, as I did his previous novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets.