My favorite living writer is on the cover of Time, which means I am about to leave my house to go to a bookstore and pore through it hoping for bits of wisdom to be revealed. I love the scope of his writing, how deeply and unrepentantly serious it is, and he seems to be. There was a time last year when his writing made me a better thinker, and illuminated and clarified things I was trying to understand but couldn't without the aid of his suffering characters and their private, troubled worlds, and his tightly written essays, so full loss and lament and refuge in writing. I think sometimes I wouldn't be as sad without submerging myself in Franzen's patterns of thinking, as he's always let me know how far I must go, how much harder I must try, but I wouldn't be as alive either.