Describe your research routine.

I call in a zillion books and go through them one by one. Some I wind up spending only a few minutes with and others I live with for years. I also like to go across the street to what I still call the Mid-Manhattan Library (I still call where the Mets play Shea, too). I visit the call numbers in the neighborhood of my topic and pull a bunch of books off the shelf. I pretty much always wind up on an interesting tangent. While I’m there I might grab my kid some graphic novels, get the family a travel guidebook for our next vacation, or order a coffee and sit on the roof and look out at the city.

Read it all here.