Anthony Rumbos-Perez, ‘26, is a Sociology/Anthropology and Mathematics double major. He loves any and all books about geography and urban history, and also is currently trying to get through a stack of science fiction novels sitting in his room. His favorite places to read are on an Amtrak or simply curled up in bed with a Miles Davis or Chick Corea CD playing in the background.

What are you reading these days? A lot of books in the realm of critical geography and urban studies. Authors and academics like David Harvey, Edward Soja, Doreen Massey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mike Davis have made up the bulk of my reading this last year. I tend to read nonfiction books in fragments. There are so many that I have only half-finished, but the one I completed most recently was Postmodern Geographies by Edward Soja, a really important book justifying the “spatial turn” in the social sciences. In terms of fiction, I’ve been slowly getting through a small collection of sci-fi novels that involve time travel. I finished The Ministry of the Time by Kaliane Bradley earlier this semester and would highly recommend it!

Describe your favorite place to read on campus: It's always been my dorm! It’s where I get the most reading done.

Is there a book you’ve read multiple times? In high school I read Catch-22 twice. It’s one of the few books that has made me consistently laugh out loud while reading it. The only other book I have re-read has been The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, my favorite book of all time. I read it once in high school and another time in college. Last year, I also bought a translated Spanish copy of the book, and hope to read that sometime soon as well.

Is there a book you pretend to have read? I get pretty shocked reactions from people whenever I mention that I’ve never read The Hunger Games. It might be easier to just start pretending that I have…

Who is your favorite author? Viet Thanh Nguyen! Reading his book The Sympathizer was so important to me in high school, and has shaped my worldview and development as a student since then. I own and have read his other works of fiction, which are the sequel novel The Committed and the short story collection The Refugees, as well as an essay collection he edited, The Displaced. 

What’s the latest book you could not finish even though you thought you should? Nuestra parte de noche by Mariana Enríquez. It’s a phenomenal Latin American Gothic novel that I got about halfway through two summers ago. But I left it back at home in California to make room in my suitcase when I came back for Fall Semester, and I unfortunately haven’t picked it up since.

What is your favorite reading genre? I like a variety of nonfiction books, especially ones about urban history. I also love “soft” science fiction and historical fiction. 

What book do you recommend most often? This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Or, for those looking for nonfiction recommendations, City of Quartz by Mike Davis. Go read them!

What’s the best movie adaptation of a book you’ve read? I can’t actually recall too many movie adaptations of books that I’ve read, but I can talk about several TV series adaptations! The Sympathizer and Catch-22 both have fairly recent mini-series that were quite good (fans of Park Chan-Wook’s movies should definitely check out the former). And I thought that the Percy Jackson series was really enjoyable, though I am not caught up with it. If you’ll allow me one more answer, I watched the American adaptation of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams over winter break and loved it! I found a copy of the book at Dirt Farm Books in the Ville soon after, and will be cracking it open soon. 

What author would you love to meet, and what would you ask them? At risk of turning this interview into one long plug for The Sympathizer…  the answer is probably Viet Thanh Nguyen. But I actually have met him! I went to a book talk and signing he did at the Santa Ana Public Library my senior year of high school. And in fact, I did ask him a question during the Q&A portion. I can’t remember what it was though.

What book made an early impact on you and why? Not a single book, but I recall loving the works of Gordon Korman while in elementary school. His Everest trilogy, especially, inspired a brief obsession with learning about various mountain ranges that I think fueled a budding interest in geography.

What is one lesson you learned from a book that you think everyone should know? Having grown up in Southern California, Mike Davis’ essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” reoriented entirely how I thought about the state’s wildfires. Davis compares the amount of resources poured into persistent Malibu wildfires to the comparatively weaker response to far deadlier tenement fires in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Westlake. The tenement fires were likely preventable, had Westlake’s “slumlords been held to even minimal standards of building safety.” In contrast, Malibu has and will continue to be prone to the seasonal wildfires that every decade or so threaten the canyon’s ostentatious mansions. “As in so many things,” writes Mike Davis at the end of the chapter, “we tolerate two systems of hazard prevention, separate and unequal.”