Steve Hely

Steve Hely writes for the Fox animated comedy American Dad! He was twice president of The Harvard Lampoon, and has been a writer and performer on Last Call with Carson Daly and a writer for The Late Show with David Letterman, the latter earning him an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety or Comedy Show.

With Vali Chandrasekaran, he is co-author of The Ridiculous Race.

I recently asked him what he was reading. His reply:

As I was writing The Ridiculous Race I read Abroad by Paul Fussell, an interesting short study of a period in the 1920s and 1930s when everyone in England started writing travel books.

Nixon and Mao by Margaret MacMillan - Super-readable account of the time two lunatics who controlled most of the world had a meeting.

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy - Before switching to chronicles of seared wastelands, Cormac McCarthy wrote this novel about lowlifes and watermelon rapists living in houseboats in Knoxville, TN. While reading this book I had to look up about 120 words in the dictionary, many of which were obscure terms from the worlds of mining and speleology.

In Praise of Wine by Alec Waugh - Reading this book is like being invited to the summer house of an eccentric English drunk who tells rambling stories as he makes you cocktail after cocktail.

The Reivers by William Faulkner – Have people heard of this guy?!

Visit The Ridiculous Race Facebook page and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue