The American author Kevin Powers has revealed the reading experiences that marked him earliest — including the ones that nearly defeated him.

"I was ready to abandon Infinite Jest a thousand times," Powers said in a new interview about the books that shaped his life as a writer. David Foster Wallace's mammoth 1996 novel, it seems, tested even a novelist of Powers's discipline.

His earliest reading memory is darker and earlier still. The deaths of Old Dan and Little Ann in Wilson Rawls's Where the Red Fern Grows were "etched into my being as a first grader in Chesterfield County, Virginia," Powers recalled. The two hunting dogs at the heart of Rawls's 1961 classic left a mark on the future writer before he had finished first grade.

Not every formative encounter was so painful. Asked about his favourite book growing up, Powers named Stephen King's The Stand. "I completely lost myself in the story," he said. "I don't think I realised at the time what a rare gift it is to have that experience."

That distinction — between reading as absorption and reading as labour — runs through Powers's account of his life with books. The Stand offered the child in Chesterfield County the rare pleasure of total immersion. Infinite Jest, by contrast, demanded persistence that even an award-winning author had to fight to sustain.

Powers also counts F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby among the works he fell in love with, and cites the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas as an inspiration. Among the books he returns to is a memoir of a canoe trip in Texas — a choice that reflects the geography that has long grounded his fiction.

Powers, born in Richmond, Virginia, is best known for his novels of war and its aftermath, including The Yellow Birds, which won the 2012 Guardian First Book Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Award. His work repeatedly circles back to the landscapes and histories of his home state.

His reading history suggests why. The books he names — a boys-and-dogs novel set in the Ozarks, a pandemic epic, a Virginia childhood, a Texas river journey — share a preoccupation with place and survival. They are books in which landscape does the dramatic work.

For readers weighing up Infinite Jest themselves, Powers's admission offers a kind of permission: the impulse to quit a difficult book does not disqualify a writer, or a reader. He kept going, a thousand surrenders at a time. The full interview traces the rest of his reading life, from Fitzgerald to Dylan Thomas and back to that Texas canoe trip.