Editor’s note: We thought you would like to get to know some of our journalists. This week in the editorial space, the members of the Tribune newsroom write about their interests.

Top 5 books

1. “The Book of Basketball” by Bill Simmons

2. “Native Son” by Richard Wright

3. “Survivor” by Chuck Pahliniuik

4. “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut

5. “The Years” by Virginia Woolf

While I’m quick to list my top five favorite movies, bands or flavors of ice cream, I’ve never actually sat and listed my top five favorite books. Looking at it. It’s a pathetic list. A sports book published by ESPN tops a great American classic and “Survivor,” a book I read once as a 16-year-old, is No. 3. Should your all-time favorite books be read and re-read? Honestly, I don’t even remember the protagonist’s name.

As someone who scours Sunday sports pages, gets endlessly lost in the World Wide Web and pumps out a thousand words a day on who scored and how, I don’t get enough time to enjoy books.

1. “The Book of Basketball” is laugh-out-loud funny — unless you don’t like the NBA, understand pop culture references or enjoy crude humor. It’s the first book that I’ve literally been unable to set down since reading “Slaughterhouse-Five” on family vacation in eighth-grade. And to be honest, I’m not finished reading “The Book of Basketball” — not even close. The 700-some pages with a billion (hilarious) footnotes and the countless references to Bird and Magic have me on YouTube looking at classic NBA highlights every 10 minutes. It’s a No. 1 New York Times Best Seller written by the most read sports writer on the planet. He has five flatscreen TVs in his office. Can you imagine? I grew up during a terrible NBA era (1990s) so this book is helping respark my interest.

2. I read “Native Son” in a class titled Afican-American Literature during my junior year at Luther College. It was one of the few books assigned to me that I had the openness to enjoy. It’s about a 20-year-old black man living in poverty on Chicago’s South Side who gets a job working for a white, rich family. What happens next is terrifying, dark and real. I won’t give anything away but I read many of the pages wide-eyed with my jaw dropped. “Native Son” was an incredibly emotional read.

3. “Survivor” is on this list for its sentimental value. I’m not sure I’d like it as a 23-year-old, but it transformed the way I approached reading as a teenager. I first picked it up because it was written by Chuck Pahlinuik, the author who wrote the book that was optioned into one of my favorite movies, “Fight Club.” I’ve re-read only the first 30 pages in the seven years since I fist read it but it remains one of my favorites because of the impact it had on me.

4. “Slaughterhouse-Five” was the first real novel I read. I was in eighth-grade and on a family vacation to South Carolina. I bought it in a bookstore in some town along the way and felt real satisfaction in finishing it on the way back to Minnesota. I hated reading at the time, but Vonnegut changed that. The imagery and language was unlike anything I had read before. It wasn’t a Micheal Jordan’s biography but classic literature and I felt like a real young adult finishing the final page.

5. “The Years” is another book that sticks out after four years in college (I read it senior year). It tells the story of a family living in Britain from 1880 to the present day (mid-1930s) and each section of the novel’s 11 sections focus on one particular day during those years.