Dear readers, remember last summer, when we swapped our top 10 favorite books all the livelong summer?
Well, the Top 10 is back!
Send me your top 10 favorite all-time best reads, or your top five, or heck, your top one. We’ll list them on this blog, and many of them also on the Sunday book pages. (And if you’ve got a top 10 LEAST favorite books, well, send them on: I’ll take a look at those, too.)
Our rules are simple:
The names of the books, and their authors.
Your name, your city and state, and a contact telephone number in case I need to clarify some point.
Your e-mail address.
We had an absolute blast with this last year. Participants included everyone from retirees to businesspeople to politicians to students.
And, as your hostess, I will again lead off …
My Top 10 favorite books (not the best books, or the books that made me a better person, or the books I’m most grateful to have read: my favorites). Mine change all the time; yours probably do, too, so those of you who participated last year are invited to submit updated lists this year.
Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson. I’ve tried to push this book on pretty much every group I’ve ever spoken to, every student I’ve counseled, every family member I’ve managed to corner near a bookshelf. It’s about the 1900 Galveston hurricane, but it’s a beautifully written reminder of the intersection between journalism and history. Larson’s powers of description have never been better — not even in The Devil and the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and a murderer, which is also a fine read. And yes, Larson is a master at switching up his narrative threads.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. It’s science fiction, it’s spirituality, but it’s really the book I turn to when I’m sure I’m doing the right thing, to let me know that you can never really be sure. There’s no book that keeps me more humble than this one, no book I’m more grateful to have read. I recommend it to everybody I know. (And sometimes, as was the case with my teenage daughter, they throw it back at me, but you know: I’m persistent.)
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. Just a ripping good yarn about what might happen if unknowable aliens hijacked our planet, put a permeable sheath over the whole thing and started pulling strings. Like an M. Night Shyamalan movie, except that Spin stays with you even after the trick is revealed.
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Why is it that single defining moments reverberate for us decades later? How can a single action, or a single moment of losing focus, change everything? And how can the proudest among us grit it up enough to simply do the right thing when we should?
The Portable Dorothy Parker. Because, like my collection of books by and about the Mitford sisters, I couldn’t live without it, and I’m finally old enough to admit it.
Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz. Because Fran Lebowitz could be Dorothy Parker’s daughter.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. We like to pretend that everything is inevitable. We like a narrative. We like to pretend that history turned out that way because it was supposed to. We are so wrong, and Taleb takes great delight in showing why.
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. What if humanity vanished tomorrow? What would the world be like? Would the earth “recover” from us? One fun footnote: The thing that’s most likely to get your house, and, indeed, all manmade structures: the moisture. Go thank your roofer right now.
Middlemarch by George Eliot (or Bleak House by Charles Dickens: same general idea). Why readers don’t root for the characters of Eliot and Dickens the same way they pull for everybody in Jane Austen just befuddles me.
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Writing about the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth sent me back into this book, and not because I’m looking forward to seeing the movie version (Liam Neeson as the Great Emancipator, indeed). Goodwin has a gift, both in writing and speaking about this time in history, of seeming as if she was on the spot. It’s hypnotizing — and if you can, as a reader, lose track of time’s passage as you’re reading, you’ve found yourself a wonderful book.
Ms. Truman, as a book collector with over 6,000 books, I’d love to send you my top ten but I can’t locate your email address on this site and I really don’t want to post personal info like address and phone in a public forum. Could you tell us, please, where we might email our lists to you.