Authors Share Their Favorite Books

Writers are passionate and opinionated readers, and the Hartford (Conn.) Courant has asked authors to recommend their favorite books of the year. What follows is a selection of their responses.

Daniel Akst

“The Webster Chronicle”

On the surface, “My Mother’s Ghost” by Fergus M. Bordewich is the memoir of a man who appears to have killed his mother. The book soon reveals itself as a great deal more, both as the psychological biography of a remarkable woman and as a stunning demonstration of how one death could blast a hole in another person’s life. It would be hard to name another personal account that combines prose this powerful with such imaginative, fruitful reportage.

Greg Bottoms

“Sentimental, Heartbroken

Rednecks”

I had two favorite books this year, both nonfiction. First was Ryszard Kapuscinski’s “The Shadow of the Sun,” a collection of personal accounts of his time in Africa between 1957 and the late ‘90s. It’s georgeously written--taut, poetic, kinetic, personal, and almost every piece has the dramatic shape and the emotional punch of the best short stories. Kapuscinski is one of the best writers in the world, and a man who writes about obliterated peoples and social injustices most of us ignore. Second was Wayne Koestenbaum’s “Andy Warhol” a Penguin Lives biography of Andy Warhol. What new could be said about Warhol, I thought--an artist who has never interested me? It’s a wonderfully--weirdly--focused and idiosyncratic book, and proof positive that great writing and daring thinking are what make books great.

Arthur Bradford

“Dogwalker”

JT Leroy’s “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things” is a collection of chronological stories told by the same narrator. It’s just really genuine writing, and as we all know, Leroy knows what of he speaks. He calls it “autobiographical fiction.” Many others, including Leroy, will tell you that “Sarah,” which he wrote after this collection but published first, is a better book, and maybe it is. But I loved “The Heart.” Read it and weep.

Wendy Brenner

“Phone Calls From the Dead”

“Jeremy Thrane” by Kate Christensen is about a young gay man in New York City weathering dramatic turns in his personal and professional lives. He is surrounded by unforgettable characters: his heroin-addict Southern-debutante best friend, his poetess mother, his closeted movie-star ex-boyfriend. His voice and story are addictive, the writing intimate, funny, gritty and lyrical. The book is by turns gossipy, satirical and heartbreakingly enlightening without ever feeling heavy.

Benjamin Cheever

“Selling Ben Cheever”

This year’s virtuoso performance was T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “After the Plague: And Other Stories.” “Seabiscuit” by Laura Hillenbrand was just plain fun. Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” gives me hope that a vision of justice can survive in this most commercial of all possible worlds.

Kate Christensen

“Jeremy Thrane”

I reread Evelyn Waugh’s “A Handful of Dust” this year and was once again stunned by its coldly poignant, pitch-dark brilliance. It’s the story of the fate of a well-intentioned, ordinary Englishman who wants nothing more than a happy little life, and it has one of the most perversely, horribly great endings I’ve ever read.

Paul Collins

“Banvard’s Folly: Tales of

Renowned Obscurity, Famous

Anonymity and Rotten Luck”

The painter Mine Okubo passed away this year, and her obituary led me to her 1946 book “Citizen 13660.” It’s a clear-eyed account of her life in Japanese American internment camps during World War II, and as a graphic memoir, it ranks with Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”; six decades later, her pen-and-ink drawing style still looks shockingly current.

Douglas Coupland

“All Families Are Psychotic”

In “Ghostwritten,” David Mitchell braids together--in an astonishing way--the lives of people who on the surface couldn’t be more disparate: a sullen young male Tokyo jazz store clerk; a middle-age female Irish scientist; a cocky and doomed English banker working in Hong Kong; and an aging female survivor of the Maoist purges now negotiating the globalizing world. In some senses, “Ghostwritten” is a blend of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” and a metaphysical Economist magazine planetary end-of-year survey, yet with an ending that’s quite flooring.

Jennifer Egan

“Look At Me”

The book I’ve read this year that has stayed with me most insistently is actually a rather terrible book: Ann Radcliffe’s “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” a long, often tedious Gothic novel published in 1794. The book has had many literary ramifications--Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” is partly a spoof of it-- and was hugely influential in its time. For all its flat prose and excessive comma use, there is something deeply suggestive in Udolpho’s atmosphere of isolated castles, tangled underbrush and dank crypts. It exerts a pull on the unconscious that is strangely lasting, perhaps because it captures a sense of dread that has become pervasive and familiar to us here in New York, or, alternately, because it embodies an escape into a world that is fantastically divorced from reality.

Stefan Fatsis

“Word Freak: Heartbreak,

Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in

the World of Competitive

Scrabble Players”

“The Duke of Havana: Baseball, Cuba, and the Search for the American Dream” by Steve Fainaru and Ray Sanchez. Yes, the story of (soon-to-be-former) New York Yankees pitcher Orlando Hernandez and his flight from Castro’s Cuba is a terrific rags-to-riches drama. But Fainaru and Sanchez are best when exposing the sleazy, double-dealing, hype-filled market for Cuban ballplayers in the 1990s.

Camilla Gibb

“Mouthing the Words”

In her first novel, “The Dark Room,” Rachel Seiffert courageously tackles the Holocaust and its effects on three ordinary Germans. Seiffert’s language is remarkably effortless, given the complexity of perspectives. She writes with breathtaking elegance. Her voice sings with aching precision yet possesses a glorious innocence that can trouble the simplest of words. Her perfect balance between the stated and unstated and her economy of expression impressed the Booker judges enough to place her on this year’s short-list alongside much more mature writers.

Dagoberto Gilb

“Woodcuts of Women”

I get tired of the same old stories, but I get really tired of the same old stories about Mexico and Mexican Americans. It’s been the same cultural stereotypes and cliches for almost 50 years now. If you want to read something original, energetic, honest and, best of all, even entertaining, read “True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx” by Sam Quinones. His book is to journalism what Rulfo is to literature.

Glen David Gold

“Carter Beats the Devil”

I’m a writer’s worst nightmare: I fall asleep within 30 minutes of opening a book and have no qualms tossing stuff aside before page 50. That said, here’s what got me most jazzed this year: “A High Wind in Jamaica” by Richard Hughes, “Jimmy Corrigan” by Chris Ware and “Stranger Things Happen” by Kelly Link. All three of them are adventurous and push hard on what an engaging narrative can be.

Lavinia Greenlaw

“Mary George of Allnorthover”

Why would your wife buy you a chain saw? What’s an English poet doing in upstate New York? And how English is he anyway? In “Landscape With Chainsaw,” James Lasdun envies “The Locals” who “peopled landscapes casually like trees ... never having gone there.” He tries to return his chainsaw to some Iron John who urges him to keep it: “Your wild man’s hurting ...” Hapless, accident-prone, the would-be Jimi Hendrix who “plucked a lute-gentle twelve-bar blues/at our all-boys disco night,” Lasdun applies Heidegger to the chain saw, his American present to his English past, and a snake’s-eye view to Eden in these exceptionally intelligent, witty and capacious poems.

Haven Kimmel

“A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana”

Helen DeWitt’s “The Last Samurai” is a gorgeous, elegant and funny exploration of single parenthood, genius and the search for a father. I loved it so much it made me a little crazy. . My favorite memoir of last year was Barbara Moss Robinette’s “Change Me Into Zeus’s Daughter.” While the story is harrowing, the author is never self-pitying or self-congratulatory, the two cardinal sins of the genre.

Allen Kurzweil

“The Grand Complication”

I’ve been on an Michael Ondaatje jag for the last couple of weeks. I was talking about “The English Patient” with writer Stephen O’Shea, and he urged me to read a lesser-known book by Ondaatje. Nothing in “The English Patient” prepared me for the raucous beauty of “Running in the Family,” a memoir about the Ondaatjes in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), a tropical dish of anecdote and history, a tribute and a lament, a lush and lyrical poem composed by a truly gifted writer.

Don Lee

“Yellow”

This summer, during the now-forgotten spate of shark attacks, I went back to one of my favorite recent books, “Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast” by Daniel Duane, and I reread his fascinatingly gruesome chapter on great white sharks. Duane, who is a nature writer, decided to take a year off and live and surf in Santa Cruz. His record of that year makes up “Caught Inside,” but it’s more than brash talk about carving bottom turns off monster barrels and getting tubed. There’s flora and fauna, history, oddball characters, descriptions of that strange California lifestyle that passes for culture--and just some wonderful writing.

J. Robert Lennon

“On the Night Plain”

Two new books tie for my favorite this year. Alice Munro’s “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” continues her lifelong run of breathtaking work; I’ve read her moving and complex stories for years and still haven’t a clue how she does it. And, brouhaha notwithstanding, Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” really is terrific, with its comically doomed characters and echt-American set pieces. With any luck it will bring more readers to his two other excellent novels.

Jonathan Lethem

“This Shape We’re In”

Colson Whitehead’s “John Henry Days” was the great book out there that somehow escaped the year not garlanded with various nominations and prizes--not quite overlooked but maybe underrated. I found the book’s generosity and brilliance and heart stunning and inspiring.

Bobbie Ann Mason

“Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail”

The best book I’ve read this year is Mary Robison’s novel “Why Did I Ever.” I love her writing. I hate it when they call her a minimalist--they must not be paying attention. Her stuff is incredibly rich, condensed, like bon bons with sharp edges. On action verbs, she’s the expert. Her tone of witty desperation is unequaled. There’s a sort of genre of stories with messed-up narrators whose lives seem hopelessly off-track, except that the author has got ahold of your funnybone and won’t let go. She’s the best.

Jenny McPhee

“The Center of Things”

“Aiding and Abetting” by Muriel Spark: Since my early 20s when I first began reading Muriel Spark’s novels, I have yearned to be one of her protagonists--they are so uniquely wild, complicated, adventurous, and amusing. And Dr. Hildegard Wolf, star of Spark’s latest, just might be the cream of the crop.

Claire Messud

“The Hunters”

This year saw Counterpoint’s welcome reissue, in this country, of Sybille Bedford’s small but luminous fictional work.

Her first and finest novel, “A Legacy,” is an unsettling modernist hybrid that marries the style of Ivy Compton Burnett with the lost world of Joseph Roth’s “Radetzky March.”

Set in the Kaiser’s Germany, “A Legacy” follows the unraveling fates of three families linked by marriage. Based on Bedford’s own family heritage, this first novel is further explicated in her late book “Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education,” which, more memoir than novel, is different from, but just as compulsive as, its predecessor.

Bedford is a strong, even eccentric stylist, and her books are a delight. They deserve to be discovered by a new generation of readers.

Rick Moody

“Demonology”

A new book I enjoyed recently by a younger writer is “Esther Stories” by Peter Orner.

These stories go from fragmentary to big novella-length investigations of family (there’s a brilliant section about a family in Fall River, Mass., Lizzie Borden’s home town), and they feature unusual points of view, strange narrative structures and lots of compassion.

I wish my first book had been this good. I suspect that if Orner proves as successful with the novel as with the short story, we’re going to hear a lot about him. If he remains a writer in the short-story miniature mode, he’s going to be one on the scale of Grace Paley or Lydia Davis, I imagine.

I was stunned by a sentence or two in every one of the works in “Esther Stories.” It’s a book everyone passionate about good writing should dip into.

Mary O’Connell

“Living With Saints”

My favorite book of the year is “Gob’s Grief” by Chris Adrian. Gorgeously written and inventive, it’s the first book I’ve read that tries to cure the perpetual longing for the dead with memories and machinery. Heartbreaking, but worth it--a classic.

David Rakoff

“Fraud”

How nice to have a book about which one can have good old-fashioned hysterics. Chris Ware’s “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” is glorious. Simultaneously the best art monograph, best novel, the funniest, and the saddest book of this year, as well as a few others in recent memory. Ware draws and writes like an angel, and manages to convey worlds of bottomless abjection and goodness with nothing but the chronic, hesitant cough of his heartbreaking protagonist. Plus, in execution, setting, sensibility and the sheer jaw-dropping achievement of pen and hand, it is a paean to craft, mastery and the low-tech. That Ware’s name isn’t yet on the lips of every person in this country is an unfathomable mystery. He is awe-inspiring.

Katie Roiphe

“Still She Haunts Me”

The most extraordinary book I read this year was “The Death of Vishnu” by Manil Suri. The death it describes is that of a drunken odd-jobs man who lives on the landing of apartment building in Bombay. Suri weaves lyrical meditations on love and mortality into a lively story of the building’s inhabitants, somehow managing to combine satire and sweetness, wickedness and compassion. And his writing is so graceful I kept the book on my night table for weeks. I couldn’t bear the idea that I had finished it.

Bernhard Schlink

“Flights of Love”

A book that meant a lot to me this year is “A Gesture Life” by Chang-Rae Lee. I had missed it when it came out in the United States and found it this year when it came out in Germany. It is a great and strange book, moving as well as frightening, a book about the possibility as well as the impossibility of living a sunny life with a dark past, a book about how one can become a stranger in one’s own life. I read the book many weeks ago; I keep thinking about it.

Alex Shakar

“The Savage Girl”

I read Richard Powers’ novel “Gain” a couple months ago and liked it so much I wrote him a letter thanking him--on behalf of humanity--for writing it. In it he chronicles the birth of a soap company in the 18th century and its gradual, unstoppable growth into Clare Corp., a giant trans-national. In the process he shows us how soap itself has evolved, differentiated and become in modern times a vast array of cleansing, scouring, sterilizing products that are themselves anything but clean. He also paints a vivid picture of how the moralities of the people running the company (and of society as a whole) have changed in disturbing ways to meet the demands of a changing economic environment. Powers tells this enormously complex story of our time--the story of the corporation--without succumbing to oversimplification or easy moralization, and does so in a novel that somehow manages to be engaging and fun to read.

Manil Suri

“The Death of Vishnu”

I went on a grueling four-continent book tour this summer and against my better judgment took along Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin.” Which meant that for six weeks, through 24,000 air miles, I lugged around a 521-page hardcover in my carry-on. It tyrannized everything around it--crumpling clothes, crushing chocolates, even snapping my toothbrush in half. This is all I will say: It was worth it.

Whitney Terrell

“The Huntsman”

The book that ranks highest on my list of undiscovered genius would be Rick Harsch’s novel “Billy Verite.” It is the second in a trilogy of neo-noir books set in the “Driftless Zone” of Lacrosse, Wis. Harsch is a talented, disturbing, and macabre craftsman whose best work attains a level of invention that few writers ever glimpse.

Kate Walbert

“The Gardens of Kyoto”

Two books deserve a rave: Anne Carson’s mesmerizing and lyrical “The Beauty of the Husband,” a “fictional essay in 29 tangos” that forms a pastiche, of sorts, of the disintegration of a marriage; and Carolyn Cooke’s terrific debut collection, “The Bostons,” linked stories of Brahmin aesthetes and hardscrabble Mainers that are at times funny, at times wicked, and always perfectly executed.

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