What I’m Reading Now | Next on My List | All-Time Favorite Books
“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.
Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.”
William Faulkner
What I’m Reading (or listening to) Now
- The Good Lord Bird, James McBride
- Caste, Isabel Wilkerson
Next on My List
- The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein
- Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders (I will try, for the third time….)
Books I’ve Enjoyed Since I Started Keeping Track (October 2015)
Note: if I didn’t enjoy a book, I didn’t add it to this list, which may explain why a title went from “What I’m Reading” to not on any list.
- Piranisi, Susanna Clarke
- Squeeze Me, Carl Hiaasen
- Migrations, Charlotte McConaghy
- The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa
- Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell
- The entire Detective D.D. Warren series, by Lisa Gardner
- Still Life, Louise Penny
- Little Eyes, Samanta Schweblin
- The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson
- The Dutch House, Ann Patchett
- There There, Tommy Orange
- The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich
- Deacon King Kong, James McBride
- Late Migrations, Margaret Renkl
- Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
- Nothing to See Here, Kevin Wilson
- Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe
- Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell
- Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney
- The Snakes, Sadie Jones
- Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Togarczuk
- All the Names They Used for God, Anjali Sachdeva
- The River, Peter Heller
- The Silent Patient, Alex Michaelides
- Dare to Lead, Brené Brown
- Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy
- Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller
- Walking on the Ceiling, Ayşegül Savaş
- Save Me the Plums, Ruth Reichl
- Circe, Madeline Miller
- Three Dog Life, Abigail Thomas
- The Ice Limit, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
- The Guest Book, Sarah Blake
- No Visible Bruises, Rachel Louise Snyder
- Becoming, Michelle Obama
- Mrs. Caliban, Rachel Ingalls
- Safekeeping, Abigail Thomas
- The Red-Haired Woman, Orhan Pamuk
- The Overstory, Richard Powers
- An American Marriage, Tayari Jones
- The Witch Elm, Tana French
- Leaving Atocha Station, Ben Lerner
- 10:04, Ben Lerner
- Destroyer, Victor Lavalle
- Warlight, Michael Ondaatje
- Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Florida, Lauren Groff
- Less, Andrew Sean Greer
- The Day the World Came to Town, Jim Defede
- Fever Dream, Samantha Schweblin
- Moonglow, Michael Chabon
- Autumn, Ali Smith
- Liar’s Club, Mary Karr
- The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro
- Outline, Rachel Cusk
- When It Grows Dark, Jorn Lier Horst
- The Absent One, Jussi Adler-Olsen
- The Keeper of Lost Causes, Jussi Adler-Olsen
- My Absolute Darling, Gabriel Tallent
- Voices, Arnaldur Indridason
- Silence of the Grave, Arnaldur Indridason
- Jar City, Arnaldur Indridason
- Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Neil de Grasse Tyson
- The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni
- Miss Jane, Brad Watson
- A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
- The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
- A Really Big Lunch, Jim Harrison
- The Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery
- Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple
- South and West, Joan Didion
- Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
- Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance
- Ordeal, Jorn Lier Horst
- Caveman, Jorn Lier Horst
- Mastering Leadership, Robert Anderson & William Adams
- The Nest, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
- Commonwealth, Ann Patchett
- A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman
- Crusader’s Cross, James Lee Burke
- In the Kingdom of Ice, Hampton Sides
- Lab Girl, Hope Jahren
- The Danish Girl, David Ebershoff
- Delicate, Edible Birds, Lauren Groff
- Pack of Two, Caroline Knapp
- The Earth is Enough, Harry Middleton
- A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
- Can’t Not Do, Paul Shoemaker
- The Lake House, Kate Morton
- Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
- The Nightingale, Kristen Hannah
- StandOut 2.0, Marcus Buckingham
- Etta and Otto and Russell and James, Emma Hooper
- Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion
- Fates & Furies, Lauren Groff
- The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North
- Thunderstruck, Erik Larson
- Hold Still, Sally Mann
- Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
- The Opposite of Loneliness, Marina Keegan
- The Swimmer, Joakim Zander
- Strengths-based Parenting, Mary Rechmeyer and Jennifer Robison
All-Time Top Favorites
- The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
- Man’s Fate, Andre Malraux
- Life of Pi, Yann Martel
- A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean
- She’s Come Undone, Wally Lamb
- All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
- Rivers of Memory, Harry Middleton
- The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
- The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein
- Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
- The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
- Sense & Sensibility, Jane Austen
- Grendel, John Gardner
- The Meadow, James Galvin
Favorite Books I Read with My Kids
- From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankewiler, E. L. Konigsburg
- Magic Marks the Spot (and the entire Very Nearly Honorable League of Pirates series), Caroline Carlson
- Gregor the Overlander (and other books in the same series), Suzanne Collins
- The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
- A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle
- The Borrowers, Mary Norton
- The Fairy Tale Detectives (and the entire Sisters Grimm series), Michael Buckley
- Looking for Alaska, John Green
- The Hunger Games (and series), Suzanne Collins
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban (and the entire series, but book 3 is my favorite), J. K. Rowling