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Special Report
National Book Festival
The annual event takes place from Sept. 22-23 on the National Mall. Read more
National Book Festival authors share their favorite books National Book Festival writers reveal their favorite titles and explain what makes them so special.
Author: David Ezra Stein
“The Lord of the Rings ” trilogy and “The Hobbit” over and over since I discovered them in childhood. It’s such a richly detailed world. These books are a gift to the imagination. Whenever I delve into Middle Earth, I remember where I was the last time I visited. As a grade-schooler, when I first took a dusty, map-adorned copy of “The Hobbit” from the school library. As a teenager, on my grandmother’s couch by a sunny window. As a newly married person reading aloud to my wife at bedtime.
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Mariner
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Author: T.C. Boyle
Faulkner reminds me of what fiction is supposed to do, can do, should do. And I don’t always reserve a rereading of these books for mid-novel: I just pulled “Sanctuary ” from the shelf to stimulate me in the very beginning process of collecting material and thinking about the next novel, which at this point is as vague and shadowy to me as a flickering, dimly seen film.
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Vintage
Author: Vivian Siobhan
“The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing ” by Melissa Bank. The writing is just extraordinary — crisp, evocative, and I think she perfectly captures what it feels like to be a girl. She is able to pack an incredible amount of heart into the smallest, rudimentary moments. I reread this book once a year, and I am inspired by it each and every time.
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Penguin
Author: Chris Raschka
The book I reach for the most, whether I’m sitting in my favorite library in New York or in my studio, is P.G. Wodehouse’s “The World of Mr. Mulliner,” which collects all of the Mulliner stories. The shape of those sentences still knocks me out. And the way in which Mr. Wodehouse constructs the humor, so adroitly, so stylishly, with no excess, demands constant study.
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Penguin
Author: Geraldine Brooks
“The Norton Anthology of Poetry .” I have the fourth edition now; the third edition fell apart from overuse. This one’s looking mighty scruffy. I turn to it every day, after I put my younger kid on the school bus, while a fresh pot of coffee is brewing, before I head upstairs to my study to face the blinking cursor.
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W. W. Norton
Author: Sally Bedell Smith
Nancy Mitford’s “Love in a Cold Climate ” gets me laughing all over again as I revisit some of the funniest characters in English literature. I have long found the Mitford family fascinating and have read all of Nancy’s novels. With each rereading I appreciate anew Mitford’s comic sensibility and her sly and astute observations about the aristocratic world in which she was raised.
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Vintage
Author: Tayari Jones
For me, all roads lead back to “Beloved ,” by Toni Morrison. I own the book in all formats — a hardcover first edition, a dog-eared paperback that I use for my own pleasure, a marked up paperback for teaching, an e-book that I read on my phone and the audio book, so that I may hear Morrison’s words in her own voice. There is no novel that speaks to the complexity of modern life like this one, although the story takes place in 1873. It shows us that amid deep violations of humanity, humanity wins out.
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Vintage
Author: Lois Lowry
I’d have to say “Letters of E.B. White ” (collected and edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth). Because I spend a substantial part of each year in rural Maine, his voice resonates with me as he describes the quotidian life on a Maine farm. There’s no fake folksiness to his description but rather an elegant appreciation of what he calls, without irony, the “trivial matters of the hearth.”
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Harper
Author: Christopher Bram
There is one book that I reread every five years or so with a devotion that even I find eccentric: “Lytton Strachey ,” by Michael Holroyd. This book is easily the best single-volume account of the Bloomsbury circle. It also ranks with the best biographies of gay men.
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W. W. Norton
Author: Giannina Braschi
“Thus Spoke Zarathustra ” by Friedrich Nietzche is a book not to be read, but to be learned by heart. It is a book of wisdom with a thought in every line. I have six or seven copies, but the one I learned by heart is the raggedy, dog-eared, crackling paperback, splitting through the spine.
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Penguin
Author: Jeffrey Toobin
“Common Ground ,” by J. Anthony Lukas, is the story, told through the lives of three families, of the Boston school busing crisis of the 1970s. In a larger sense, it’s an exploration of race and class in America — and a masterwork of narrative journalism, both impeccably researched and beautifully written.
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Vintage
Author: R.L. Stein
“Dandelion Wine ” by Ray Bradbury. I believe it is one of the most underrated books ever. Bradbury’s lyrical depiction of growing up in the Midwest in a long-ago time, a time that probably never even existed, is the kind of beautiful nostalgia few authors have achieved.
Avon
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Avon
Author: Laura Amy Schlitz
This is a personal and intrusive question, and I’m tempted to lie. I could honestly say that I’ve read — and reread — “Great Expectations” and “The Brothers Karamazov” and “The Song of the Lark” and “The Deptford Trilogy” and “Villette” and “Middlemarch.” I passionately love all these books, none of which runs the risk of compromising my status as an intellectual and an adult. But the book I reread most, and have loved since I was a child, is Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “A Little Princess .”
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Norilana
Author: Patricia Cornwell
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro ” is the most perfect prose I’ve ever read. The way Hemingway summarizes a life and describes the act of dying is sheer brilliant poetry. I keep a copy nearby and even travel with it when I work on the road as I find the writing inspiring.
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Scribner
Author: David Levithan
I have taught M.T. Anderson’s “Feed ” for seven years in a row now and have reread it each time, and each time it has meant more to me and been more scarily prescient. It’s a great lens through which to see our culture and the risks of an over-reliance on technology instead of humanity.
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Candlewick
Author: James Dashner
“Ender’s Game ,” by Orson Scott Card, influenced both my reading and writing life, shaped them more than any other novel. The book has everything I love in a story: a strong, complex, flawed protagonist; adventure; turmoil and heartache; displays of the relentless, unstoppable human spirit in the face of adversity; and surprising plot twists. One of the greatest endings of all time. “Ender’s Game,” I love you.
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Tor
Author: Tad Hills
The book I loved as a kid and most returned to and have come to depend on as a source of inspiration, for me as a writer, is “Charlotte’s Web ,” by E.B. White. As an author of children’s stories who casts animals as kids, reading “Charlotte’s Web” brings me to a place where I’d like my characters to live. It helps me get in a zone where I feel more receptive to inspiration.
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HarperCollins
Author: Tony Horwitz
I’ve worn out two or three copies of Jonathan Raban’s “Old Glory ,” about piloting a small boat down the Mississippi. I first read “Old Glory” 30 years ago, as a young reporter in the Midwest, and Raban helped me realize that you don’t need to climb a mountain or trek across the Gobi to have a great adventure. He also showed me that aimlessness and loitering are excellent techniques, and I’ve tried to apply them to my own travel writing ever since.
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Vintage
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