Six writers on their favorite reading, genre by genre…
Peter Carey (historical fiction):
The Radetzky March (1932) by Joseph Roth
Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy
Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie
Riddley Walker (1980) by Russell Hoban
Specimen Days (2005) by Michael Cunningham
War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy
An Artist of the Floating World (1986) by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Eye in the Door (1993) by Pat Barker
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) by Michael Chabon
William Gibson (science fiction):
Tiger! Tiger! (1956) by Alfred Bester
Dhalgren (1975) by Samuel R. Delany
Arslan (1976) by M. J. Engh
The Crystal World (1966) by J. G. Ballard
The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman
Pavane (1968) by Keith Roberts
Random Acts of Senseless Violence (1993)by Jack Womack
Great Work of Time (1991) by John Crowley
Holy Fire (1996) by Bruce Sterling
334 (1972) by Thomas M. Disch
Kathryn Harrison (memoirs):
Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life (1997) by J. M. Coetzee
The Lover (1984) by Marguerite Duras
A Fan’s Notes (1968) by Frederick Exley
To the Is-Land (1982) by Janet Frame
Fierce Attachments (1987) by Vivian Gornick
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston
Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (1992) by Paul Monette
Speak, Memory (1951) by Vladimir Nabokov
Running in the Family (1982) by Michael Ondaatje
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) by William Styron
Simon Rich (humour):
Our Dumb Century (1999) by the Writers of ‘The Onion’
Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000) by David Sedaris
The Magic Kingdom (1985) by Stanley Elkin
Decline and Fall (1928) by Evelyn Waugh
Claw Your Way to the Top: How to Become the Head of a Major Corporation in Roughly a Week (1986) by Dave Barry
The Magic Christian (1959) by Terry Southern
Love Is Hell (1984) by Matt Groening
My Uncle Oswald (1979) by Roald Dahl
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams
The Great American Novel (1973) by Philip Roth
Otto Penzler (thrillers):
The Tears of Autumn (1975) by Charles Mccarry
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) by John Le Carré
The Garden of Weapons (1980) by John Gardner
Child 44 (2008) by Tom Rob Smith
Empire of Lies (2008) by Andrew Klavan
Spies of the Balkans (June 15, 2010) by Alan Furst
Six Days of the Condor (1974) by James Grady
Word of Honor (1985) by Nelson Demille
The Cold War Swap (1966) by Ross Thomas
A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939) by Eric Ambler
Rebecca Skloot (science):
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, And the Collision of Two Cultures (1997) by Anne Fadiman
In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (1985) by Daniel J. Kevles
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (1985) by Oliver Sacks
Confessions of a Knife (1979) by Richard Selzer
Love at Goon Park (2002) by Deborah Blum
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987) by Randy Shilts
A Long Line of Cells (1990) by Lewis Thomas
His Brother’s Keeper: A Story From the Edge of Medicine (2004) by Jonathan Weiner
The Best American Science Writing Edited by Jesse Cohen
The Best American Science and Nature Writing Edited by Tim Folger