Tag Archives: reading lists

WRITERS AS READERS: READING THE WRITER’S LIBRARY

Late Last Night Books
The Writer's Library offers an intimate and fascinating glance of writers as readers.
The Writer’s Library offers an intimate and fascinating glance of writers as readers.

What is your favorite book? As a writer, this is the most common–and most dreaded–interview question I get. I know writers are supposed to be readers, and I am one. But my mind always goes blank.

In The Writer’s Library, literary mavens Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager ask this question of a slew of prominent authors. And these people know how to answer. This fascinating book is filled with 23 interviews with authors including T.C. Boyle, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Madeline Miller, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Donna Tartt, and Ayelet Waldman on books that “made them think, brought them joy, and changed their lives.”

Books that Change (Writer’s) Lives

This is a book you’ll want to keep around just for the lists at the back of every chapter naming the most influential authors and books each author cites.

The Martin Amis-Garry Craig Powell Reading List for Covid-19 Quarantine

Late Last Night Books

A proliferation of reading lists has appeared since quarantine began: ‘comfort reading’ (Susan Hill), lists about pandemics, lists of new novels (nearly all by women) and so on. But isn’t this a good time to catch up on our serious reading? I recently mentioned to a friend, novelist David Joiner, that in The Pregnant Widow, the protagonist Keith Nearing manages to read practically the whole canon of the British novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in fact up to about 1920) during a single long vacation, while he stays at a castle in Italy with a bevy of nubile young women, one of them named Scheherazade. DH and Frieda Lawrence were once guests at the same castle, which happens to have an excellent English library.

What’s On Your Bucket List of Books?

Late Last Night Books

What book is top on your bucket list of books? What book have you always wanted to read but somehow never have? And what book would you feel incomplete without reading?

Bucket List

Love Those Reading Lists

Late Last Night Books
7 AUGUST 2015 Love Those Reading Lists

8/7/15 — Love Those Reading Lists!

Some of my favorite reading comes from lists. With enticing names like “Best,” “Great,” or even “Chosen,” they promise new discoveries and hours of entertainment. I know not everyone feels this way—Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada criticizes summer reading lists as stress inducers—but to me, reading lists actually remove the stress. Someone else has done the hard work of getting the goodies together, and I get to pick and choose what I want and ignore the rest. (I’ve even offered a few lists of my own in this space.)