Some of my favorite books
Memoir
Mary Karr's first memoir is a classic.
More Memoir Picks
- This Boy's Life -Tobias Wolff
- Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories of a Decade Gone Mad - Virginia Holman
- Fierce Attachments - Vivian Gornick
- Things I Don't Want to Know - Deborah Levy
- Educated - Tara Westover
- Hollywood Park -Mikel Jollett
- Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love - Dani Shapiro
- Mortality - Christopher Hitchens
- When Breath Becomes Air -Paul Kalanithi
- Levels of Life -Julian Barnes
- H is for Hawk -Helen Macdonald
- Lab Girl -Hope Jahren
- A Broom of One's Own: Words on Writing, Housecleaning and Life - Nancy Peacock
- Maybe You Should Talk to Someone -Lori Gottlieb
- Reading Lolita in Teheran -Azar Nafisi
- Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?-Jeanette Winterson
- Just Kids -Patti Smith
- Becoming -Michele Obama
- Nothing was the Same -Kay Redfield Jamison
- The Year of Magical Thinking -Joan Didion
- The Glass Castle -Jeannette Walls
- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly -Jean Dominique Bauby
- The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother -James McBride
- Angela's Ashes -Frank McCourt
- Lit -Mary Karr
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings -Maya Angelou
- Survival in Auschwitz -Primo Levi
- Darkness Visible -William Styron
- Autobiography of a Face -Lucy Grealy
- The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal
- The Men We Reaped - Jesmyn Ward
- The Yellow House - Sara Broom
- Unstill Life: A Daughter's Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction - Gabrielle Selz
- Memorial Drive - Natasha Trethewey
- Know My Name - Chanel Miller
- Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap - Judy Goldman
- Slow Motion - Dani Shapiro
- Searching for AmyLu Danzer: A Memoir - John Rosenthal
- The Beauty of Dusk - Frank Bruni
- How to Say Babylon: a Jamaican Memoir - Safiya Sinclair
Fiction Picks
I'm a huge Murakami fan, but I'll limit myself to my favorite of his books: Killing Commendatore
More fiction faves:
- Apeirogon - Colum McCann (fiction based on a true story and true events, gripping and compelling and emotional)
- Homeland Elegies - Ayad Akhtar
- TransAtlantic - Colum McCann
- The Weight of Ink - Rachel Kadish
- Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neal Hurston
- White Dog Fell From the Sky - Eleanor Morse
- Lincoln in the Bardo -George Saunders
- Circe -Madeline Miller
- On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong
- The Noise of Time - Julian Barnes (anything by Julian Barnes)
- A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
- All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
- Blindness - Jose Saramago (Nobel Prize winner)
- Sacred Hunger & its sequel,The Quality of Mercy - Barry Unsworth
- Three Junes -Julia Glass
- The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
- The Reader -Bernard Schlink
- The Friend - Sigrid Nunez
- The Life & Times of Persimmon Wilson -Nancy Peacock
- Beloved -Toni Morrison
- The Underground Railroad -Colson Whitehead
- The Color Purple -Alice Walker
- The Temple of the Golden Pavilion -Yukio Mishima
- The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
- Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Death in the Andes - Mario Vargas Llosa
- The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -Juno Diaz
- The Tin Drum -Gunter Grass
- The Lover - Marguerite Duras
- The Stranger, The Plague - Albert Camus
- Labyrinths -Jorge Luis Borges
- Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell
- Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stewart
- The Night Watchman - Louise Erdrich
- Cloud Cuckoo Land - Anthony Doerr
- Crossroads - Jonathen Franzen
- Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver
Non-Fiction
Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson, is an important book on racism and so much more. We all would be better, more aware people for reading it.
More Non-Fiction Picks
- Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End - Atul Gawande
- Factfulness -Hans Rosling
- Leonardo da Vinci -Walter Isaacson
- God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire and the Making of the Modern World - Alan Mikhail
- The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness -Sy Montgomery
- Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI - David Grann
- Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away -Rebecca Goldstein
- From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find a Good Death - Caitlin Doughty
- Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption - Laura Hillenbrand
- The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science - Douglas Starr
- The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values -Sam Harris
- Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst -Robert Sapolsky
- Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family -Robert Kolker
- What to Read and Why -Francine Prose
- A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering American on the Appalachian Trail -Bill Bryson
- A Short History of Nearly Everything -Bill Bryson
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
- Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo
- Portraits of an Artist - Mary Burns
- The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon - David Grann
- The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson
- Under the Banner of Heaven -Jon Krakauer
- Art and Fear -David Bayles & Ted Orland
- The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race - Walter Isaacson
- Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures - Merlin Sheldrake
- An Immense World - Ed Yong