Writers choosing writers
Aimee Bender (“The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake”) picks ...
Alison Bechdel’s
“Are You My Mother?”
A Comic Drama
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
This book is more internal, more sprawling, more wrenching and less resolved and narratively complete than her amazing “Fun Home,” but I still liked it better. It’s messy and deep. It lingers. It has scenes of Winnicott in psychoanalytic sessions in England and Virginia Woolf walking in parks and Bechdel’s own exploration of herself — the self as lab — in a way that is honest and bold and inviting. (Paul Morse / Los Angeles Times, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
What happens when you ask a handful of writers to name their favorite book of 2012, and then the authors of those books pick their favorites? The unexpected. Follow the trail for a wonderful daisy-chain of eclectic reading recommendations to last through next year.
Ware picks ...
Zadie Smith’s
NW: A Novel
(Penguin)
A colorful microcosm of London life refracted through some of the most varied, condensed and recursively poetic prose I’ve read in a contemporary novel; intense word-images flare up on the page delineating a diversity of inescapably 21st century people to whom Zadie Smith gives us a full empathetic mental pass from youth to adulthood — and, like the rest of us, they’re only trying figure out who they are, where they came from and where it is they’re going. (Alex Garcia / Chicago Tribune/MCT, Penguin)
Porochista Khakpour (“Sons and Other Flammable Objects”) picks...
Victor LaValle’s
“The Devil in Silver”
(Spiegel & Grau)
LaValle never writes the same book and his recent is a stunner: a bizarre, fantastical, hellish and hilarious psychiatric-ward horror novel of sorts that makes “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” look downright demure. (Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times, Random House)
Jonathan Lethem (“The Ecstacy of Influence”) picks...
Philip Pullman’s
Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm
(Viking)
I’ve been reading to my children from Philip Pullman’s new Grimm’s Fairytales every night and find myself as absolutely enthralled as they are; his introduction and endnotes are terrific too. He’s rendered the tales in a relaxed, timeless vernacular that frees the crazy vitality of the familiar ones, and brings innumerable lesser-known (and bizarre) tales into focus. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times, Viking)
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Pullman picks...
Robert Macfarlane’s
The Old Ways
(Viking)
Macfarlane has walked a thousand miles or more along ancient tracks and pathways in Britain and elsewhere, by day and by night, alone and in company, in every kind of weather, shod and barefoot. He writes beautifully, he communicates what he knows (and he knows a great deal) and what he feels with immense grace and skill, and he tells one of the best ghost stories I’ve read for a long time. A truly marvellous book. (Graham Barclay / For the Times, Viking / Penguin Books)
Attica Locke (“The Cutting Season”) picks...
Errol Morris’
“A Wilderness of Error”
(Penguin Press)
Errol Morris’ “A Wilderness of Error” just floored me. Exhaustingly researched and beautifully illustrated, the book questions the conviction of a man accused of horrific crimes, with the same moral outrage that Morris brought to his award-winning film “The Thin Blue Line.” It’s a haunting piece of art, and a reminder of why physical books still hold so much power.” (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times, The Penguin Press)
Martinez picks...
Stephen Tobolowsky’s
“The Dangerous Animals Club”
(Simon & Schuster)
“The Dangerous Animal Club” runs the gamut between the youthful, dreamlike compulsions of a brainy little boy, to the recollections and misadventures of a struggling actor in Los Angeles in the past 30 years, and in between you have story-telling at its finest: well-written, poignant, hysterical, heart-wrenching and above all — wise. (The Brownsville Herald, Brad Doherty / AP Photo, Simon & Schuster)
Daniel Handler a.k.a. Lemony Snicket (“Who Could That Be at This Hour?”) picks...
Eileen Myles’
“Snowflake”
(Wave Books)
“I started making copies of my favorite poems in Eileen Myles’s Snowflake — published literally back to back with another collection, “Different Streets,” by the good folks at Wave Books — to put up on my refrigerator, but gradually I realized I was copying the whole book. It’s rare to find a poet who can speak to people who never read poetry and people who read it all the time, but Myles is it and Snowflake is really it.” (Jeff Chiu / Associated Press, Wave Books)
