By title

By author

Dan Gutman

• The Invention of Hugo Cabret

• Genius. The Sgt. Pepper of children's books.

• Hatchet

• Still the best survival story.

• Ball Four

• This is the book that turned me on to reading. For the first time, somebody wrote like they were having a conversation with me.

• Yertle the Turtle

• Or anything by Dr. Seuss. Can’t beat it.

• Mad Magazine

• Without it, all intelligent life on Earth would have ceased to exist.

Micol Ostow

• The Haunting of Hill House
• Shirley Jackson

• "The ne plus ultimate haunted house story, I like to think of Amity's Gwen as sort of a modern spin on Eleanor, a young woman seeing and experiencing ghostly things, whose mind and perceptions can't be trusted."

• We Have Always Lived in the Castle
• Shirley Jackson

• "A slow-burner filled with atmosphere. Merricat is the platonic ideal of an unreliable narrator."

• The Shining
• Stephen King

• "A suggestible man, prone to violence, isolated in a hotel that exerts evil force over his will... Jack Torrance is to Amity's Connor as Hill House's Eleanor is to Gwen."

• Tighter
• Adele Griffin

• "A modern take on The Turn of the Screw, Griffin draws from chilling source material and makes it her own for today's teen readers."

• To Die For
• Joyce Maynard

• "A dark and twisty thriller (the movie's great, too) that serves up multiple POV's on a platter. I spent a lot of time poring over the many distinct voices of that book."

• The Maddaddam trilogy
• Margaret Atwood

• "Epic and sprawling, boldly visionary, and still she manages to tie all of her narrative threads together by the series' conclusion. To spend ten minutes in that woman's head!"

• Dangerous Girls
• Abigail Haas

• "Pacing, pacing, pacing. Totally un-put-downable."

• The Amityville Horror
• Jay Anson

• "(That one probably goes without saying.)"

• We Were Liars
• E.Lockhart

• "The pages turn and the ending twists!"

Stephen Emond

• The Art of Urban Sketching, Drawing On Location Around The World
• Gabriel Campanario

• This book is full of sketches of buildings and cityscapes, and was influential in the design of my novel Bright Lights, Dark Nights.

• Dark City, The Lost World of Film Noir
• Eddie Muller

• Really cool book with lots of full page sharp stills from noir films. I was very inspired by the downbeat storytelling and cool aesthetics of noir. Mixed with the urban settings of a lot of noir and the light and dark interplay gave me a lot to work with.

• Eleanor and Park
• Rainbow Rowell
• Kendra
• Coe Booth
• Every Day
• David Levithan
• The First Part Last
• Angela Johnson
• Where Things Come Back
• John Corey Whaley
• Playing in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
• Toni Morrison
• Why We Broke Up
• Daniel Handler
• Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock
• Matthew Quick

Loren Long

• The Magic Finger
• It made me think about what it would feel like to be an animal . . . especially an animal being hunted.
• Hatchet
• I was fascinated by the question . . . what would you do if you were lost all alone in the wilderness?
• A Season on the Brink
• For any NCAA basketball fan or anyone interested in a quirky biographical study of a legendary coach . . . Bobby Knight.
• The Winner’s Manual, For the Game of Life

• I like to learn how extraordinary/successful people approach life and this is a unique (just published) book about methods and ideals that Jim Tressell brings to his Ohio State football program.

• Marley and Me
• Sorry, I'm a softy for dogs. I had just lost my dog of 14 years and read this book on a book tour. Ended up bawling my eyes out all alone in a Hotel in Tampa. Guy Reads, guy cries.
• The Little Engine That Could
• The essential picture book for every collection . . . my favorite growing up. Take it off to college with you!

Adam Selzer

• The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death
• Daniel Pinkwater

• A story of two kids who sneak out to go to late night double feature picture shows and end up fighting aliens with wrestlers and detectives. I pretty much based my life on Pinkwater's teachings, and this one, in particular. It's set in a thinly-veiled version of Chicago, and the fact that I live near some of the locations now is not entirely a coincidence. It's available in a really good collection called "5 Novels" which also has a couple of other masterpieces in it.

• Rotters
• Daniel Kraus

• A book about a guy who finds out that his father is a grave robber. I love grave robbing so much that my neighbors are reluctant to come to my barbecues.

• Knock On Any Door
• Willard Motley

• How Nick Romano went from being an altar boy at 12 to dying in the electric chair at 21. A really tough, gritty novel about life on the streets in the 40s, this book is also the origin of the phrase "live fast, die young, have a good looking corpse." I found this in a bin at a thrift store in high school and bought it because I knew Jim Morrison had liked it; a week later it was my favorite novel ever. The writing just pounds you in the face.

• Martin Chuzzlewit
• Charles Dickens

• The easiest Dickens to start with is A Christmas Carol (you already know the plot, and it's short), and the best ones are probably Great Expectations and Bleak House (which has a guy who spontaneously combusts in it). But sometimes I feel like I have a duty to tell people that Martin Chuzzlewit is under-rated; it comes right in between his early, zanier books and his later, more serious ones so you get the best of both worlds. Dickens books can take weeks to read, but they're worth it. You lose yourself in a larger-than-life world full of kooks and crooks with lots of droopy taverns and winding alleys. Even the most serious ones are funny as hell.

• I Hated Hated Hated Hated This Movie
• Roger Ebert

• A collection of Ebert's worst reviews - just about everything you need to know about writing is mixed into these. Reading Ebert's best and worst reviews will tell you more than 100 "writing craft" books. He was really funny when he was ripping into a movie - he says one of them should be chopped up and made into free ukulele picks for the poor. And the notes he had for that movie where Shaq plays a genie are some of the best writing advice you can get.

• Space Station Seventh Grade
• Jerry Spinelli

• Spinelli's first book, re-reading it in college is what made me realize that YA books could be just as "literary" as anything else on the shelves.

• Nemesis
• Phillip Roth

• Roth's latest and apparently last book, a story about a gym teacher in a Jewish neighborhood in New Jersey during World War 2 who questions his faith when a couple of kids die of polio. He seems to have no idea what's going on in Europe. But the reader does.

• The Shakespeare Wars
• Ron Rosenbaum

• A nonfiction book about controversies among Shakespeare scholars (like, does Juliet talk about having an orgasm? Did Shakespeare revise his work? How much of Macbeth is missing from the script we have?) Academia is weird world full of cliques and drama, Rosenbaum succeeds in making it look as though professors throw folding chairs at each other during conferences. He also speaks as well as anyone about how Shakespeare can just cast this spell over you that you may never recover from if it hits you just right (while freely admitting that most Shakespeare productions, and most essays about him, are boring as all get out).

• Skinnybones
• Barbara Park

• Look, writing middle grade humor is really, really hard. Way harder than YA humor. I re-read this one lately and couldn't believe how funny it was. Barbara Park made it look so easy.

• The Lost Continent
• Bill Bryson

• Bill Bryson drives across the country, makes fun of things, and muses about how America has changed over the decades. One of those books where you can just open to any page and read a bit.

   

  BONUS REC OF OBSCURIA:

  The Sears Catalog and Consumer's Guide, Fall 1900
  They reprinted an abridged version of this in the 1970s; you can find it online for a couple of bucks. It's the best bathroom reading in the world. The 1927 one is neat, too.