Read on
HARPER LEE once described reading as akin to breathing, and I’m pretty sure that’s exactly right. From the moment I discovered books, I couldn’t get enough of them. I read endlessly as a kid, devouring whatever I could get my hands on, and plowed my way through the library during my teen and adult years. Since the age of twenty, I have had a stack of books next to my bed that is nearly as high as the bed itself, and into which I dip at random depending on my mood that night. I buy books the way some women buy shoes, and there are few things in my life that compare to the anticipation of beginning a brand-new one. I believe that reading is the most essential tool for a writer—more important than any teacher or graduate program in the world—but books are also one of the truest sources of joy I’ve ever known, portals into the worlds and minds of people I will never meet except on the page. Books are the best of everything; they are solitude and company, student and teacher, stranger and friend.
Here are some of my favorites.
Olive Kittredge, by Elizabeth Strout
The winner of the well-deserved 2009 Pulitzer Prize, this novel-in-stories follows the acerbic, cantankerous Olive Kittredge through the eyes of her fellow neighbors in Maine. I love central characters who possess strange, ornery personalities but with whom you fall in love anyway. Olive is such a person, a one-in-a-million character that you wish you knew personally. I feel similarly about Elizabeth Strout, who has written some of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever come across.
A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
Another Pulitzer Prize winner (2011) and another novel-in-stories. Like Strout, Egan knocks it out of the park with her deeply felt characters and fresh, beautiful prose. I’m drawn especially to writers who get right to the point and say what needs to be said, but in a way that makes you wonder where in the world he or she got such an idea in the first place. Egan is one of those writers. Also, not many authors can force me to put a book down so that I don’t finish too quickly. This one did—and still does.
Tiny Beautiful Things, by Cheryl Strayed
This isn’t a novel, but a collection of Strayed’s writings from when she used to maintain an advice column at Salon.com. Strayed (who also wrote the blockbuster Wild) is one of those rare writers who can evoke the purest type of honesty in their work without sounding preachy or oversentimental. Each of these pieces is a window into her own life, as well as a basket overflowing with the generous lessons she’s learned along the way. It’s a wise, brave little book from a woman who’s been there and back again.
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
It’s no accident that I teach this book every year to my eighth-grade students at Wyoming Seminary Preparatory School. It was one of my own favorites as a kid, and I relish the shared excitement each semester as study of the novel comes to a close in my classroom. The layers within this book, as well as its riveting themes of racism, courage, and empathy, continue to keep it as pertinent today as it was when it first came out. Maybe even more so.
Talk Before Sleep, by Elizabeth Berg
I love Berg’s style of writing—clean, simple, with the kind of details that make me think, “Oh, I’m not the only one!” This novel, which deals with a woman battling cancer and the friends who rally around her, has all those traits and more. Berg is wonderful at humanizing her characters in such a way that they become almost intimate by the novel’s end, and her books, which almost always deal with things like relationships, marriage, and the search for self, continually strike a chord with me. 
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