Books

Loved hearing, meeting (and timidly talking to) T.C. Boyle at the book festival yesterday.  It was invigorating to hear an author read one of his stories aloud - one that I had read before; I don't know, you just see it in a new light.

Which brings me to my annual list of reading and author goals for the year (and life):

25 Living Authors I Would Love to Meet1. Richard Russo
2. Jhumpa Lahiri
3. Dennis Lehane
4. Ken Follett
5. Jonathan Franzen
6. Jeffrey Eugenides
7. George Pelecanos
8. Ian McEwan
9. Oscar Hijuelos
10. Michael Connelly
11. Jeffery Deaver
12. Stewart O'Nan
13. Alice Munro   (not likely, considering she's 81 and Canadian)
14. Tom Perrotta
15. Jennifer Egan
16. Donna Tartt
17. Benjamin Black (aka John Banville)
18. Larry McMurtry
19. William Boyd
20. Kate Morton
21. Lionel Shriver
22. Claire Messud
23. Scott Smith
24. Philip Roth

25. Scott Spencer

25 Dead Authors I Would Have Loved to Meet1. Richard Yates
2. John Updike
3. Ross Macdonald
4. Agatha Christie
5. Evan Connell
6. William Faulkner
7. Jack London
8. Mark Twain
9. Pearl S.Buck
10. Truman Capote
11. Edith Wharton
12. James Joyce
13. F. Scott Fitzgerald
14. Cornell Woolrich
15. Dashiell Hammett
16. Graham Greene
17. Patricia Highsmith
18. Carson McCullers
19. Willa Cather
20. Fyodor Dostoevsky
21. Evelyn Waugh
22. Joseph Conrad
23. William Styron
24. Daphne du Maurier
25. James T. Farrell

25 Authors I Want to Read This Year (Whom I've Never Read Before)

Scott Turow

1. Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk)
2. Anna Sewell (Black Beauty)
3. Irving Stone
4. Scott Turow
5. Herman Wouk (Pulitzer winner for The Caine Mutiny)
6. Jospehine Tey
7. Edwin O'Connor (Pulitzer winner for The Edge of Sadness)
8. John Fante
9. John Jakes
10. Leon Uris
11. Karin Fossum (Scandanavian crime fiction)
12. Jane Smiley
13. David Quammen (nonfiction nature/science writer)
14. Isak Dinesen
15. John Buchan  (The Thirty-Nine Steps)
16. Wilkie Collins
17. Stephen Dobyns
18. Margaret Millar  (mystery writer, wife of Ross Macdonald)
19. Christopher Isherwood
20. John Galsworthy (The Forsyte Saga)
21. Gunter Grass
22. Natsuo Kirino (modern Japanese mystery writer)
23. Sara Blaedel  (Norwegian crime)
24. Daniel Freeman
25. Ross King


25 Books I Want to Read This Year

1. Stories, T.C. Boyle
2. The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer
3. The Child's Child, Barbara Vine
4. Islands Under Fire, Kevin McCarey (a friend of T.C. Boyle and a teacher at SCAD, McCarey's first book is an account of the attempt to save Puerto Rico's coral reefs)
5. The Monuments Men, Robert Edsel
6. The Absent One, Jussi Adler-Olsen
7. The Boys From Brazil, Ira Levin
8. The Homesman, Glendon Swarthout  (a 1988 western that is being made into a Tommy Lee Jones-directed movie with Jones, Meryl Streep, and Hilary Swank)
9. The Secret Keeper, Kate Morton
10. Dear Alice, Alice Munro
11. The Hook, Donald Westlake
12. The Gods of Gotham, Lyndsay Faye
13. Back to Blood, Tom Wolfe
14. Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, Maria Semple
15. The Hypnostist, Lars Kepler
16. The Stonecutter, Camilla Lackberg
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Dare Me, Megan Abbott   (Lord of the Flies meets Bring it On)
19. The White Devil, Justin Evans
20. Quiet, Susan Cain   (a non-fiction book about introverts)
21. Howards End, E.M. Forster
22. A Thousand Parsons, Jonathan Dee
23. And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini
24. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
25. Frenchman's Creek, Daphne du Maurier







Images courtesy of:

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