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Words Move Me

Words Move Me | 11/21/2009 7:00 am

Nick Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn's Half the Sky is riveting. The women in this book are the true heroines of our time: ordinary women who did extraordinary things. Anyone who reads this book will be moved, inspired, and called to action.

Amy Cohen
Author of The Late
Bloomers' Revolution

Words Move Me | 11/20/2009 4:30 am

I recently read a memoir I think is one of the best I've read in the last ten years: The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham. A moving, gorgeously-written, probing, brilliantly structured attempt to understand her own father's suicide.

Dani Shapiro
Author of Slow Motion

Words Move Me | 11/18/2009 3:00 am

The most satisfying ghost story I’ve read is Playmates by A.M. Burrage. A middle-aged bachelor adopts a young girl whose upbringing was so dire she never “learned to play.” In this marvelous tale, she is taught, and her guardian’s horizons are expanded.

Gail Godwin
Author of the forthcoming novel
Unfinished Desires

Words Move Me

Words Move Me | 11/17/2009 4:00 am

When I was writing my first novel, I stumbled upon Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. It was the perfect book to help me rethink ideas of character and story. When I finished that novel, I was inspired enough to finish my own.

Ann Hood
Author of The Knitting Circle

Words Move Me | 11/16/2009 5:00 am

Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination has never left me. She takes a woman's worst nightmare and tells the story with humor, truth and the most exquisite language that can only come from a naked soul.

Lori Gottlieb
Author of Stick Figure

Words Move Me | 11/14/2009 7:00 am

In J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, I love "For Esme, With Love and Squalor." It went straight to my heart, and has stayed there. One character observes that hell is '…the suffering of being unable to love.' How true -- then and forever.

Luanne Rice
Author of The Deep Blue
Sea For Beginners

Words Move Me | 11/12/2009 3:30 am

I love The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins. This great 19th century novel sows the seeds for all mystery novels to come. It's a book that made me understand that mysteries can be great novels -- and it made me want to write them.

Jane Stanton Hitchcock
Author of Mortal Friends

Words Move Me | 11/11/2009 2:30 am

Shortly after I moved to Manhattan, I read Jack Finney's science fiction novel, Time and Again. It forever altered the way I see the city, as a place inhabited by centuries of ghosts. Sometimes I swear I see them lurking, especially around The Dakota.

Sally Koslow
Author of Little Pink Slips

Words Move Me | 11/10/2009 4:15 am

John Steinbeck's East of Eden is the most important piece of writing I have ever read. It drives me daily to be a better person.

Jamie Lee Curtis
Actress, Author, Activist

Words Move Me | 11/09/2009 4:30 am

I can't count how many times I've read the opening stretch of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, awed by how uniquely cinematic the writing and its effect are. You forget you're reading; you're tricked into watching a movie in your mind. It's stunning.

Frank Bruni
Author of Born Round

Words Move Me | 11/09/2009 4:30 am

Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body has an exquisite view of romantic love. "You did not say it first, and neither did I," the narrator says. "Yet when you say it and when I say it, we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them."

J. Courtney Sullivan
Author of Commencement

Words Move Me

Words Move Me | 11/06/2009 3:30 am

My ultimate comfort book is Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, which I think I may now have read as many times as I've seen the 1982 mini-series. I love it for its language, wit, humor, and nostalgia for a bygone era. I'm a sucker for all that.

Christopher Buckley
Author of Losing Mum and Pup

Words Move Me | 11/05/2009 2:00 am

Sleeping Arrangements by Laura Shaine Cunningham is a book that delighted me, and charmed every friend I've ever recommended it to. It's a tender, quirky, unexpected memoir about a girl growing up in unusual circumstances.

Julie Morgenstern
Author of Organizing
from the
Inside Out

Words Move Me | 11/04/2009 4:15 am

I keep The Moviegoer by Walker Percy by my bed. On a low day, I turn to p. 13: "To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be on to something is to be in despair." It never fails to lift my spirit.

Marie Brenner
Author of Apples and Oranges

Words Move Me | 11/03/2009 5:00 am

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss stayed with me long after I put it down. It is a story of lost love that spans over half a century. Krauss weaves different narratives together so masterfully. I found it romantic, heart-breaking and deeply moving.

Campbell Brown
Host of CNN'S "Campbell Brown"

Words Move Me

Words Move Me | 11/02/2009 4:30 am

I love Dubliners by James Joyce -- and specifically the story "Araby," which is an under-loved one. Well, "under-loved" as compared to "The Dead." I read it when I was very young, and think of the ending all the time. It's heartbreaking and subtle.

Sloane Crosley
Author of
I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Words Move Me

Words Move Me | 10/30/2009 4:20 am

"I don't write poems, but I love them because I can carry them with me like prayers. As Elizabeth Alexander writes in The Venus Hottentot: "Elegant facts await me. Small things in this world are mine."

Veronica Chambers
Author of Kickboxing Geishas

Words Move Me

Words Move Me | 10/29/2009 3:30 am

I first read Moss Hart's autobiography Act One at age 10 and have reread it ever since -- for its humor, for its romantic portrait of Broadway's golden age, and for its powerful account of how a child with few resources could realize his dreams.

Frank Rich
New York Times op-ed columnist

Words Move Me | 10/28/2009 4:30 am

Dalia Sofer's The Septembers of Shiraz is the haunting story of a prosperous Jewish family in Iran right after the Revolution. Suddenly, they become strangers in a land that was once theirs; they survive through the father's acceptance of a new reality.

Myrna Blyth
Editor-in-Chief
BettyConfidential.com

Words Move Me | 10/27/2009 4:30 am

The ultimate test of a book for me: can you be in bed with it and stay awake? Joan Silber's novel, Ideas of Heaven, is so smart, so wise, so funny, and so illuminating about ordinary sorrows and longing, I was up most of the night marveling.

Jane Hamilton
Author of A Map of the World