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The return of our top 10 lists

By Cheryl Truman Herald-Leader Books Editor

Cheryl Truman

It’s back! Your favorite books, listed here …

Dear readers, remember last summer when we swapped our top 10 favorite books all the livelong summer?

Well, the Top 10 is back!

Send me your top 10 favorite all-time best reads, or your top five, or heck, your top one. We’ll list them on the Sunday book pages and also on the Bluegrass Books blog at Kentucky.com. (And if you have a top 10 least favorite books, well, send them on: I’ll take a look at those, too.)

Our rules are simple:

The names of the books, and their authors.

Your name, your city and state and a contact telephone number in case I need to clarify some point.

Your e-mail address.

You may send these to my e-mail address or mail them to me at the Herald-Leader. Or you may use the Herald-Leader’s books blog at http://bluegrassbooks.wordpress.com/

We had an absolute blast with this last year. Participants included everyone from retirees to businesspeople to ­politicians to students.

Why do we do this? Because we want to share the books we love. Look at it as a newspaper-led reading list exchange.

(And incidentally, kudos go to the individual who submitted Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth last year: I finally got around to starting it this last weekend — behind, I realize, most of the world now that it has been an Oprah Book Club pick — but it is a great big doorstop of a page-turner. It’s the kind of book that the late lamented book catalog A Common Reader, may it rest in a bookish military science/wag ­philosophy/Anglophile peace, would define as a book to read read.)

And, as your hostess, I will again lead off …

My Top 10 favorite books (not the best books, or the books that made me a better person or the books I’m most grateful to have read: my favorites). Mine change all the time. Yours probably do too, so those of you who ­participated last year are invited to submit updated lists this year:

1. Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
by Erik Larson
I’ve tried to push this book on pretty much every group I’ve ever spoken to, every student I’ve counseled, every family member I’ve managed to corner near a bookshelf. It’s about the 1900 Galveston ­hurricane, but it’s a beautifully written reminder of the intersection between journalism and history. Larson’s powers of ­description have never been better — not even in The Devil and the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and a murderer, which is also a fine read. And yes, Larson is a master at switching up his narrative threads.


2. The Sparrow
by Mary Doria Russell
It’s science fiction, it’s spirituality, but it’s really the book I turn to when I’m sure I’m doing the right thing to let me know that you can never really be sure. There’s no book that keeps me more humble than this one, no book I’m more grateful to have read. I recommend it to everybody I know. (And sometimes, as was the case with my teenage daughter, they throw it back at me, but you know, I’m persistent, and eventually I will wear her down.)

3. Spin
by Robert Charles Wilson
Just a ripping good yarn about what might happen if unknowable aliens ­hijacked our planet, put a permeable sheath over the whole thing and started pulling strings. Like an M. Night ­Shyamalan movie, except that Spin stays with you even after the trick is revealed.

4. Angle of Repose
by Wallace Stegner
Why is it that single defining moments reverberate for us decades later? How can a single action or a single moment of losing focus change everything? And how can the proudest among us grit it up enough to simply do the right thing when we should?

5. The Portable Dorothy Parker
Because, like my collection of books by and about the Mitford sisters, I couldn’t live without it, and I’m finally old enough to admit it.

6. Metropolitan Life
by Fran Lebowitz
Because ­Lebowitz could be Dorothy Parker’s daughter.

7. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We like to pretend that everything is ­inevitable. We like a ­narrative. We like to ­pretend that ­history turned out that way because it was supposed to. We are so wrong, and Taleb takes great delight in showing why.

8. The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman
What if humanity vanished tomorrow? What would the world be like? Would the earth “recover” from us? One fun footnote: The thing that’s most likely to get your house, and indeed all man-made ­structures? The moisture. Go thank your roofer right now.

9. Middlemarch
by George Eliot
(or Bleak House by Charles Dickens — same general idea). Why readers don’t root for the characters of Eliot and Dickens the same way they pull for everybody in Jane Austen just befuddles me.

10. Team of Rivals
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Writing about the bicentennial of ­Abraham Lincoln’s birth sent me back into this book, not the fact that I’m ­looking forward to seeing the movie version (Liam Neeson as the Great ­Emancipator, indeed). Goodwin has a gift, both in writing and speaking about this time in history, of seeming as though she were on the spot. It’s hypnotizing. And if you can, as a reader, lose track of time’s passage as you’re reading, you’ve found yourself a wonderful book.