For people who like to read, here are a few of my favorite books which you might enjoy yourselves.

Elmer Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained is a powerful novel about the tribulations of ranching in 1950s Texas during a six-year drought.

Andrea Barrett’s Voyage of the Narwhal is the tale of an exploratory sea voyage seeking the infamous Northwest Passage during the late 19th century. The protagonist is a naturist and the book is infused with love of nature and exploration.

Michael Bishop’s Brittle Innings is perhaps my favorite novel ever, a warm tale of a minor league baseball team during World War II. The first baseman for the team is a famous literary figure whom you would least expect to see in a pastoral novel such as this, but his inclusion in the story works very well indeed.

Michael Chabon is a fabulous writer whose masterpiece is Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the tale of two youngsters who create a famous comic book character during the 1930s (definitely not Superman!).

Jeffrey Ford is one of the finest modern fantasists, and his semi-autobiographical The Shadow Year is both touching and unsettling. Anybody who grew up in the 1950s can relate to this fine novel.

I do not normally read Nobel Prize winners, but Toni Morrison is a real treasure, and her Beloved is both moving and horrifying in its glimpse at life among former slaves in the post-Civil War era. This book is must reading.

Anybody who likes either historical fiction or mysteries (or both!) should love two wonderful Iain Pears novels An Instance of the Fingerpost and A Dream of Scorpio. I rarely describe a writer as a genius, but Pears comes closer to that designation than any other writer I know.

Anybody interested in fiction about either politics or near-future exploration should love Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. This is typical science fiction for people who hate spaceships/thrillers/car chases but rather serious extrapolations about real people struggling to survive.

I love Chinese fiction and my favorite writer in that area is Mo Yan, whose satirical views of life in China are both biting and touching. Red Sorghum is his masterpiece, a bleak tale of the Japanese invasion and the many massacres which took place as a result of it.

Happy reading!