Books have brought me comfort, humor, knowledge, inspiration, and a lot of joy over the years. In fact, you can read a love letter I once wrote to books here.
And, I receive a lot of requests for book recommendations, so here is a list of some of my favorites that I’ve read this year.
Inner Practice
For a deep dive into inner practice, I heartily recommend anything by Stephen Snyder and Henry Shukman, such as Trust in Awakening or Original Love.
Fiction
For fiction, my wife once wanted to give me a book. The staffer pointed to their well-stocked shelves, and then asked her what I liked. Jan said, “Well, he likes books with good writing, and characters you can like, and a moral trajectory . . . and a happy ending.” “Hmm,” the staffer replied, “we don’t have many of those.”
But there are still some!
- Anything by Peter Heller is really good, and I particularly like The Dog Stars and Celine.
- This year I read the whole Vorkosigan
Sci-Fi series, which combines page-turning space opera with deep insights into character and enduring love. - I also really liked:
- A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
- Titanium Noir
- A Gentleman in Moscow
- All of Martin Clark’s legal novels.
- The Maltese Falcon is weirdly fun and interesting.
- The Arkady Renko detective novels are phenomenal, with the first one – Gorky Park – set in the crumbling Soviet Union and later books now in Russia.
- With the series on TV, I had to reread Shogun, still a magnificent journey into complex medieval Japan.
And I keep coming back to Where Have You Been?, about major 20th-century authors. I don’t have any background at all in literary analysis, but it’s simply a delight to follow Michael Hofmann’s gorgeous, exuberant, brilliant cascades of words.
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