First published in 1960. Out of print for years. Now beautifully reissued by NYRB. (Are they my favorite imprint? Maybe.) Incredible, 59-year-old drawings that look absolutely fresh. An American classic.

I don’t read as many novels as I probably should, and this is a novel novel. McCracken goes for it, doing in the book what, I think, only a novel can do. And damn, can she write a sentence. So many underlines. (Related post: “The religion of walking.”)

I don’t really listen to audiobooks (they don’t fit into my commute-less life), but I got my hands on this one, and used it for company while shoveling snow during our Lake Erie sabbatical exile. I found it warm and smart, with a bunch of good stuff about the creative process and parenting. (Related post: “On solitude and being who you are”)

Seems like a love-it-or-hate-it book, but I tore through it. One of those books that came at just the right place and just the right time for me. (Related reading: “Walker Percy’s problems of re-entry”)

A 500-page interview arranged to cover Herzog’s career in chronological order. This book took me forever to get through, not because it was a slog, but because it’s so dense with insane stories and poetic insights, I was constantly stopping to underline. (Related reading: “Werner Herzog on writing and reading”)

I am a former librarian who read this on a flight from Cleveland to Los Angeles, so it was pretty much the perfect book at the perfect time. A real page-turner. Orlean knows what she’s doing. (Another good LA book, not a page-turner, but a page-lingerer: Christoph Niemann’s Hopes and Dreams.)

How great is it when an acclaimed book turns out to be worthy of the hype?

I laughed all the way through this book and then I cried at the end.

When I came across the original talk I knew this was going to be a good book, but I liked my advance copy even more than I thought it would, and then I was quite pleased to see what a hit it became this year. A good contrast to Cal Newport’s productivity-focused Digital Minimalism. (A great companion: Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. )

My 4-year-old got obsessed with this book, and I got obsessed with it and with Ungerer. Another great classic picture book I loved: Edward Gorey’s The West Wing. (Collected in Amphigorey.) And let’s throw in Bruno Munari’s Drawing a Tree, which I loved even more upon re-reading.

It’s taken me a decade or so for Love and Rockets to really click, but this book, along with its followup, Is This How You See Me?, made me fall in love. (I read Tillie Walden’s On A Sunbeam right after this, and it was such a great compliment — the budding master’s technicolor vs. the established master’s black and white.)

“Maybe we’ll soon have a new literary category, Old Adult, to match Young Adult,” wrote John Wilson, in his review of Hall’s posthumous collection of essays, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. I’d be so down for that. (See also: Ron Padgett’s Big Cabin.)

When children are going through transitional periods, they’ll pull out old toys, old books, old stuffed animals. I do the same. This summer I re-read all of Portis’s novels, which is somewhat easy to do because there are only five of them. (If you’ve never read him, go ahead and start with True Grit, his masterpiece.) Gringos was the biggest surprise, and maybe the most underrated of all of his books? Such an interesting world and so many great sentences. I would love for another novel of his to turn up, but I also sort of hope he’s just kicking back on a porch somewhere in Arkansas, sipping bourbon, and enjoying his life.