Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Robber Bride

Atwood was trained as a historian, and you have to love her just for that. She gets her details right. The Handmaid’s Tale might seem like fanciful science fiction until you read the epilogue, in which a panel of historians looks back at the abuses in her hypothetical world of the future and in our own time and finds a kind of moral equivalence. This book will join Brave New World and 1984 in the canon of predictive political commentary that we could only wish weren’t so accurate. Read The Robber Bride if for no other reason than to find a wonderful, highly intelligent female character who is a specialist in military history.

Peter DeVries, Forever Panting

In a time when the only available literary flavor seems to be vanilla, DeVries reminds us that literary style can be a delight in itself. Reading him aloud enhances the experience because you are forced to slow down and appreciate the way he puts words together. This comic novel has the main character falling in love with his mother-in-law, divorcing his wife and marrying her mother, then wishing he hadn’t.

William Goldman, The Color of Light

Based on what he’s said in interviews, this is not Goldman’s favorite book, perhaps because it’s much too confessional. He tells the story of an aspiring writer who builds a career on the unglamorous foundation of being a library science geek. He can’t hide his love of books and preoccupation with research. He comes to an obvious conclusion that can be impossibly hard for other writers to get – that every painful crisis of your life is potential literary material, provided you survive the experience and live long enough to use it.

John Le Carré, The Quest for Karla (trilogy title) and The Night Manager

Former intelligence analyst Le Carré (the pen name of David Cornwell) regards writers, readers, and spies as "close observers." Note particularly the opening chapter of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (first in the trilogy), in which an operative turned schoolteacher gives his pet student lessons on the art of close observation. In the process, Le Carré teaches you not only how to pay closer attention as you read but also how to observe the details of your daily life with sharpened intelligence and keener interest. And his metaphor of the British Secret Service as a bunch of pre-adolescent schoolboys is revealing of his own emotional attachments to his former profession and its sometimes misguided ideals.

In The Night Manager, Le Carré describes the post-Cold-War triangle trade of drugs, arms, and currencies--in a behind-the-scenes story of the first Gulf War, which we're now watching all over again with a fresh cast in the old roles.