Ari Shapiro's Reading List

"Abraham Verghese's next novel, The Covenant of Water, is more than 700 pages, and even though it doesn't come out until May, I devoured it more quickly than many books that were ahead of it in my queue."

"The only version I've ever read is the 2020 translation by Maria Dahvana Headley. Nearly every page has lines that I wanted to read aloud."

"Sometimes I flip through The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara and give myself a little dose of him in the middle of a day. I think Having a Coke With You may be the best love poem ever written."

"The novelist Amitav Ghosh wrote about this dilemma in an insightful nonfiction book called The Great Derangement."

"I recently felt this way about the trans women in Detransition, Baby, by Torrey Peters."

"I recently felt this way about the teenagers coming of age in 1970s China in A Map for the Missing, by Belinda Huijuan Tang."

"Lulu Miller's Why Fish Don't Exist might have been my favorite read of the pandemic. It presents itself as a biography of the taxonomist David Starr Jordan, but then it morphs into a multilayered meditation."

"Michael Ende also wrote a lesser-known book called Momo, published in 1973. It is a fable about a girl who has a gift for listening."

"I read A Little Life beginning to end this way, on one long flight from South Africa to the United States."