Jane Smiley's Reading List

"Horse, by Geraldine Brooks. I've read all of Brooks's novels, and plenty of books about horses and racing, but this one is a revelation. Best horse book I've ever read, including all of my own."

"I recently read Kindred, by Octavia Butler, and, if 'classic' means a book that everyone should read and learn from, that's the one. I saw it, opened the cover, and read it in a day. The description of the narrator passing back and forth in time between being a slave in the family of some of her ancestors and living her current life in Los Angeles is transfixing."

"The Year of Lear, by James Shapiro. The standard belief is that we can't know much about Shakespeare's life, but Shapiro opens his life up by exploring in a detailed way what was going on when Shakespeare was writing Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. While I was reading it, I felt like I was walking down the street with Mr. Bill."

"David Copperfield, because you have to read a Dickens novel in order to understand 19th-century England (both setting and language) and this is the smoothest one and the most easy to visualize."

"The details of the westward movement in the United States, thanks to David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly's Bound Away, about how and why the Virginia Colony spread west."

"I was also a big fan of The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, because it challenges the way we see our current world and compares it with the culture of earlier, and different, ways of living."

"Read: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg, but it's a reread."