Reading recommendations from Alice McDermott and more

Writers tend to be readers, really good readers. So one of our favorite questions to ask any visiting author is: What are you reading?

Leading a few of the author panels at Books By The Banks, we took our opportunity and asked National Book Award winner Alice McDermott and others to share the best books they’d read recently. Their answers made our TBR lists a great deal longer — and smarter.

• Alice McDermott, We That Are Young by Preti Taneja; The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene

• Hannah Pittard, author of Visible Empire: American Pastoral by Philip Roth; Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; The Friend by Sigrid Nunez; Less by Andrew Sean Greer

• James Markert, author of What Blooms from Dust: (Because of the proximity to Halloween, Markert said he was on a horror kick.) Floating Dragon by Peter Straub; The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty; Pet Sematary by Stephen King

• Moriel Rothman-Zecher, author of Sadness Is A White Bird: Red Clocks by Leni Zumas; Heads of The Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

• Tatjana Soli, author of The Removes: All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (Soli listened to this and said the audio was excellent); After Dark by Haruki Murakami