Best Books Read in 2013

As in years past, I have asked a handful of diverse people in my life to recommend the best book they read in the last year. It’s a pressure-free recommendation, as the only rule is that the book had to have made some kind of personal impact. So, this latest list of  "Best Books" includes titles that might have you reading cover to cover in one sitting, make you cry or laugh uncontrollably, or (simply!) change the way you look at the world or even live your life.

Fiction

• Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe
• Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walters
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• Dear Life by Alice Munro
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philipp K. Dick
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls (labeled a “true life novel”)
• Solo Faces by James Salter
• Summer of '42 by Herman Raucher
• Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
• The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

Non Fiction

• The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens by Stephen Apkon
• Bossypants by Tina Fey
• Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
• Ganesha on the Dashboard by Raghunathan, V. and Eswaran, M. A.
• The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
• Island at the Center of the Earth by Russell Shorto
• Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
• My Misspent Youth: Essays by Meghan Daum
• Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by Jake Tapper
• The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars that Were Lost – from Ancient Greece to Iraq by Victor Davis Hanson

For more book recommendations, check out the lists from 2012, 2011, and 2010.