Book List: novels about books, readers, bibliophiles and more

An unabashed bookworm, I make my way through an inordinate amount of books every year. But a recent perusal of my shelves led me to realise that I dont just enjoy reading books, but that I rather enjoy reading about books. Below is a brief list of books about books, including two of my all-time favourites, The House on Moon Lake and If on a Winters Night a Traveller.

(All book descriptions taken from publishers websites or Amazon)

Feel free to add any bookish suggestions that come to mind!

The House on Moon Lake by Francesca Duranti

Blurb: Fabrizio Garrone is an impoverished but aristocratic translator who has been living a life of quiet desperation in Milan. He feels underappreciated and tormented by a persistent sense of having been cheated by life. But when he reads about a lost Viennese novel  The House on Moon Lake  in the journals of a late esteemed literary critic, he dreams that this project will put him on the cultural and literary map, and finally bring him the accolades that have eluded him.

Fabrizio journeys to Vienna, tracks down the book, and translates it, and in so doing embarks on a nightmarish search for the truth behind the events depicted in it, as well as for clues about the tragic life of its forgotten author. When asked to write a short biography of the novelist, Fabrizio must invent details missing from the last three years of his subjects life. The resulting biography is a publishing phenomenon. But the repercussions for Fabrizio are profound: he becomes the willing victim of a person he had thought to be fictional.

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If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Blurb: Calvinos masterpiece opens with a scene thats reassuringly commonplace: apparently. Indeed, its taking place now. A reader goes into a bookshop to buy a book: not any book, but the latest Calvino, the book you are holding in your hands. Or is it? Are you the reader? Is this the book? Beware. All assumptions are dangerous on this most bewitching switch-back ride to the heart of storytelling.

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The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (our review forthcoming)

Blurb: Barcelona, 1945—Just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes one day to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again.

Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a book from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the book he selects, a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last of Carax’s books in existence.

Before Daniel knows it, his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness, and doomed love, and before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.

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The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak (our review forthcoming)

Blurb: HERE IS A SMALL FACT YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier. Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall. SOME IMPORTANT INFORMATION THIS NOVEL IS NARRATED BY DEATH. Its a small story, about: a girl, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. ANOTHER THING YOU SHOULD KNOW DEATH WILL VISIT THE BOOK THIEF THREE TIMES

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The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar

A masked terrorist has brought London to its knees there are bombs inside books, and nobody knows which ones. On the day of the launch of the first expedition to Mars, by giant cannon, he outdoes himself with an audacious attack. For young poet Orphan, trapped in the screaming audience, it seems his destiny is entwined with that of the shadowy terrorist, but how? His quest to uncover the truth takes him from the hidden catacombs of London on the brink of revolution, through pirate-infested seas, to the mysterious island that may hold the secret to the origin not only of the shadowy Bookman, but of Orphan himself.

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 How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely (see our review)

Blurb: What Pete Tarslaw wants is simple enough: a realistic amount of fame that will open new avenues of sexual opportunity; the kind of financial comfort that will allow him to spend his life pursuing hobbies such as boating or skeet shooting at his stately home by the ocean or a scenic lake; and perhaps mostly importantly the chance to humiliate his ex-girlfriend at her wedding. This is the story of how he succeeds in getting it all, and what it costs him in the end. Narrated by an unlikely literary legend, How I Became A Famous Novelist pinballs from the post-college slums of Boston, to the fear-drenched halls of Manhattans publishing houses, from the gloomy purity of Montana’s foremost writing workshop to the hedonistic hotel bars of the Sunset Strip. The horrifying, hilarious tale of how Pete’s “pile of garbage'? called The Tornado Ashes Club became the most talked about, blogged about, read, admired, and reviled novel in America will change everything you think you know about literature, appearance, truth, beauty, and those people out there, somewhere in America, who still care about books.

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Salamander by Thomas Wharton

Blurb: The English are about to seize Canada from the French; in the midst of Wolfes siege of Quebec, a colonel walks into a bookshop. It is run by an enigmatic, combative, proud young woman, who proceeds to tell him all about the ideal book, the castle where it was made, and the man who made it.

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Wits End: A Novel by Karen Joy Fowler

Blurb: Set in contemporary Santa Cruz, Wit’s End opens as Rima Lanisell arrives at her godmother’s old Victorian mansion, weary from her recent losses an inventive if at times irritating father, a beloved brother. (Indeed, Rima seems to lose people and things habitually sunglasses and keys, lovers and family members.) At loose ends, she has come to coastal California to regroup and to meet that legendary godmother. She soon finds herself enmeshed in a household of eccentrics: a formerly alcoholic cook and her irksome son, two quirky dog-walkers, a mysterious stalker, and of course, godmother Addison Early, a secretive and feisty bestselling mystery writer who once knew Rima’s father well. Perhaps too well. Rima is on a mission to discover just what their relationship was all about.

That won’t be easy. Over the years, Addison has fought fiercely to protect her work and her privacy, even as her passionate fans have become ever more intrusive. In this age of the Internet, with its blogs, chat rooms, and websites, its Wikipedia, false personas, and hidden identities, those fans have begun to take over her plotlines and the life of her famous fictional detective. For many of those fans, Maxwell Lane is more real than Addison herself. Wit’s End is also a highly original take on the way dedicated readers appropriate their favorite books, perhaps the one act of theft applauded the world over except by authors. Word has it that Addison is so beleaguered, so distracted by her fans’ Web postings that she has writers block.

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Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

Blurb: Meggie loves books. So does her father, Mo, a bookbinder, although he has never read aloud to her since her mother mysteriously disappeared. They live quietly until the night a stranger knocks at their door. He has come with a warning that forces Mo to reveal an extraordinary secret a storytelling secret that will change their lives for ever.

See also:

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Destiny, Rewritten by Katheryn Fitzmaurice

Eleven-year-old Emily Elizabeth Davis has been told for her entire life that her destiny is to become a poet, just like her famous namesake, Emily Dickinson. But Emily doesnt even really like poetry, and she has a secret career ambition that she suspects her English-professor mother will frown on. Then, just after discovering that it contains an important family secret, she loses the special volume of Emily Dickinsons poetry that was given to her at birth. As Emily and her friends search for the lost book in used bookstores and thrift shops all across town, Emilys understanding of destiny begins to unravel and then rewrite itself in a marvelous new way.

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The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Sansom (see our review)

Blurb: Introducing Israel Armstrong, one of literatures most unlikely detectives in the first of a series of novels from the author of the critically acclaimed Ring Road. Israel is an intelligent, shy, passionate, sensitive sort of soul: hes Jewish; hes a vegetarian; he could maybe do with losing a little weight. And hes just arrived in Ireland to take up his first post as a librarian. But the librarys been shut down and Israel ends up stranded on the North Antrim coast driving an old mobile library. Theres nice scenery, but 15,000 fewer books than there should be. Who on earth steals that many books? How? When would they have time to read them all? And is there anywhere in this godforsaken place where he can get a proper cappuccino and a decent newspaper? Israel wants answers!

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The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe

Blurb: Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connies grandmothers abandoned home near Salem, she cant refuse. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. This discovery launches Connie on a questto find out who this woman was and to unearth a rare artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge.

As the pieces of Deliverances harrowing story begin to fall into place, Connie is haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials, and she begins to fear that she is more tied to Salems dark past then she could have ever imagined.

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The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

Blurb: High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness. Angry and alone, he takes refuge in his imagination and soon finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a world that is a strange reflection of his own populated by heroes and monsters and ruled by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book, The Book of Lost Things.

Taking readers on a vivid journey through the loss of innocence into adulthood and beyond, New York Times bestselling author John Connolly tells a dark and compelling tale that reminds us of the enduring power of stories in our lives.

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The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Blurb: In Jasper Ffordes Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontës novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Ffordes ingenious fantasy—enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novel—unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix

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Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (see our review)

Blurb: Nowadays firemen start fires. Fireman Guy Montag loves to rush to a fire and watch books burn up. Then he met a seventeen-year old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid, and a professor who told him of a future where people could think. And Guy Montag knew what he had to do.

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Booked to Die by John Dunning

Blurb: In the first Cliff Janeway mystery, the Denver homicide detective loses his job after taking the law into his own hands by brutally assaulting a man suspected of killing a rare book collector, and continues to investigate the case by becoming a collector himself.

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Ex Libris by Ross King (see our review)

Blurb: Responding to a cryptic summons to a remote country house, London bookseller Isaac Inchbold finds himself responsible for restoring a magnificent library pillaged during the English Civil War, and in the process slipping from the surface of 1660s London into an underworld of spies and smugglers, ciphers and forgeries.

As he assembles the fragments of a complex historical mystery, Inchbold learns how Sir Ambrose Plessington, founder of the library, escaped from Bohemia on the eve of the Thirty Years War with plunder from the Imperial Library. Inchbolds hunt for one of these stolen volumes a lost Hermetic text soon casts him into an elaborate intrigue. His fortunes hang on the discovery of the missing manuscript but his search reveals that the elusive volume is not what it seems and that he has been made an unwitting player in a treacherous game.

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 Mr Toppit by Charles Elton (see our review)

When Arthur Hayman, an unsuccessful screenwriter turned children’s book author, is accidentally hit by a cement truck in London, his dying moments are spent with a passing American tourist, Laurie Clow, who is fated to bring posthumous fame to his obscure series, The Hayseed Chronicles, and the enigmatic and sinister Mr. Toppit who is at the center of the books. While Arthur doesn’t live to reap the benefits of his books’ success, his legacy falls to his widow, Martha, and their children—the fragile Rachel, and Luke, reluctantly immortalized as the fictional Luke Hayseed, hero of his father’s series. But others want their share of the Hayseed phenomenon, particularly Laurie, who has a mysterious agenda of her own that changes all of their lives as Martha, Rachel, and Luke begin to crumble under the heavy burden of their inheritance.  Spanning several decades, from the heyday of the postwar British film industry to today’s cutthroat world of show business in Los Angeles, Mr. Toppit is a riveting debut novel that captures a remarkable family and their tragic brush with fame to wonderfully funny and painful effect.

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The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

Blurb: Bastian embarks on a wild adventure when he enters the magical world of Fantastica, a doomed land filled with dragons, giants, and monsters, and risks his life to save Fantastica by going on a very dangerous quest.

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Codex by Lev Grossman (see our review)

Blurb: When hotshot young investment banker Edward Wozny is called to the home of an important and mysterious client, the last thing he expects is to be ordered to uncrate and organize a library of rare books. Edwards indignation turns to curiosity when he learns that among the volumes there may be hidden a unique medieval codex, a priceless treasure kept sealed away for many years and for many reasons. Enlisting the help of Margaret Napier, a passionate and brilliant medieval scholar, Edward learns the strange history of the codexs author, Gervase of Langford, as well as the dark, intricate tale that lies within the missing medieval text. As Edwards obsession with the codex deepens, friends introduce him to MOMUS, an addictive computer game set in a fantasy world that, perplexingly, begins to parallel the legend of the codex. Yet MOMUS confounds more than it clarifies, and it becomes evident that someone is trying to prevent Edward and Margaret from ever finding the elusive codex. As they race against an unknown enemy, the two begin to uncover secrets that the codexs powerful owner will do anything to keep hidden.

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The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

Blurb: The eponymous reader of Alan Bennetts good-natured novella is none other than Englands own Queen Elizabeth, who pursues her incorrigible corgis into a mobile library parked near Buckingham Palace, discovers the world of serious literature, and forsakes her duties for the pleasures of obsessive reading. Guided by a former kitchen employee, Her Majesty dives headlong into the works of Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, Nancy Mitford, and other literary icons while distressed advisers, fearing a constitutional crisis, scheme to divert her from her newfound passion. A renowned essayist (Untold Stories) and playwright (The History Boys), Bennett demonstrates once again his unerring eye for the eccentricities of the British national character. We suspect this droll, slyly subversive little story is destined to make a big splash on both sides of the pond.

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Dominance by Will Lavender

Blurb: When the students in Winchester University’s Logic and Reasoning 204 arrive for their first day of class, they are greeted not with a syllabus or texts, but with a startling assignment from Professor Williams: Find a hypothetical missing girl named Polly. If after being given a series of clues and details the class has not found her before the end of the term in six weeks, she will be murdered. At first the students are as intrigued by the premise of their puzzle as they are wary of the strange and slightly creepy Professor Williams. But as they delve deeper into the mystery, they begin to wonder: Is the Polly story simply a logic exercise, designed to teach them rational thinking skills, or could it be something more sinister and dangerous? The mystery soon takes over the lives of three students as they find disturbing connections between Polly and themselves. Characters that were supposedly fictitious begin to emerge in reality. Soon, the boundary between the classroom assignment and the real world becomes blurred—and the students wonder if it is their own lives they are being asked to save.

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Homicide in Hardcover by Kate Carlisle

Blurb: The streets of San Francisco would be lined with hardcovers if rare book expert Brooklyn Wainwright had her way. And her mentor wouldn?t be lying in a pool of his own blood on the eve of a celebration for his latest book restoration. With his final breath he leaves Brooklyn a cryptic message, and gives her a priceless?and supposedly cursed?copy of Goethe?s Faust for safekeeping. Brooklyn suddenly finds herself accused of murder and theft, thanks to the humorless?but attractive?British security officer who finds her kneeling over the body. Now she has to read the clues left behind by her mentor if she is going to restore justice?

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Books Can Be Deceiving by Jenn McKinlay

Blurb: Lindsey is getting into her groove as the director of the Briar Creek Public Library when a New York editor visits town, creating quite a buzz. Lindseys friend Beth wants to sell the editor her childrens book, but Beths boyfriend, a famous author, gets in the way. When they go to confront him, hes found murdered-and Beth is the prime suspect. Lindsey has to act fast before they throw the book at the wrong person.

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Sentenced to Death by Lorna Barrett

Blurb: As the owner of Stoneham, New Hampshires mystery bookstore Havent Got a Clue, Tricia Miles can figure out whodunit in the latest bestseller long before she gets to the last page. But when her friend is killed in a freak accident, Tricia must use her sleuthing skills to solve a murder mystery that promises to be much more sinister than the books on her shelves.

See also:

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Buried in a Book by Lucy Arlington

Blurb: After losing her job as a journalist at the age of forty-five, Lila Wilkins accepts an internship at A Novel Idea, a thriving literary agency in North Carolina. Being paid to read seems perfect to Lila, although its difficult with the cast of quirky co-workers and piles of query letters. But when a penniless aspiring author drops dead in the agencys waiting room-and Lila discovers a series of threatening letters-shes determined to find out who wrote him off.

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Cooking the Books by Bonnie S Calhoun

Blurb: After her mother dies from a heart attack, Sloane Templeton goes from Cyber Crimes Unit to bookstore owner before she can blink. She also inherits a half-batty store manager; a strange bunch of little old people from the neighborhood who meet at the store once a week, but never read books, called the Granny Oakleys Book Club; and Aunt Verline, who fancies herself an Iron Chef when in reality you need a cast iron stomach to partake of her culinary disasters. And with a group like this you should never ask, “What else can go wrong?'?  A lot! Sloane begins to receive cyber threats. While Sloane uses her computer forensic skills to uncover the source of the threats, it is discovered someone is out to kill her. Can her life get more crazy?

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A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Blurb: Diana Bishop, a young historian (and a witch), discovers an enchanted manuscript at the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The text, known as Ashmole 782, turns out to be a coveted treasure lost for centuries, and she is the first and only creature who has met the terms of its spell. Her discovery sets the supernatural world spinning, and she soon finds an ally in Matthew Clairmont, a 1,500 year old vampire

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The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Vida Winter, a bestselling yet reclusive novelist, has created many outlandish life histories for herself, all of them invention. Now old and ailing, at last she wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. Her letter to biographer Margaret Lea a woman with secrets of her own is a summons. Vidas tale is one of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family: the beautiful and wilful Isabelle and the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline. Margaret succumbs to the power of Vidas storytelling, but as a biographer she deals in fact not fiction and she doesnt trust Vidas account. As she begins her researches, two parallel stories unfold. Join Margaret as she begins her journey to the truth hers, as well as Vidas.

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The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

Lucy Hull, a young childrens librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both a kidnapper and kidnapped when her favorite patron, ten- year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. The precocious Ian is addicted to reading, but needs Lucys help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly antigay classes with celebrity Pastor Bob. Lucy stumbles into a moral dilemma when she finds Ian camped out in the library after hours with a knapsack of provisions and an escape plan. Desperate to save him from Pastor Bob and the Drakes, Lucy allows herself to be hijacked by Ian. The odd pair embarks on a crazy road trip from Missouri to Vermont, with ferrets, an inconvenient boyfriend, and upsetting family history thrown in their path. But is it just Ian who is running away? Who is the man who seems to be on their tail? And should Lucy be trying to save a boy from his own parents?

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The End of your Life Bookclub by Will Schwalbe

“What are you reading?'? That’s the question Will Schwalbe asks his mother, Mary Anne, as they sit in the waiting room of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In 2007, Mary Anne returned from a humanitarian trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan suffering from what her doctors believed was a rare type of hepatitis. Months later she was diagnosed with a form of advanced pancreatic cancer, which is almost always fatal, often in six months or less.  This is the inspiring true story of a son and his mother, who start a “book club'? that brings them together as her life comes to a close. Over the next two years, Will and Mary Anne carry on conversations that are both wide-ranging and deeply personal, prompted by an eclectic array of books and a shared passion for reading. Their list jumps from classic to popular, from poetry to mysteries, from fantastic to spiritual. The issues they discuss include questions of faith and courage as well as everyday topics such as expressing gratitude and learning to listen. Throughout, they are constantly reminded of the power of books to comfort us, astonish us, teach us, and tell us what we need to do with our lives and in the world. Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dying.

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Mr Penumbras 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloane

The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a San Francisco Web-design drone—and serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey has landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. But after just a few days on the job, Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than the name suggests. There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything, instead “checking out'? impossibly obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra. The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he’s embarked on a complex analysis of the customers’ behavior and roped his friends into helping to figure out just what’s going on. But once they bring their findings to Mr. Penumbra, it turns out the secrets extend far outside the walls of the bookstore.