Taigan Fetch Magazine by Taigan

Jay McInerney’s first novel, Bright Lights Big City, defined an era and got him compared to J.D. Salinger—the book, published in 1984, remains by far the best of the many reprises of A Catcher in the Rye. In the years since his debut, McInerney has published nine additional books, including two excellent collections of essays on wine, one of his great passions. Of his most recent work, How it Ended: New and Collected Stories, Sam Tannenhaus wrote in the New York Times Book Review that the book “reminds us how impressively broad McInerney’s scope has been and how confidently he has ranged over wide swaths of our national experience.” Here, McInerney cuts a swath through the novels written in the past ten years and gives us his favorites, though he warns that like fiction itself, it’s subject to change according to the mood of the reader: “This is today’s list. If I make one tomorrow it might be completely different.”

The Little Friend by Donna Tart
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart
Big If by Mark Costello
The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night Time by Mark Haddon
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
Trading Up by Candace Bushnell
Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis
Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Jon Meacham, the editor-in-chief of Newsweek, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. He is also the author of three more books including the best-selling Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, and American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, and is at work on another, a biography of George H. W. Bush. Astonishingly, he still finds time to read—a lot— and here he shares his assessment of the ten best non-fiction books of the past ten years:

Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills by Mary Soames
The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941-1945 by Michael Beschloss
Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center by Daniel Okrent
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman
1776 by David McCullough
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
The Looming Tower: Al Quaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
Sea of Thunder: Four Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign 1941-1945 by Evan Thomas
Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England by Lynne Olson.

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