What writers are reading

David Remnick, author of "Reporting: Writings From the New Yorker"
"I'm reading George Eliot's Middlemarch and loving it - almost as much as I am loving the Yankees' . . . pursuit of a certain team in a certain city."

Michael Connelly, author of "The Overlook" and numerous other Harry Bosch novels
"Spook Country, by William Gibson. I have always marveled at his imagination, and this time is no different. Gibson is the best at getting us to look at ourselves through the prism of technology and the future."

George Saunders, author of "The Braindead Megaphone"
"I'm in the middle of the twin storms of 1) starting a new semester and 2) going out on a book tour. So I have two books set aside like treasures for when the storm(s) die down. One is Jonathan Franzen's new translation of Spring Awakening [by Frank Wedekind], and the other is Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. These are two of my favorite writers (and people) in the world so I've got these two books set aside as a kind of post-tour treat."

David Leavitt, author of "The Indian Clerk"
"W. G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction. This meditation on the Allied bombing of Germany during the Second World War is at once sad, beautiful, and unforgiving: a brilliant coda to the extraordinary works of fiction that Sebald published before his death in 2001."

D. T. Max, author of "The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery"
"Love in a Fallen City, by Eileen Chang. It proves people are awful everywhere at every time. Paracelsus, 16th-century doctor and alchemist, shows how hard it was for modern medicine to be born, since the ones with the most innovative ideas were often the ones who paid least attention to the facts."

Helen Oyeyemi, author of "The Opposite House"
"I just finished what must be the ultimate tale of destruction and regeneration of identity: The Count of Monte Cristo [by Alexandre Dumas]. After [Edmond Dantès's] amazing escape from prison I cheered him on as he used his newfound riches to destroy the lives of the people who'd plotted his downfall - until he went too far. As a protagonist, the Count sits between Hamlet and Batman at the table of anti-heroes suspended between the power to do justifiable harm and the morality to use that power."

Junot Díaz, author of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"
"I'm reading Samuel R. Delany's Dark Reflections. One of our greatest living writers, still knocking it out of the park."

Edmund White, author of "Hotel de Dream" and "Chaos"
"I'm finally reading, in French, Flaubert's Sentimental Education. The scenes are short and dry, relieved by only a few lyrical pages devoted to the natural beauties surrounding Fontainbleau - and that only to underline the horrors of Paris during the 1848 revolution. Frederic Moreau is a stand-in for Flaubert, but with 20 points less of I.Q. and no artistic vocation. It's a chilling but absorbing activity, to watch a great author torture his own simulacrum for four hundred pages."

Amy Bloom, author of "Away"
"A Spot of Bother, by Mark Haddon - a stripped-down, English, less introspective version of 'The Corrections.' None of the glorious flamboyance on one hand, none of the [self-absorption] on the other. A copy of Given Sugar, Given Salt, [poems] by Jane Hirshfield, because without it, when I am stuck in airport lounges and various cattle calls, my hair would probably set itself on fire."

Compiled by John Freeman