The best books to transport you to another time and place

I loved To Kill a Mockingbird when I was growing up—both the book and the movie. (Who can resist Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch?) And I love them both still.

Scout may be one of the best narrators we have in American literature: wise and naïve, fierce and fragile, and as honest as she can possibly be at any given time. Mockingbird leads us into some of the darkest crevices of mid-1930s life in the deep South, and brings us out into the light of love, integrity, and what it truly means to be a good citizen of the world. 

William Gibson, “The Father of Cyberpunk,” is responsible for much of our current technology.

In Pattern Recognition, however, Gibson isn’t writing about a future decades away, but just a hint ahead, enough for us to think that the future may well be more intriguing than the present—and to understand its deep roots in the past. Through Cayce Pollard, with her allergy to bad branding, Gibson navigates the brittle edge of fashionable London, weaving in a dark documentary in Russia, a series of film stills rising like fish to the surface of the internet, and a father lost in the aftermath of 9/11.

Part mystery, part coolness commentary, and stunningly well-written, this book will have you blinking when you wake from the dream Gibson has created.

Neal Stephenson has a gift for seeing just enough into the future to make it both accessible and mysterious. Reamde (think “Read me,” with the D and M flipped) is the smartest action-adventure movie you’ve ever seen—in the form of a can’t-put-down 1000+ page novel.

It takes the world of MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), combines it with hostage-taking, survivalist encampments, money-laundering, technology start-ups, doomed relationships, the critics we all carry in our heads, family (which may be some or all of the above), the landscape of British Columbia, young Chinese gold farmers and a midlife crisis, and wraps it into a book you’ll have to start rereading the minute you put it down.

Pack meals for several days. You won’t want to stop.

We all need rock stars to idolize, and mine is Alice Munro, a Canadian writer whose books are mostly short story collections about the quietly intense lives of farmers and townspeople in rural Canada.

I’m from a generation of writers who learned about writing through the stories of Alice Munro, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver, among others. Choosing my favorite Munro book is a challenge—for decades I read them all over and over—but if I had to, I’d say it’s Dance of the Happy Shades.

No one understands better what it’s like to be an adolescent girl than Alice Munro, and no one is more gifted at portraying it, particularly in the stories “An Ounce of Cure” and “Red Dress—1946,” with such generous characterizations and courageous honesty.

In All the Light We Cannot See I got lost immediately in The Museum of Natural History in Paris, a cathedral to science, where young Marie-Laure’s father works.

We follow Marie-Laure and her father as they escape the Nazis in Paris, fleeing from there to St. Malo on the coast of France. Meanwhile, Werner, growing up in Germany, uses his skill in working with radios to escape the brutality of coal mining, but ends up in an even more brutal situation: bringing about casualties in a war he doesn’t believe in. Their stories converge in St. Malo, along with those of Marie-Laure’s great uncle and a dying Nazi officer, in a novel both compelling and beautiful.