Books like Fergus — picked by fans

Novelist Peter Viertel, an uncredited screenplay contributor to three John Huston-directed movies, wrote one of the great Hollywood-adjacent novels in this 1953 classic backgrounded by the preproduction of a fictionalized film. Hint: it’s transparently Huston’s The African Queen and the "John Wilson" character is clearly John Huston himself. The book dramatizes the hell screenwriter Peter Verill (Viertel, of course) endures when the bigger-than-life director becomes more obsessed with hunting and killing a majestic elephant than in shooting the film he’s been sent to make. 

Funny, marvelously readable, it's also rich with wry and knowing portraits of characters based upon Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and producer Sam Spiegel, the latter of whom says of Wilson/Huston: “In a well-ordered society, he’d be in a straitjacket now.” Clint Eastwood directed and starred in a 1990 movie version. Skip that, watch The African Queen, then read this instead.

Much as I enjoyed the film based on this novella by Stephen King (which I now understand is a standalone book—I read it as part of a story collection long ago), I enjoyed the novella more.

Why? Because of its extraordinarily likeable narrative voice, which has caused people worldwide to find themselves rooting for its narrator. How can you not want to know what’ll happen next to someone so candid and down-to-earth—who has experienced homicide and love so intensely? Especially when he wants intimacy yet also feels threatened by it.

In fact, just after I finished reading the Shawshank novella, I vowed to write a novel about someone in NYC who exuded those same attributes: candor, humility, and understated yet solid wisdom about murder and affairs of the heart. And after several years of writing with this goal, I finally tapped into the voice of Matt Connell, the narrator of… show more.

Cronenberg’s 1996 movie adaptation (not the one that won many Oscars and is bad) captures Ballard’s sensual mechanical fetishism and apocalyptic consumerism perfectly. It is a 120-minute-long sex scene in a carousel of mangled metal. It is probably the best adaptation of prose to film I can think of, which is bolstered by the sheer strength of the book itself. Crash (again, not the 2006 one, the car crash sex one) is by far Cronenberg’s horniest feature, and that’s saying something. Uh. I didn’t mean to just talk about the movie. I should probably talk about the book. The book is very good. I’m deathly afraid of car accidents, and reading about them through Ballard’s dreamy, eroticized lens is a capital-E Experience. Truly one of my favorites.

This book includes so many of my favorite things: an inn on the coast of Italy, a young innkeeper with outsized dreams, movie stars, an almost-romance, and a chance for rekindled love.

I clung to every page as the story moved back and forth from the 1960s to the present day, from the set of Cleopatra in Rome to Hollywood backlots. This book is like a vacation full of interesting people you want to know better, the kind of vacation you never want to end.

I read this novel just as I was starting to write in earnest, and before I fully understood how hard it is to pull off a feat of complex storytelling as elegantly as Walter does in this novel. It’s a marvel.

I love a book that weaves fiction into historical events. The Cypress Hills are on the Canadian side of the international border where it cuts through the North American central plain. This was a gathering place for First Nations and Metis people, but the area also attracted American whisky traders and wolf hunters. The reasons for the massacre that occurred in 1873 are disputed, but fifty years later, the last living survivor, by then a grizzled bit player in Hollywood, tells his story to a young screenwriter.

A book I’d wanted to read for a long time, but it wasn’t until later in life I was able to get it. When I was just on the early stages of my writing career, my now longtime friend, Marty, said he had a spare copy of Cabal laying around and offered to send it to me. Marty was my writing mentor at the time as he’d been writing horror for many years previous, and his work is inspiring. So, knowing I was getting a book in the mail from my mentor, to whom I hadn’t met in person yet, was very exciting. The book itself was a tired secondhand copy (which I was told it was) yet this gave it more special meaning. Even the cover was a little torn and it was a pocket edition. So, I sat back with this little book, which I still have as… show more.

I was very much taken with this novel’s blend of romance, mystery, and exploration of whether you can ever go home again. Raddall doesn’t get much mention and is largely remembered for his other novels when he does. That’s a shame.

This 1956 work stands up very well against more recent works. It features unadorned yet persuasive prose that many modern writers can only wish for. Raddall quite evidently intended it as a loving, almost lyrical, description of rural Nova Scotia. He succeeded.

Canadian immigration policy has always been a subject of fierce political and public debate and in this authoritative work Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock examine the interests, ideas, institutions, and rhetoric that have shaped it. The authors begin their study in the pre-Confederation period and interpret major developments in the evolution of Canadian immigration policy. Among the shameful episodes they describe are the deportations of the First World War and Great Depression and the uprooting and internment of Japanese Canadians after Pearl Harbour.

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.

Sometimes I want a dense, fascinating world to unpack, and sometimes I want to open a book and have it punch me in the face with no-holds-barred action and adventure.

The main character of Let Sleeping Gods Lie is Porter Rockwell – a real person from the history of Utah Territory and the Old West. But this story takes place where, once again, legends of the area have come to life and evil has real, lethal fangs. It’s like a spaghetti western meets Die Hard meets a D&D campaign – which pushes every single one of my buttons.

This one has a hero that refuses to be stopped, action that isn’t afraid of pushing expectations, and an unabashed love of over-the-top set pieces that made me giggle in delight.