Novelists Pick Books to Inspire, Uplift, and Escape

Alice Munro has been my favourite writer ever since I first read a collection of her stories almost 30 years ago, when I was still a teenager. Periodically, something in life reminds me of one of her stories, and I reread it. When I do, I’m freshly struck by the richness of her plots and the complexity of her characters, their emotions, and their relationships with each other. Although her work isn’t uplifting per se, its wisdom is somehow inherently reassuring to me. More than once, I’ve thought: I bet if I started each day by reading an Alice Munro story instead of looking at Twitter, I’d be so much better off. Full disclosure: I haven’t. But maybe I finally will. In the meantime, no hour of the day is wrong for reading a Munro story, and no Munro story is the wrong one. But why not start with Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage?