Best books…chosen by Daniel Wallace

Alabama native Daniel Wallace is the author of eight novels, including Big Fish, the 1998 best-seller adapted into a Tim Burton film. Wallace’s memoir This Isn’t Going to End Well, about his brother-in-law and mentor, is now out in paperback.

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino (1957). Cosimo, an 18th-century Italian nobleman, rebels as a boy one day by climbing into a tree and telling his parents he will never come down. And he doesn’t—not for the rest of the novel or his life. Calvino makes this so much fun and utterly believable. Even Voltaire makes an appearance.

The Dolphin People by Torsten Krol (2006). I have never met anyone else who has read this novel. I don’t know if it’s still in print. I don’t even know who wrote it; the author’s name is probably a pseudonym. A family’s plane crashes in the Amazon and they’re captured by a Stone Age tribe that believes the strange-looking foreigners are freshwater dolphins in human form. See? Why isn’t this on everyone’s bedside table?

Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell (1959, 1969). It’s a shame how, when writers die, their books—even when they stay in print—fade away, backlisted, going largely unread by new generations of readers. These two novels are glorious evocations of a husband and a wife, and mid-century America, told in tiny chapters. I love tiny chapters.

Airships by Barry Hannah (1978). Maybe not the whole book, but the first story, “Water Liars,” sums up the South and Southern literature in six pages or so. The last line of that story, “We were both crucified by the truth,” is as close to a ragged perfection as anyone is likely to get.

The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham (2008). This is nonfiction, in which Wickersham tries to make sense of her father’s suicide by “arranging” it, scene by scene, alphabetically. It’s hard and sometimes impossible to make sense of suicide, but this book is luminous, and in that light we come away with heartbreaking understanding.

The Nealy Way of Knowledge by William Nealy (2000). A compendium of cartoons 20 years in the making, many of them satirizing Nealy’s favorite subject: adrenaline sports. In addition to being my brother-in-law, William was a cartographer, author of 10 books, boater, my mentor, the subject of my most recent book, and a suicide.