IN MY LIBRARY
A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City by Anonymous
This was written by a woman who endured the Russian occupation in Berlin at the end of the war. I was born in Germany and was researching a World War II novel when I found this . . . Women tend to read women and men read men, but this book was as harrowing and powerful as any history of war I came across.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Given where we are now in America, with our obsession with youth and our denial of death, this [1890 book] is more relevant than all the postmodern novels put together. Nothing beats Oscar Wilde at the top of his game. And it has some of his best one-liners: “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
Brutal Journey by Paul Schneider
This comes from the diary of Cabeza de Vaca, one of four survivors, out of 400, of the Narvaez Expedition of 1528, who made their way from Florida to Mexico. [It’s about] the hubris of Christians who planted their flag and how completely humbled they were by the native people of the New World. I read it in two hours flat!
Devil’s-a-Walkin’ by Stanley Nelson
Stanley Nelson is the reporter who worked for years on the murders that occurred in the 1960s by a splinter cell of the KKK. Stanley began solving these cold cases, and the FBI came to him! A lot of his work provided the basis for [my] trilogy. These weren’t prominent people — just regular black folks, brutally murdered for no good reason, whose cases lay dormant for years.
A brush with death can change your life. When a 2011 car crash left Greg Iles in a coma for a week with a torn aorta and a lost right leg, the best-selling writer told The Post, “I decided I’d throw all commercial concerns aside and deal with race and family in the South the way it should be done.” The result? His “Natchez Burning” trilogy, which concludes with “Mississippi Blood,” out now. It came from realizing “you don’t have forever to say the things you need to say.” Here’s what’s in his library. — BarbaraHoffman