Richard Schickel's 5 favorite books

The esteemed film critic recommends essays by David Foster Wallace, a Henry James bio, and the requisite "Hollywood novel"

Unsurprisingly, the film critic Richard Schickel also has emphatic opinions when it comes to recommending books.
(Image credit: 2010 Patricia Williams)

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (Back Bay, $15). The essay is my favorite form, and this collection, which features a masterly piece on dictionaries as well as a report on a porn convention in Las Vegas, is profoundly funny, obsessively detailed, and full of quirky wisdom. The vote on Wallace as a novelist is still out, I think, but I’m betting he will achieve immortality as one of the great reflective writers of our times.

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes (Vintage, $16). Based on the true story of how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle rescued an Anglo-Indian barrister falsely accused of a heinous crime, Barnes’s novel is a study both of marvelously contrasting characters and of turn-of-the-century English society. It’s a massive book that reads with the addictive quickness of a detective story, which it partly is. Barnes is one of our deftest and most appealing writers.

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