David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (Dover, $3.50). This is Dickens at his funniest and most soulful, and the genius of the minor characters (Micawber, Uriah Heep, Peggoty, Betsey Trotwood) is both a dazzling pleasure and completely intimidating, if you've ever had any desire to write fiction.
Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris (Penguin, $17). Harris' brilliantly researched study of the five films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1968, following a pivotal year in Hollywood history, is my favorite book about cinema. It's enormous fun to read but also extremely accomplished: Harris understands the collaborative and random nature of the business better than anyone else I've come across.
Father and Son by Edmund Gosse (Oxford, $15). A misery memoir, perhaps the first, about the author's coming-of-age in a strict evangelical Victorian household. Father and Son is perceptive, wise, occasionally comic, and heartbreaking — even if Gosse is now believed by biographers to have stretched the truth a bit.
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What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey (Oxford, $18). A brilliant and important little book — by an Oxford English professor, no less — about taste, high culture, objective artistic worth, and the absurd arguments made to prop the whole teetering edifice up. Carey has an extraordinary mind, and a wicked wit, and it's hard to read this book and end up feeling the same about what you value and why.
Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Scribner, $17). Random Family follows two young Bronx, N.Y., women as they struggle over a decade with men, kids, drugs, poverty, and, very occasionally, money. It's an astonishing, and astonishingly patient, piece of reportage; it's also an important book about contemporary America, and it grips like a thriller.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (Ecco, $26). Fountain's achingly sympathetic, funny, and imaginative novel is a book about Iraq and the soldiers fighting there, and it's set almost entirely within a Texas football stadium. It's the best novel I've read this year.
— Nick Hornby is a British novelist, essayist, and screenwriter best known for his novels High Fidelity, About A Boy, and Fever Pitch.
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Home Depots are the new epicenters of ICE raidsIn the Spotlight The chain has not provided many comments on the ongoing raids
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Why does Trump keep interfering in the NYC mayoral race?Today's Big Question The president has seemingly taken an outsized interest in his hometown elections, but are his efforts to block Zohran Mamdani about political expediency or something deeper?
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The pros and cons of banning cellphones in classroomsPros and cons The devices could be major distractions
