Amanda Foreman

Dr. Amanda Foreman is the author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (Random House, $16), and is working on Our American Cousins: The British Volunteers of the Civil War. Here she lists her six favorite “genre-breakers.”

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (Random House, $6). Sometimes the simplest tales are the most profound. The Phantom is a children’s book that speaks to adults, a fantasy book that relies on logic, and a cautionary tale that contains the secret to a good life.

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (out of print). In a distant future where happiness is a right for every citizen, Banks shows that the end of history does not necessarily mean the end of pain. The Player of Games is what critics term “space opera” because of its vast complexity, although no opera ever moved at such a pace.

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Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (Hougton Mifflin, $20). Everyone has a book that he or she can reread without impatience. This is mine. LOTR did not exactly break the genre so much as create it.

Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes (Vintage Books, $14). This book—a collection of essays that brilliantly interweave Holmes’ own experiences as a biographer with those of his subjects—explained to me the meaning of biography. I use it to teach undergraduates, and it is the one I recommend to any budding biographer. Holmes reinvented the genre with this book, and I know I owe a debt to him in my own work.

The Second World War: A Complete History by Martin Gilbert (Henry Holt, $24). What differentiates Gilbert’s study from the thousands of other books about W.W. II is his ability to switch between the broad sweep of politics and warfare, and the minutiae of individual lives as ordinary people come face to face with the monstrosity of Nazi Germany.

The Pax Britannica Trilogy by Jan Morris (out of print). This affectionate but not nostalgic study of the British empire could not be written today. Political pieties, the decline of narrative, and publishers’ dislike of multivolume works have made such an undertaking impossible. But more than any other writer, Jan Morris—or James Morris, as he then was—revealed to me the grandeur and heartbreak of the past.