A Life in Books: Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan, author of National Book Award finalist "Look at Me" and, more recently, "The Keep," finds that raising two sons enhances her reading: "it's delicious to have an excuse to revisit the books" she read as a child.

My Five Most Important Books

• "Tristram Shandy" by Laurence Sterne. Even though it was one of the first novels written in English, much of what we credit to modernism is in this book.
• "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison. It manages to be historically and politically engaged, and also about invisibility as an idea.
• "Transit of Venus" by Shirley Hazzard.In reading it, I saw my own life differently.
• "House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton. It gets at the question of a woman's relationship to her physical appearance.
• "The Image" by Daniel Boorstin. As we begin to feel our experience is artificial, we crave something real. Could there be a better description of reality TV?

An Important Book you haven't read: "The Man Without Qualities" by Robert Musil. It's still in plastic, in a beautiful box set. I feel so bad about it; what can I say? I'll get there eventually.

A book you want your kids to read: "Little House on the Prairie." I really want them to love the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, because they were important to me, but I'm worried they won't because they're boys.

© 2007