Mark endorses Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

We also mention:

• Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus
• Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be.
• Kate Beaton’s Hark a Vagrant.
• Charlotte Gill’s Eating Dirt
• Dani Couture’s Algoma
• Adam Gopnik’s Winter: Five Windows On The Season
• Douglas Coupland’s and Graham Roumieu’s Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People
• Neal Stephenson’s Reamde
• “The Mongoliad” By Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and Friends from Subutai
• Michael Crichton’s Airframe
• Michael Lewis’ Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
• Michael Lewis’ Big Short
• Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest
• Sebastian Junger’s War
• Michael Lewis’ It’s the Economy, Dummkopf! from Vanity Fair
• Mark Bowden’s Worm: The First Digital World War
• Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
• Haruki Murakami’s Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
• The Third Reich: A Novel by Roberto Bolaño
• All-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books at Time.com
• Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood
• Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast
• Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking
• The September Issue — the movie.
• Tom Wolfe and Martin Amis
• Joan Didion’s Blue Nights