You’ll Never Have Nothing to Read Again

“Nothing can compete with the shimmering immediacy of now,” grumps David Carr: well, if we must access Bill Hader’s thorough and fairly excellent list of book recommendations via the internet, so be it:

What are your literary guilty pleasures? Do you have a favorite genre?

I don’t believe in the term “guilty pleasure,” because it implies I should feel ashamed for liking something. A real guilty pleasure would be, I don’t know, taking gratification in some stranger’s ghastly death or something — which I guess I do enjoy, because I read a ton of true crime. So, O.K., O.K., I have a guilty pleasure, and it’s true crime. […] Good true-crime books: David Simon’s “Homicide”; “In Cold Blood” (obviously); “Columbine,” by Dave Cullen; “Under the Banner of Heaven,” by Jon Krakauer; “The Devil in the White City,” by Erik Larson; “In Broad Daylight,” by Harry N. MacLean; “Shot in the Heart,” by Mikal Gilmore; “A Wilderness of Error,” by Errol Morris.

Elsewhere, of course, the New Yorker’s just unpaywalled their archive from 2007 on. Longform’s got 25 recommendations culled from these new releases (my favorites from this list, shimmering immediately, are Tad Friend’s “Crowded House” and John Colapinto’s “The Interpreter”), and I am most excited personally to reread Sarah Payne Stuart’s gorgeous, quiet “Pilgrim Mothers” and Atul Gawande’s masterpiece of nightmare “The Itch.”