Two shelves of favorites.

Two shelves hold my 32 favorite books. As hard as it was to choose them, here are my ten favorites.

The Reckoning

By David Halberstam

In this nonfiction book, Halberstam traces the rise of the Japanese auto industry after World War II. He shows why, particularly in Detroit, American automakers have lost their niche and why Asian automakers have taken over the market. Although it's more than 700 pages long, the book was hard to put down.

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Mallory's Oracle

By Carol O'Connell

This first book in the Kathleen Mallory series is a mystery-within-a-mystery set in New York City. Mallory, a cop, has a barely repressed crooked streak. While she tries to solve her adoptive father's murder, we start to ask questions about her background before she was taken in by her adoptive family. It took me about five books before I discovered the whole story, but Mallory's Oracle is a riveting start.

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Women of the Silk

By Gail Tsukiyama

When a friend recommended this remarkable book, I quickly became a fan of the author. The novel opens in China in 1929 and portrays the lives of the girls who have left their farms to work in the silk sweat shops from dawn to dusk. I saw what the "silk work" was all about and, more important, how workers living together cared for and strengthened each other.

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Snow in August

By Pete Hamill

Set in the slums of 1947 Brooklyn, this novel chronicles the bond between 11-year-old Michael Devlin, an Irish Catholic, and the elderly Rabbi Jacob Hirsch. This story reveals the prejudices of the time--and the friendship between Michael and the rabbi despite the backlash from Michael's Christian pals.

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The Late George Apley

By John P. Marquand

* PULITZER PRIZE

In this often satirical look at Boston society between 1866 and 1933, one family and its deceased patriarch (George Apley) navigate through a very privileged, traditional Boston. As a Bostonian myself, I really enjoyed this novel.

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Absolute Rage

By Robert K. Tanenbaum

In the Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi mystery series, New York DA Butch Karp is a strange sort: his wife, Marlene Ciampi, changes profession from book to book; their daughter Lucy is a language savant; and a mysterious Vietnamese man watches over the children, including twin boys. This 14th installment of the series takes place in a West Virginia coal town, where Karp must save his family from a corrupt union. The action is riveting, the setting gritty. All in all, a true page-turner.

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The Good Children

By Kate Wilhelm

Wilhelm is known for her science fiction and mysteries. This novel, more of a psychological thriller, falls into neither genre. A pageturner, it involves four children, a promise, a death--and a terrible cover-up.

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What Went Wrong?

The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East

By Bernard Lewis

I knew very little about Middle Eastern history until I read this book, which explores Islam during the Middle Ages, when the religion flourished. It is the most enlightening work I have read about Muslims, their belief systems, and their evolution as a people. A must-read for understanding the effect of Islam on the Middle East.

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Vanishing Act

By Thomas Perry

In this installment of the Jane Whitefield series, Whitefield is an American Indian with an unusual job: she helps people disappear from the people who want them dead. Action abounds in Vanishing Act, and I found Whitefield's methods for helping people vanish fascinating. When she needs to disappear because baddies want her dead, she can pull that off, too. I wish there were more books in this series.

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Judgment Ridge

The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders

By Dick Lehr and Mitchell Zuckoff

This book is a real winner. The murder of two Dart-mouth professors rocked the community and made headlines for months, especially after the killers were apprehended. Lehr and Zukoff, Boston Globe reporters, dug deeper than the cursory news stories to examine the lives of the killers (two teenage boys from an adjacent town), the dynamics of the towns, and the families and forces that may have turned the boys into murderers.

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Annemarie Thomas lives in Boston.