I recently asked ’90s, “What’s the best (or most impactful or memorable) book you’ve read during the last three years?” Here is Part I of your responses. Lauren Waller Smith: “Florida by Lauren Groff.” Paul Haffner: “Last year I re-read Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, and it just blew me away. It’s a masterpiece (and funny as hell). Honorable mention goes to Grandma Gatewood’s Walk by Ben Montgomery—a true story of a grandmother who leaves home to walk the Appalachian Trail on her own with no one knowing—and in tennis shoes.”

Mike Lindgren: “The Doctor of Aleppo by my former roommate Dan Mayland was pretty durn good!” Deborah Cornavaca: “New Power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, which I read as I began working for the governor of New Jersey. A great book is a great book. A really memorable book is a great book read at the right time.” Kyrie Robinson: “Nonfiction, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson; fiction, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.” Heather Block: “Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Three times because you have to.” Jonathan Sullivan: “Most recently The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, Educated by Tara Westover, Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates are showing me how different the world looks when viewed through the eyes of Black people and the rural poor and helping me understand why we are in this moment as a society. The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu has been mind-expanding in completely different ways and a welcome escape when the day-to-day is too much.”

Andrew Latimer: “The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. Although, annoyingly, I will also tell you the best-written book I have read during the last few years is Middlemarch by George Eliot—also the funniest! And the book that moved me the most was All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.” Wendy Richmond: “Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, also Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.” Pamela Chandran: “Recently, during a hot, dry L.A. summer, I read The Overstory by Richard Powers (which is, to unfairly simplify it, about the interconnectedness of trees and humans and how humans need trees and how trees very much do not need humans). I would wake up very early and read the book outside on our front porch in the quiet and the growing light. While we have three lovely palms in the front, we do not have the broad-trunked, wide-canopied trees that undergird the book. The book left me with a feeling of an absence. I once again felt the regret of not spending enough time outdoors when I was at Dartmouth, and it only now occurs to me that the book may have played a subconscious role in our decision to move to the Pacific Northwest next month.” Michael Keller: “Telegraph Road by Michael Chabon. Nobody writes like he does. His storytelling is not always perfect, but his use of language is sublime.”

—Rob Crawford, 22 Black Oak Road, Weston, MA 02493; crawdaddy37@gmail.com