The American Spectator

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Sink happily into Joseph Pearce's Literary Converts and some of the best prose of the 20th century. It includes T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ronald Knox, Edith Sitwell, Roy Campbell, Dorothy Sayers.... Himself a master of the art, Pearce probes the religious journeys of these great men and women. The temptation is to take the book in one gulp. Don't.

Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time blasts the age-old myth that Richard III is evil personified. A short explosive book, every chapter unravels a mystery and rights a terrible wrong.

Patricia Buckley Bozell resides in Washington, D.C.

Priscilla L. Buckley

The most fascinating book I've read all year is April 1865: The Month That Saved America by Jay Winik. Both masterfully researched and masterly written.

The most provocative was Futuring: The Exploration of the Future by Edward Cornish, editor of The Futurist magazine, and, I am happy to say, a former buddy of mine at United Press in Paris in the mid-1950s. It causes you to think about what's ahead for us all in a new and different way.

Priscilla L. Buckley is the former managing editor of National Review and the author of Living It Up With National Review: A Memoir.

Roger Ebert

Right now I am amazed by the works of Cormac McCarthy, particularly Blood Meridian and Suttree, which have the verbal complexity of poetry and are such a tactile reading experience that on reaching the last page of Blood Meridian I simply started again.

The best novel of the last decade is A Fine Balance, a Dickensian story of poverty in India, by Rohinton Mistry.

Another great novel about India is Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet, which must be included among the books of a lifetime.

Of course, I keep something by Balzac and Simenon on standby at all times.

Roger Ebert is a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and co-host of Ebert and Roeper.

John S. Gardner

India has over a billion people, and the country is arguably America's best friend among the rising powers of the developing world. Knowing that others will cover the more obvious suggestions in American and European history, I propose several books to increase one's knowledge of this fascinating country.

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