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succumb.
    Neil Gaiman is the author of Coraline , The Graveyard Book , Odd and the Frost Giants , The Wolves in the Walls, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane , among other books.
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    The Gift of a Book
    When I was nine, I was given a set of slightly abridged classics for Christmas, and the same again when I was ten. My mother got them from a mail-order catalog. We weren’t a household that owned many books so it was a novelty to fill a whole shelf. There were plain cloth bindings and no pictures. (That’s just the way I like it; I make my own pictures, thanks.) That’s when I became enthralled by Robert Louis Stevenson, and failed to like Dickens, and met the Brontës. They were clever abridgments, too, as I came to realize when I read the full texts later. (Imagine, Jane Eyre without the embarrassing bits.)
    â€” Hilary Mantel
    Gender Outlaw , by Kate Bornstein. I got it for my birthday last year from my daughter after a family discussion on the merits of transgender surgery. It’s a fascinating and illuminating memoir by a transgender playwright.
    â€” Caroline Kennedy
    A copy of Libra , with a nice inscription, that Don DeLillo sent me in 1989. I must have asked my publisher to send him a finished copy of my first novel; there’s no way to explain the gift otherwise. But after spending my twenties working in near-total isolation and revering DeLillo from afar, I couldn’t believe that I had something signed to me in his own human hand. At some level, I still can’t believe it.
    â€” Jonathan Franzen
    I’m not currently teaching, but it’s a wonderful feeling when a former student gets a book published and sends me a copy. This happened last year with a woman named Bianca Zander, whose terrific first novel is called The Girl Below . It’s about a young woman who returns to London after a decade in New Zealand and confronts strange events from her past
    â€” Curtis Sittenfeld
    Peter the Great , by Robert Massie. It kicked off my obsession with Russian history.
    â€” Jeannette Walls
    Not long ago, I had an amusing experience meeting the author of a book I received as a gift nearly two decades ago—a book that in many ways changed my life. Almost twenty years ago, I was halfway through writing my first novel, Digital Fortress , when I was given a copy of Writing the Blockbuster Novel , by the legendary agent Albert Zuckerman. His book helped me complete my manuscript and get it published. Two months ago, by chance, I met Mr. Zuckerman for the first time. I gratefully told him that he had helped me write Digital Fortress . He jokingly replied that he planned to tell everyone that he had helped me write The Da Vinci Code .
    â€” Dan Brown
    On December 7, 1999, I left the bedside of my editor Faith Sale, just before she was removed from life support. We had been like sisters. Two hours later, Stephen King called and asked my husband, Lou, and me to meet him at his hotel room. It was his first public foray after being nearly killed by a van six months before. He gave me an advance reading copy of On Writing . A couple of years before, we had talked about the question no one asks us in interviews: language. He had been thinking of doing a book on writing, and I had said, “Do it.” He now asked me to look at the dedication. It was for me. We then went to see the premiere of The Green Mile , about a man on death row who can heal people, including those dying of cancer. That night was both enormously sad and gloriously uplifting.
    â€” Amy Tan
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Mary Higgins Clark

    What book is on your night stand now?
    Dante to Dead Man Walking : One Reader’s Journey Through the Christian Classics , by Raymond A. Schroth.
    When and where do you like to read?
    I like to read anywhere. I never go to a doctor or dentist without a book in my bag. At home I used to love to read in bed but fall asleep too easily. So my favorite spot is a roomy wing chair with a