10 Sexy, Yummy Reads

Guaranteed to be 100% fat-free and smoking hot, these books will make your mouth water and your knees go weak without making you fat or getting you pregnant. Listed below (in no particular order) are my current students’ favorite creative nonfiction reads.

Eddy really, really enthusiastically recommends God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. He insists that it's not a manual on how to be an atheist, but rather a sort of spiritual memoir with a sociohistorical agenda. Eddy was terribly sick while he was ranting, so we don't know how much of what he said was true and how much Dayquil, but he says he has had wonderful fights about this book and that it has made him very popular at our Catholic institution.

In a completely unrehearsed stroke of cosmic genius, Belinda recommends Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology by Elizabeth A. Johnson, which she is currently reading for one of her classes. I suggest reading both of these recommendations back to back, of course.

Several of my students are big fans of Edwidge Danticat. Most notably, they recommend the memoir Brother I'm Dying, in which she chronicles her family's struggles to reunite after first her father, then her mother emigrate from Haiti to the United States. Everyone's also very excited about Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, the 2010 collection of essays originating from the Toni Morrison lecture series at Princeton.

Michael recommends pretty much anything written by Rick Reilly, but most especially Hate Mail from Cheerleaders and Other Adventures from the Life of Reilly, a collection of pieces by the award-winning Sports Illustrated writer that Michael says is truly funny. He also recommends We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang--The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnamby Harold G. Moor and Joseph L. Galloway. Now a major motion picture, the book tells the story of the crucial November 1965 battle. Mr. Action also likes Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer so much he has read it "multiple times." The book tells the story of the disastrous May 1996 Mt. Everest climb in which five people died.

For those of you considering medicine as a backup to your writing, Chip recommends Becoming a Doctor: From Student to Specialist, Doctor-Writers Share Their Experiences, a collection of both funny and serious real-life accounts of med-school memoirs.

Tiffany recommends Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Koreaby Barbara Demick, a book which exposes the horrible deprivation of the lives of people in North Korea after WWII through the stories of six defectors. Tiffany calls it a real eye-opener, a book that made her think about her own life and what it would be like to live in such an oppressive regime, one clouded by such silence that we know next to nothing about it.

Yazmin recommends Kitchen Confidentialby Anthony Bourdain, the cynical, chain-smoking, weirdly attractive host of the Travel Channel's No Reservations. Ruminating on the seedy side of the culinary world, this book is half memoir, half restaurant exposé. Perhaps this is the only recommendation that truly delivers the promise of this post's teasing title.

So there you have it, folks. Let me hear no more about how you don't know what to read, or whose recommendation to trust, or how you don't have time to find out what to read, or where to get it, for that matter, since all the links above will take you directly to each book's Amazon page. From the sacred to the profane, these 10 books offer a wide spectrum of choice from the tastemakers of tomorrow. There's just no excuse, people. Go get yourself a hot new book.