Lit stars pick their favorite books

1. Stephenie Meyer

Some of the Twilight author’s picks are unsurprising: The Book of Mormon makes the cut, along with novels focusing on plucky young heroines, like Jane Eyre, Little Women, and Pride and Prejudice. The wild card is Ararat, a dark, confessional examination of a grieving family by Pulitzer-winning poet Louise Glück.

2. Dave Eggers

”These are the books that crushed me, changed me when I first read them,” writes Eggers, whose new novel, A Hologram for the King, just earned a National Book Award nomination. He sometimes keeps copies of Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita next to him while he works on his own books.

3. Michael Chabon

”My reading diet has always been from all major food groups in the pyramid,” the Telegraph Avenue author recently told EW. Indeed, Chabon’s favorite authors run the gamut from sci-fi (Ursula K. Le Guin) to horror (H.P. Lovecraft) to contemporary fiction (David Mitchell) to weighty classics (James Joyce).