The following list is made up of the books self felt most interested in reading after perusing the Wall Street Journal’s Holiday Books (2014) issue:
Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee (Knopf, 488 pages, $35)
Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald’s Booker-Prizewinning novel of 1979
Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History, by Rhonda K. Garelick (Random House, 570 pages, $35)
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, by John Lahr (Norton, 765 pages, $39.95)
Updike, by Adam Begley (Harper, 558 pages, $29.99)
The Novel: A Biography, by Michael Schmidt (Harvard University Press, 1,172 pages, $39.95)
The Age of the Vikings, by Anders Winroth (Princeton University Press, 320 pages, $29.95)
Napoleon: A Life, by Andrew Roberts (Viking, 926 pages, $45)
The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Knopf, 528 pages, $60)
The Mantle of Command: FDR at War 1941 – 1942, by Nigel Hamilton (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 514 pages, $30)
George Marshall: A Biography, by Debi and Irwin Unger (Harper, 352 pages, $35)
James Madison: A Life Reconsidered, by Lynne Cheney (Viking, 564 pages, $36)
Rendezvous with Art, conversations between the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford (Thames & Hudson, 248 pages, $35)
Frans Hals, by Seymour Silve (Phaidon, 400 pages, $125)
My Favorite Things, by Maira Kalman, a catalogue of 40 items in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (Harper Design, 160 pages, $35)
The Only Way to Cross, by John Maxtone-Graham
SS United States, by John Maxtone-Graham (Norton, 245 pages, $75)
Surf Craft, by Richard Kenvin (MIT University Press, 192 pages, $29.95)
The Art of Things, an anthology of essays on good design, edited by Dominique Forest (Abbeville, 592 pages, $150)
Globes: 400 Years of Exploration, Navigation and Power, by Sylvia Sumira (University of Chicago Press, 224 pages, $45)
Me, Myself, and Us, by Brian R. Little (Public Affairs, 288 pages, $26.99)
Hope: Entertainer of the Century, by Richard Zoglin (Simon & Schuster, 565 pages, $30)
The Beatles Lyrics, edited by Hunter Davies (Little, Brown, 376 pages, $35)
The John Lennon Letters, edited by Hunter Davies
Mephisto, by Klaus Mann