Robert Rosen

Shepherd is a Website that works closely with authors in an effort to guide readers to good books. Last year I gave them a list of five books that inspired me to write. You can see the list here.

This year they wanted to know the three best books I read in 2023. It was an easy question, and three books sprang to mind: The Overstory by Richard Powers, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, an iconic author I've somehow managed to avoid reading until now.

Click here to peruse the list and see my reasons for chosing those books. Perhaps it will inspire you to pick up one of my books or another book you hadn't considered reading.

If you're looking for even more choices, here's Shepherd's list of The 100 Best Books of 2023.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

Shepherd, a new Website that helps people discover their next great read, asked me to put together a list of books that were important to me, and explain why. This was a way to make readers aware of my latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, which I describe as "darkly comic" and "an unsentimental journey through mid-century Flatbush, where Auschwitz survivors and WWII vets lived side by side and the war lingered like a mass hallucination."

I called the list "The best memoirs, essays, and fiction that inspired me to write." It's also a list of books that helped me find my own voice. The most difficult part of putting the list together was limiting it to five books. Those five classics, which you can see above, were written by giants of American literature: Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Joseph Heller, who was one of my creative writing instructors at City College.

If I could have added a sixth book, it would have been Miller's Black Spring, because A Brooklyn Memoir is, in part, an homage to Miller's journey out of the "damp grime of his Brooklyn youth."

Been there.

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A Brooklyn Memoir is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.