A Year in Reading: Jean Hanff Korelitz

According to the elves at Goodreads, I’ve read 70 books so far this year, a feat made possible by the fact that I finally figured out how to get New York Public Library audiobooks onto my iPhone. Many were…just fine. Others had me pushing the fast forward button like a post-operative patient with a morphine drip. A few, like Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni, were serendipitous discoveries. I was underwhelmed by one series of novels that writer friends have been urging me to read for years, but I was also forced to rethink my Hands-Off-Classic-Literature! position by Jo Baker’s Longbourn, which was just wonderful. (Also by the recently televised Death Comes to Pemberley, but I don’t suppose that counts…). Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall lived up to its ecstatic reputation (though I’m not sure I’d have been able to follow the action if I hadn’t recently watched The Tudors on television…). I decided to read Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton biography in anticipation of The Public Theater’s coming tour de force, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (which I was lucky enough to see in workshop), so when I go back to see it another 10 times I’ll know more about the man’s life and times. My all-around picks for the year? Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, a scrupulously researched dissection of the cult. (Yes, cult. What, you thought I was going to call it a “religion”?) And John Searles’s Help for the Haunted, a beautiful novel about the natural — rather than the supernatural — kind of haunting. Finally: praise for Elizabeth Alexander’s memoir, The Light of the World, a meditation on grief and life, which will be published in April 2015.

Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of five novels, including You Should Have Known, Admission, and The White Rose. She lives in New York City and is the founder of Book the Writer, a service that brings authors and book groups together.