5 Best Books to Share With Friends

Some books just beg to be shared with friends. Glen Weldon, writing for NPR, offers his favorites in that category from 2009:

• Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo: Director Werner Herzog writes movingly about his motives for making the famously grueling 1982 movie, in which the hero pulls a real steamship over a real mountain to a remote Peruvian village.
• Asterios Polyp: It's about a pompous architect who changes his world view. "David Mazzucchelli's boldly ambitious, boundary-pushing graphic novel is remarkable for the way it synthesizes word and image to craft a new kind of storytelling."

• The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis: Too few people know about Davis, whose stories are "spare" but never "slight." To read them "is to turn her crystalline prose over in your mind and allow its flashes of mordant wit to glitter and dazzle."
• The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy and the History of Comic Book Heroines: This fun and thoughtful exploration of the topic by Mike Madrid is "long overdue."
• Everything Matters!: A "beautiful, sad and haunting" novel by Ron Currie Jr. about a genius who learns when the world is going to end and tries to save it.

(More books stories.)