Fans of Sara Gruen’s “Water for Elephants,” “Riding Lessons” and “Ape House” no doubt recognize an animal lover when they read one.
And they’re not mistaken: This writer shares her Asheville, NC, digs with dogs, cats, horses, birds and a goat (plus husband and sons).
Her new book, “At the Water’s Edge,” deals with another species entirely: “My longstanding love affair with the Scottish Highlands was rekindled by a random news article about the Loch Ness Monster,” Gruen tells The Post.
The daughter of musicians, she says she was forced to play the violin. She persuaded her parents to let her practice in their library, where she closed the door, played a tape of her doing scales — and read instead.
Here’s what’s in her library:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
This is a raunchy, raucous, brilliant novel about a fat, Dominican “lovesick ghetto nerd” living in New Jersey who dreams of writing science fiction and finding love. Alas, he is living under a “fukú americanus”— a curse of doom. I have never loved footnotes so much in all my life.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
This book is so brilliant, it intimidates me. If I hadn’t met Martel at an author’s festival, I might not have admitted I’m a writer. It’s gorgeous and filled with philosophical questions, but the end was so unexpected, it felt like a sucker punch to the gut. As with the footnotes in “Oscar Wao,” it helps to read the extraneous material, in this case, the Author’s Note.
Heap House by Edward Carey
Tim Burton meets Dickens meets Poe in this delightfully gothic first installment of the Iremonger Trilogy. Young Clod Iremonger and his family live in “The Heaps,” a shifting, mutable abode of lost and discarded items that occasionally swallows people whole. Suspense, horror and cliffhangers abound.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
I first read this when I decided to read my way through my parents’ entire library (which is how I came to read Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward” when I was 12). Heller’s absurdist, contradictory narrative is at once accessible, entertaining and serious. Its convoluted chronology brilliantly reflects the bureaucratic mess that is the focus of the title.