Call them buttonhole books, the ones you urge passionately on friends, colleagues and passersby. All readers have them -- and so do writers. This summer, NPR.org talks with authors about their favorite buttonhole books in the weekly series "You Must Read This."
The greatest novel about World War I was written by a self-fabulating, alcoholic Jew who loved the Habsburg empire. Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March, had a flair like nobody else for large-scale lying. Roth spent his days and nights in the cafés of Paris and Berlin, where he wrote, drank, smoked, and traded witticisms with fellow emigrés. His wife went mad and he lost hope, but he kept on writing. In Paris and Berlin he lived out of three suitcases, moving from hotel to hotel. He finally drank himself to death shortly before the Nazis invaded Poland.
