Mike Tharp: J.D. Salinger and other favorites

Two events happened this week to make me think of books.

They're never far from mind -- I read two or three a week.

But these events reminded me what an impact books can make on our lives.

The first event was the death of J.D. Salinger at 91. His novel, "Catcher in the Rye," has sold 60 million copies since it was published in 1951. Every generation since then has read it.

Jack Haskins, our Old Trainer, e-mailed that when he read it as a teenager, the experience was "electrifying." Same for me and millions of others.

The second event was that Dr. Don Ball brought by a copy of his book, "Follow the Bouncing Ball," self-published in 2008. The Catheys Valley resident tells his life story, and I can't wait to read it. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II and nearly ditched his plane in the North Atlantic.

Thanks, Don.

So, thinking of books, in no special order, here are some of my favorite authors. If they share one common trait, it's that you want to re-read them. I've stuck to contemporary writers of fiction and excluded such icons as Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, since you already know a lot about them.

John le Carre: His George Smiley spy novels rank with Graham Greene's "entertainments" as tours de force into the mindset of espionage. Many times, when confounded and confused by life's problems, I'll pick up one of his novels again and settle into a Zen state of being manipulated by a master storyteller. Both he and Greene deserve a Nobel Prize for Literature, but neither will ever sway the Swedish judges.

Michael Connelly: A onetime L.A. Times cop-shop reporter, he's spawned a devoted following with his intensely driven novels about LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch. Unlike so many of today's novelists, Connelly specializes in emotionally true plots and characters. His novels could be called "whydunnits" since they reveal so much inner motivation. He's the one author I'll buy new, since I can't wait to dissolve inside the pages.

Elmore Leonard: He writes dialogue and eight-word descriptions that make you feel as if you're watching a movie. And it's no accident that many of his crime novels have been made into films.

Martin Cruz Smith: His Arkady Renko novels provide spare, bleak points of view for his Russian investigator. You're transported from Moscow to the hold of a Soviet fishing trawler in the Arctic Sea to the radioactive ruins of Chernobyl. Arkady's existential anguish is balanced by his dry wit.

Donald Westlake: He died last year, but not before writing dozens of comic "caper" novels, including thrillers under the pseudonym of Richard Stark. He captures the absurdity of the criminal mind and makes you smile with his plays on words and outrageous but credible characters.

Robert B. Parker: He died earlier this year, after memorializing in 40 or more novels a one-name Boston private eye named Spenser. His amour in the books, Susan Silverman, once called him "a big John Keats." And he is. I read Spenser novels like eating M & Ms.

Elmer Kelton: He also died last year. The former Texas editor of "Sheep and Goat Management" wrote a series of westerns that are the fictional equivalent of a John Ford/John Wayne film.

Henning Mankell: A Swede whose Kurt Wallander novels pit a small-town cop against an array of international events that somehow find their way to Ystad. We learn about globalization through crimes committed in rural Sweden.

Donna Leon: Guido Brunetti is her Venice-based police investigator. Like Mankell, the policeman often finds himself in the throes of international crimes. Brunetti is as single-minded as Harry Bosch, but Leon always finds ways to take him home to his professor wife, Paola, and their two kids. I always make spaghetti when I read her books.