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Reading The Sun Also Rises as a 12-year-old, author Ben Mezrich realized he wanted to be just like the main character — an alcoholic. Not that he knew what that meant. The book also helped him find his true calling. Have you wanted to be like a character in a book? Tell us about it in the comments.

The 2004 earthquake in Indonesia was so powerful, it sped up Earth's rotation by a fraction of a second each day. That detail inspired Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel, which imagines a world in which Earth has inexplicably begun to slow down, leading to a series of calamitous changes.

April Bloomfield says she loves the smell of frying liver, the taste of a good thick steak shared with friends, and the crunch of a crispy fried pig's ear. Her new cookbook is a paean to meat — and from snout to tail, every part of the animal appears on her dinner table.

Writer Mira Bartok's memoir, The Memory Palace, is in part about the car accident that left her with traumatic brain injury and about her relationship with her schizophrenic mother. She explains how her brain injury helped her understand — and reconnect with — her mother.

Gear up for this summer's Games with Chris Cleave's new novel about three Olympic cyclists. With careful pacing, complex characters and an ambitious plot, the author of Little Bee crafts a tale of sports racing that explores themes of time, ambition and love.

In Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, Daniel Smith delves into his own experiences with crippling neuroses, which he believes can be controlled if not cured. Anxiety afflicts 18 percent of the adult U.S. population, so Smith's candid self-exploration may prove helpful to many.

Pediatrician Harvey Karp has treated thousands of kids over the course of his 30-year-career, and his popular series of parenting books are international best sellers. His latest is the Happiest Baby Guide to Great Sleep. And if you're a parent, you know he's really talking about your sleep.

For Pablo Medina, Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers was powerful enough to transport him back to his homeland of pre-revolutionary Cuba. Is there a book that has whisked you back to the place where you grew up? Tell us in the comments.

Kristen Iversen spent her childhood in the 1960s in Colorado near the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons factory, playing in fields that now appear to have been contaminated with plutonium. In Full Body Burden, she investigates the environmental scandal involving nuclear contamination around her childhood home.

The journalist turns to fiction to tell Pakistan's hardest truths. His first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, investigated the death of dictator Zia-ul-Haq; and his latest, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, looks at the fate of women and minorities in the country.