Reader recommendation: Hawthorne, A Life

Monitor readers share their favorite book picks.

Despite years of studying New England’s 19th-century authors, I never knew that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son Julian went to jail. This is one of countless colorful details artfully woven into the fabric of Hawthorne: A Life, by Brenda Wineapple. This book will make you wish you lived in Concord, Mass., with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Hawthorne.