Last week, I wrote about why we should love writers—and how we should show it. This week, I’m going to take my own advice and write about writers whose work I love.

There are lots of writers I admire. Jon Krakauer, for example. I started with his book Into Thin Air and went on to read more of his work—Missoula, Under the Banner of Heaven, Eiger Dreams, Into the Wild, Where Men Win Glory, and his essays. (Many of his books are about mountain climbing. For some reason, I like true adventure books that describe things I will never do. Dramatic thrills, maybe, or a longing for experiences that I can only live vicariously. But I digress.)

But the writers I love most, the ones whose books I buy as soon as they are published and move instantly to the top of my TBR list, are Mary Roach, Sue Grafton, and Jenny Lawson.

Mary Roach

• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

• Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

• Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

• Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

• Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War

• Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

• Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy

Mary Roach writes the least stuffy science books I know on an impressively wide variety of topics. She’s not afraid to insert herself into the narrative as she explores a wide range of topics. Her encounter with the space toilet, for example, is a riot. The thing I love most about her books, though, is the footnotes. They are copious, fascinating, and humorous, and add texture and interest with aspects of the topics that just don’t fit neatly into the narrative.

(I must admit that Roach’s footnotes were the inspiration for my digressions and thus the genesis of this blog. The footnotes for Packing for Mars, for example, include the story of Enos, the chimp that went to space. But I digress again.)

Sue Grafton

• The Alphabet Series

Sue Grafton is justly famous for her series of Kinsey Milhone mystery novels that begin with A Is for Alibi and end with Y Is for Yesterday. She died of cancer before she could write the last book in the series, which she intended to title Z Is for Zero. Mystery fans everywhere mourned her loss.

Grafton’s mysteries are often mentioned in the same breath as Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski series. They do share many qualities, such as strong female private investigators and a cast of interesting supporting characters. But, to me, Paretsky writes from anger (or rage), while Grafton writes from insight and bemusement. Over the years, I’ve gotten away from reading every one of Paretsky’s books that comes out (she’s still writing), but never tired of Grafton’s. I just wish she had lived to write more.

(When I was writing a mystery novel (which never got off the ground), I attended a writing conference where Sue Grafton was one of the speakers/instructors. She read the first 30 pages of my book and gave me some very good advice. But I digress some more.)

Jenny Lawson

• Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir

• Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

• Broken (in the Best Possible Way)

• How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay

Jenny Lawson, aka the Bloggess, writes wonderful books on some of my favorite topics. Her writing style is chaotic, wildly funny, and ultimately uplifting. I was reading her “Mostly True Memoir” and couldn’t stop laughing. My husband asked what the book was about. “I don’t really know,” I said, “but she talks a lot about her vagina.” For a long time, he called her “the vagina lady.” I haven’t told him that sometimes she talks about her labia.

There was plenty of other stuff too, a lot of it involving her bemused but steadfast husband Victor and the trouble they get into, separately or together—like the time she bought a six-foot metal chicken that she named Beyoncé and left outside Victor’s home office window.

Her later books contain essays with plenty of humor and anecdotes, but they are loosely on the subject of mental illness and coping with it (or not). How could I resist a book like that?

(I met Jenny Lawson twice, once at a book signing and once at a writer’s conference. At the book signing, there was a Q and A session. I asked, “If you could be any animal, what would you be? And why?” She replied, “A tapeworm. Because I could just lie there and someone would feed me.” But I digress even more.)

Of course, there are other books that I like a lot, including more mysteries, more science, science fiction, some history, some biographies (except ones about Prince Albert), books about shipwrecks, books by Lois McMaster Bujold, Dick Francis, Simon Winchester, Jared Diamond, and Steven Pinker, and true crime. (I don’t read as much true crime as I used to. The ones with atrocity photos no longer interest me. I like the ones involving forensics and legal maneuverings. But I digress yet again.)

Got any books/authors to suggest? My TBR pile (well, electronic shelf) only has 1,000+ books on it. There’s room for lots more!