Since the start of The South End Writes series in 2010, members of the audience routinely asked what the authors themselves were reading. Unsurprisingly, they would come up with a number of tantalizing titles that immediately got lost in the hubris of subsequent questions, laughter, greetings, autographing of books, and clean-up as the library closed for the night. To rectify this, FOSEL will post each speaker's five favorite books, beginning this season. In addition, we'll try to, belatedly, find out from previous writers and poets what lives at the top of their lists. Here is what we can offer you now:Susan Naimark (09/20/12 "The Education of a White Parent: Wrestling with Race and Opportunity in the Boston Public Schools"):

1. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

2. The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander

3. Country of My Skull, by Antjie Krog

4. The Education of a WASP, by Lois M. Stalvey

5. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman

L. Annette Binder (09/25/12, "Rise")

1. No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy

2. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

3. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

4. Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion

5. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace

Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (10/09/12: "The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk and Adventure in the 25 Years after Fifty")

1. Still Alice by Lisa Genova

2. The Known World by Edward P. Jones

3. Plainsong by Kent Haruf

4. Brown Girl Brownstones by Paule Marshall

5. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Margaret Sullivan and Sgt. Detective Dr. Kim L. Gaddy (10/16/12:“Boston’s Fairest,” an exhibit and lecture about the first 50 years of women in the Boston Police Department by the BPD’s archivist, documenting the careers of wives and mothers who took on gangsters and bootleggers.)

1.Sarah's Long Walk: The free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America, by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick

2. THE SISTERS: The Saga of the Mitford Family, by Mary S. Lovell

3. DARK TIDE: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, by Stephen Puleo

4. A City in Terror : The 1919 Boston Police Strike, by Francis Russell. Digitized by the Boston Public Library at <http://archive.org/details/officersmenstati00tapp>http://archive.org/details/officersmenstati00tapp

Maryanne O'Hara (10/2//5/12, "Cascade")

1. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

2. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

3. Immortality, Milan Kundera

4. The Master, Colm Toibin

5. Selected Stories, Alice Munro

6. Collected Stories, William Trevor

Margot Livesey (10/30/12, "The Flight of Gemma Hardy")

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

2. The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West

3. The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford

4. Middlemarch by George Elliot