At the risk of being called a “double book lover,” I love novels that feature another book or other books, real or fictitious, as part of their storylines.

Our book club recently met to discuss The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, a wonderful and unusually told story of Liesel Meminger, a nine year-old girl in 1939 Nazi Germany, who initially illiterate, steals a progression of books, beginning with The Grave Digger’s Handbook. Zusak doesn’t reveal what’s in that particular book until he has the reader well committed to the story.

In addition, the author includes two short books within his novel, both written by one of the main characters – The Standover Man and The Word Shaker – both made from the painted-over pages Mein Kampf.

That same book club is now reading People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, the story of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, an historic Hebrew tome rescued from Serbian shelling during the Bosnian war if the 1990’s.

Another of my favorites is The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, set in post-World War II Barcelona. The protagonist is the son of an antiquarian book dealer who is intrigued by a book also titled The Shadow of the Wind, written by the fictional author, Julian Carax.

On of my wife, Kris’s, favorite books is The Tightrope Walker by Dorothy Gilman. Gilman incorporates a fictitious young adult fantasy book within her mystery novel titled The Maze in the Heart of the Castle. Interestingly, after the publication of The Tightrope Walker in 1979, Gilman fans virtually demanded that The Maze in the Heart of the Castle be a real book, so Gilman wrote it and it was published in 1983.

There are many other novels that include books as part of their storylines. Let me know what some of your favorites are.