Best of the Best: The Book Review has had its say; a few weeks ago, we named our 10 Best Books of 2013. But in the interests of inclusiveness — and, O.K., advance planning before the holidays — I wondered what our 10 best authors would pick as their favorites. So I asked them. The rules were simple: Tell us the best book you read this year (whether it was published in 2013 or not) and, briefly, describe it. Not everybody responded — I wasn’t the only one beleaguered by sugarplums — but enough did to devote the column this week, and next, to their replies: the best books as chosen by the authors of the best books, a sort of chain letter of terrific reading ideas. Here they are.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (author of “Americanah”): “I discovered Barbara Pym’s ‘A Glass of Blessings’ this year and could not believe I had never read Pym. I loved it. It does that ancient, wonderful thing literature is supposed to do: instruct and delight. Pym is brilliant at portraying middle-class England in the 1950s, and even more so at honestly engaging with the ‘psychology of femaleness.’ It is a ‘slice of life’ sort of novel, serious without trying to be, very witty and very funny and very insightful, and it somehow manages to be both prim and subversive.”

Image Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Peter Baker (“Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House”): “In ‘The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide,’ Gary J. Bass takes us inside the Oval Office to reveal the scandalous role America played in the 1971 slaughter in what is now Bangladesh. Largely unknown here, the story combines the human tragedy of Darfur, the superpower geopolitics of the Cuban missile crisis and the illegal shenanigans of Iran-contra. Full disclosure: Bass is a friend. But you don’t have to know him to appreciate this harrowing tale. It turns out there’s still more to learn from those Nixon tapes.”