Memorial Day marks opening weekend for many beaches in the US. This means a lot of people are breaking out their swimsuits and guiltily remembering that long forgotten New Year’s resolution to hit the gym more often.  But don’t fret, while the weather warms up you've still got time to find your workout of choice. And when you want a relaxing read to soothe those sore muscles at the end of the day, these five books show how profoundly a deep commitment to fitness can change a body -- both inside and out.

VB6 by Mark Bittman

Mark Bittman’s interest in becoming fitter was more than just cosmetic. He was seriously overweight, and the concern wasn’t a six pack for the beach but the threat of type 2 diabetes and the many health risks that came along with that condition. His doctor recommended cutting out all animal products, but Bittman balked at the challenge of becoming vegan. After all, as a renowned food journalist, much of his life and socializing centered on food of all kinds. But something had to change, and VB6 is the compromise Bittman reached -- to go vegan, but only before before 6 pm, “because that’s when you’re most likely to combine eating with socializing, an important and even beneficial thing.” VB6 is the story of how he did it and also a how-to manual. Including everything from shopping lists to recipes, the book gives a full account of how Bittman put VB6 into action. In the end, the plan paid off in both aesthetic and health benefits -- Bittman is now 35 lbs lighter and no longer pre-diabetic.

Hell Bent by Benjamin Lorr

Benjamin Lorr was overweight and just looking for a new way to shape up.  Bikram yoga, a series of poses practiced in 110 degree heat, sounded interesting, an intense new way to try to get fit. But as his interest in Bikram yoga grew, Lorr found himself in a wild new world of fanatical competitive yogis. Lorr traces his own journey into competitive yoga leading up to his participation in the National Yoga Asana Championship. The competition is “heated” enough to be compelling, but the story is made even more fascinating by the parallel investigation into the complicated life and lore of Bikram Choudhury, the controversial founder of Bikram yoga. Lorr finds people who have been saved by the Bikram practice, and people who have been shattered by Bikram the man. Hell Bent is an intriguing look into a complicated fitness subculture where everyone looks great, but darkness governs some of the hearts beating beneath chiseled torsos.

Prime Time by Jane Fonda

Fitness knows no age limits. Jane Fonda rocked a leotard as an early fitness guru in the 1970s, and she’s still going strong today now that she’s in her 70s. In Prime Time, Fonda discusses how those in middle age can keep their bodies and minds in top condition. She shares her own “life review” process and doesn’t shy away from details about her divorce from her famously wealthy husband Ted Turner. Fonda positions fitness as an integral piece of a holistically fulfilling lifestyle, and gives plenty of pointers on how readers can make positive changes for themselves. So don’t be surprised when your newly svelte grandma plunks her beach towel down next to yours this summer.

Eat and Run by Scott Jurek

In his first book Born To Run, Scott Jurek illuminated the intense practice of ultrarunning, wherein runners cover hundreds of miles in punishing conditions. Jurek himself has set the U.S. record for distance run in 24 hours -- he made it 165.7 miles, a distance equal to almost 7 marathons. Eat and Run is a more personal book, a look back at the individual history that turned Jurek from a normal Midwestern kid who kind of hated running into a vegan, record breaking, elite athlete. Eat and Run also covers considerable ground when it comes to nutrition with lots of practical advice and vegan recipes. The moral of the story is clear – with dedication and drive, a human can not only change their body’s shape, but expand the limits of their body’s potential.

Gorilla Suit: My Adventures in Body Building by Bob Paris

Every built body has to start somewhere. Bob Paris started out a scrawny teen on an errand for a teacher. He stumbled over a set of weights in a storage room, hefted them a few times and thought it felt great. What follows is a personal passion that grows into a career; Paris built one of the best bodies in the business, eventually taking the Mr. Universe title for his hard work. But while his muscles were growing, his emotional life wasn’t always quite up to speed. Paris delves into the difficulties of being a gay man in the unwelcoming macho culture of bodybuilding. He says at times he felt like a "little boy walking around in a gorilla suit” when he was pumped up for competition. Paris doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of his sport either, openly addressing his use of steroids and other drugs while competing. In the end though, Gorilla Suit is an uplifting tale of how Paris’ efforts to change his body also changed his life.

Thomas Edison received a whopping 1,093 patents for his inventions, ranging from the phonograph and the light bulb to the awkwardly-named fluoroscope, the predecessor to the modern X-ray machine. But while he's gone down as the world's most famous inventor and the poster child of American genius, his legacy is somewhat bloated.

Mr. Edison was, after all, a clever schemer and a conniving businessman. He would box out the competition and steal inventors' works. "Patent caveats," 19th century notices sent to the US Patent Office expressing one's intent to patent something, were like candy to Edison. He'd fence off swaths of intellectual property for an entire year, staking claim to ideas he'd merely overheard or put the least amount of effort into. For all of Edison's avuncular portrayals in the media, he just as often brandished the law like a billystick, issuing patent caveats to legally leapfrog the competition.

To fellow innovators and creative types of the late 1800s, Edison was as ruthless as a robber baron, manhandling breakthrough inventions like a one-man monopoly. Of course, such are the ways of the business world. The Winklevoss's and Wozniaks of the world can attest to that much. In spite of it all, in the long shadow he's cast over the history of American entrepreneurialism, lesser-known inventors have gone on to do some astounding things. Let's take a moment to appreciate the dreamers and schemers, the ones who cared less for marketing and more for fine-tuning their creations, even if it meant falling through the cracks of history's floorboards.

The Inventor and the Tycoon by Edward Ball

If Eadweard Muybridge is the typical "zany" inventor, perhaps its no wonder posterity's memory is selective. Muybridge was a grade-A misanthrope. He preferred to flash his rudimentary camera -- the basis for his "zoopraxiscope" -- at landscapes and vistas, rarely at other human beings. In Ball's brilliant retelling of Muybridge's eccentric path to inventing moving images, we learn of his rocky relationship with Leland Stanford, the railroad magnate and eventual founder of Stanford College, and how the tycoon's wealth kept Muybridge's photographic research afloat, if only to feed Stanford's strange obsession with horses. Stanford, like Edison years later, would try and bully the public into believing he was the true genius behind Muybridge's motion-picture research. Let the record show otherwise.

Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

Even if you can't get down with algorithms, electromechanical inventions, or cryptanalysis, we'd wager you can get down with computers. In fact, you can't escape them. And who paved the way for you to build documents, run programs, and fall down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia? None other than Alan Turing. In Turing's Cathedral, science historian and boat builder George Dyson tends to the digital details that gave birth to a matrix of data at which we've now thrown ourselves with meme-worthy abandon. Dyson sheds light on the cast of characters that breathed life into the new field of computer science, he dissects the skeletal framework of computing devices, and -- with great reverence -- he walks us through the hallowed halls of data that inspired a few bright men to put a number's function before it's meaning.

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

Hedy Lamarr, the Golden Age starlet dubbed the "most beautiful woman in the world," was living proof that looks could kill. In Hedy's Folly, Pulitzer-Prize winning author Richard Rhodes chronicles Lamarr's forgotten invention, a "Secret Communications System" built to assist America in World War II. Born out of a desire to save children's lives, many of which were lost at the hands of German U-boats, Lamarr -- with the help of avant-garde composer George Antheil -- set out to invent a frequency-jumping contraption that jammed systems interfering with a torpedo and its target. Harboring far less public passions than acting, Lamarr pored over scientific documents to conceive of her breakthrough invention. Though ultimately unused by the military at the time, she was awarded late in life for her patriotic and pioneering work. The true reaches of her research, however, came to light after she'd already passed. GPS, wireless phones, Wi-Fi internet, and a host of other gadgets we take for granted are based on the crucial findings that Lamarr, born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, graciously gifted to America's legacy.

Grace Hopper by Kurt W. Beyer

Before "Amazing Grace" Hopper popularized the term "debugging" after literally removing a moth from a mainframe, she helped popularize the fast-growing field of computer science. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1928 and earning her PhD six years later, her specialization in mathematics would lead her to do some marvelous things, like developing COBOL, one of the first computer programming languages ever conceived. While most of us struggle to simply learn an existing language, Hopper went about creating her own. And if you think her brawn didn't match her brains, think again. Spurred by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hopper also volunteered with the U.S. Navy, training at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School. Oh, and she graduated top of her class, there, too.

Bunch of Amateurs by Jack Hitt

If the forgotten tinkerers and creative crafters above aren't enough, Jack Hitt suggests all you need is a stone and a good arm to find more. America is teeming with unknown inventors, symbolizing the entrepreneurial spirit and stick-to-itiveness that keep this country chugging. The American Dream, after all, attracts dreamers, people who can visualize and work towards an unseen desire. By touring across the country and glimpsing the intense passions of hobbyists and amateur inventors, from impassioned ornithologists to DNA dabblers, Hitt's approachable stories rest comfortably on the pulse of American exceptionalism. If you're fancying a project of your own, Bunch of Amateurs is your bible. It reads like a DIY manual for pursuing your own personal pet project, championing the inventor's makeshift manifest destiny.

Last year, a Gallup poll found that just 10% of Americans have a favorable view of the U.S. Congress. But how many of us really understand what it does or how it works? It is the most powerful branch of the government, responsible for the country’s budget and finances, yet the process by which bills become law is torturous, complicated, and can seem designed to ensure only the most stubborn, headstrong congresspeople prevail. Such was the case with the Dodd-Frank Act, a financial reform bill that was drafted as a response to the financial crash of 2008.

In his new book Act of Congress, reporter Robert Kaiser follows the bill from its conception by Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd, through the labyrinthine, treacherous byways of Congress, where turf wars and partisanship are the rule of law. Kaiser uses the Act as a means of investigating how Congress works -- and doesn’t -- coming to the conclusion that while woefully flawed, this branch of the government can sometimes, miraculously, get things done. Congress is not the only group capable of performing the occasional miraculous act: for biographies of other groups that have made history, read on.

Vengeance by George Jonas

In 1972, the whole world watched as a Palestinian terrorist group calling itself Black September took eleven Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympics, killing all of them after a failed rescue attempt. But hardly anyone witnessed the aftermath -- the formation of a secret squad, with a leader hand-picked by Prime Minister Golda Meir, to hunt down and kill the terrorists responsible. In this book, journalist Jonas worked with the leader of the secret team, a former Mossad agent, who describes how he and four of his Israeli countrymen banded together to perform their mission. Cut off from Israel, themselves the target of PLO operatives who knew about their plans, the five young agents had to work in complete secrecy, yet trust each other implicitly, overcoming personal differences to avenge the deaths at the Munich Games.

Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis

Today, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence seem such hallowed, sanctified documents, it’s easy to forget they were written by regular men, filled with flaws and passions, who weren’t at all confident their new nation would succeed. In this book, National Book Award-winning historian Ellis examines the last decade of the 18th century, and how a group of politicians worked together (and fought with each other) to ensure America would be more than a failed experiment in democracy. Ellis describes how Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Adams, and Madison took the ideals of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and set about making them a blueprint for a working nation.

The Good Girls Revolt by Lynn Povich

When Lynn Povich started working at Newsweek in the 1960s, she was a secretary -- the best job most women in journalism could hope for back then. The newsroom may have been stuck in the past, but the culture was undergoing a change, as the women’s movement questioned the roles of women, and men, in the workforce and at home. When, in 1970, Newsweek ran a cover story on the women’s movement titled “Women in Revolt,” a revolt happened in their own offices as well -- 46 female staffers filed a complaint with the EEOC charging the magazine with discrimination and unfair hiring and promotion practices. In this group biography, Povich, who went on to become Newsweek’s first female senior editor, recalls those days of protest, and looks at what happened to the group of women who banded together to break through the walls of the boys club of journalism.

The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

It can seem that the only thing the nine members of the Supreme Court have in common is their matching robes, but this diversity of opinion and belief, argues Toobin, is what makes the Court such a powerful and enduring institution. In his book, Toobin looks at the disparate personalities that make up the most important legal body in the country, as they grapple with critical issues such as abortion and civil rights. Tracing the views of former justices, and how past presidents shaped and changed the court, Toobin paints a picture of an ever-evolving Court that is as idiosyncratic and dynamic as the human beings who sit on its bench.

Since the beginning of time, nearly every culture has constructed a creation narrative to explain the sun, the moon, and other basic elements of nature with a profound impact on human experience. Since its launch in 2009, we've looked to Kickstarter, the video-driven crowd-sourced online funding platform, to satisfy our universal hunger for stories about the creative process.

In his book The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great, published early this year, Alec Foege writes, “The beauty of the Kickstarter approach is that the would-be patrons that sign on to fund a project become part of the story of the project's evolution. Each project lives or dies based on the direct interest of a relatively random group of observers."

Kickstarter participants are continuing the very American tradition of tinkering that dates back to amateur and professional inventors from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison, Foege writes. He describes these curious and resourceful founding fathers and mothers as “men and women who looked at the world around them and were able to create something genuinely new from what they saw.”

Fast-forward to the digital age, and enter Brooklyn designer and Kickstarter star Jack Sutter, CEO and founder of TGT (Tight) wallets, constructed from Italian leather and elastic. The streamlined product fits into the tightest pocket, eliminating bulk and bulge.

In 2008, Sutter was living in a Brooklyn brownstone with his friend Eric, who used the elastic band from a broccoli stem as a makeshift wallet. “It's perfect, simple, and small in his pocket,” Jack observes in his charmingly concise Kickstarter video, recalling those days surrounding the financial meltdown. (Foege also conceived of The Tinkerers during that time: "White-collar workers were losing their jobs,” he said in an interview about his idea for the book. “There was a movement of people wanting to work more with their hands.")

Sutter’s video features him talking directly to the camera -- to the audience that would raise $317,424 (more than fifteen times his goal of $20,000) from 7,521 backers from all over the world in just over a month in late 2012 -- along with spliced images relevant to his story: his friend Jen, who taught him how to sew the TGT wallets, the workspace of the furniture maker who let him use discarded scraps of Italian leather, a Google Trends screenshot of searches for “stock market crash,” and a man with a panicked and distraught expression on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Although he doesn’t mention that economic backstory verbally in his pitch, Sutter calls upon narrative and visual storytelling skills he learned during years spent working as a writer and film director. As in the writing of all great memoir, he expanded his personal story and made it relevant to the larger world.

In keeping with his TGT branding, Sutter opens the narrative portion of his less-than-three-minute long video, “Hey Kickstarters, my name is Jack Sutter. I want to introduce you to the Tight wallet, and the story behind Tight. I’m gonna keep it real tight." After telling a compact version of the company’s genesis story, punctuated by close-up shots of butt pockets, he concludes, “That's the Tight story. Now here we are, and this is where you come in. To make enough wallets for Tight to survive, I need to produce them on a large scale. So please become part of the story and make a pledge and get a wallet.”

By inviting his audience to participate in the narrative, he makes his supporters feel part of something larger than just buying a product. Their investment in his story leads to investment in his creation and his company. Sutter appreciates that Kickstarter makes the business of fundraising personal. “You have the opportunity to share your story and have people respond,” he says. A lot of people related to his story and used the word “inspired” in contacting him. He was struck that many donors contributed even though they didn't need a wallet.

In addressing the online platform’s strength in marketing through that kind of emotion, Kickstarter cofounder Yancey Strickler has said, “I think what [marketers] can learn is something that will, in fact, be incredibly hard for them to recreate…and that’s authenticity. The power of an individual telling a story about something they care about, or is important to them, and precisely defining how it is they go about doing that is exciting. As a backer or a spectator, I get the warm glow watching that thing come to life, knowing that I have a piece of it in some way.”

It does feel good to support the stories and projects of Sutter and other tinkerers on Kickstarter, and that's why we all keep spreading the word.

Rod Dreher and his late sister Ruthie Leming grew up in Starhill, a rural community six miles south of St. Francisville, Louisiana, a town of 2,000 and the county seat of West Feliciana Parish.

Though both descended from "country people" and were raised by Mam and Paw Dreher on fifty acres, their two roads diverged early in life. The earthy and rooted Ruthie stayed put and raised three girls with her high school sweetheart-turned-husband, Mike Leming. Her cerebral and seeking brother Rod left for boarding school and never really came back, in spiritual or practical terms, until just after his little sister’s death from cancer at the age of forty-four in 2011.

“I hope you know how special that place is,” a Washington journalist friend once said to Dreher, author of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, A Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life, a newly published nonfiction tribute to his sister. “You come from one of the last real places in America.”

In the lyrical tradition of seventeenth-century poet John Donne (“No Man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main…”) -- with the social attunement of Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam, researcher of localism and author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community -- Dreher shines a prescriptive light on an alternative to contemporary Americans’ overwhelming and increasing disconnect from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures.

Through interviews and personal narrative, he tells the story of his sister Ruthie’s living and dying within a landscape and community to which she was devoted, and the impact of her experiences on his own life. Directed by an epiphany surrounding her death, he moved his own wife and three children from their latest far-flung urban perch back to the land on which he was born.

Here are ten reasons why he did (with accompanying excerpts from the book). Do any lead you to consider going the way of a slower, smaller town?

1 ) Earnestness is a virtue: Unlike the snarky, ironic humor that tends to hover in cosmopolitan areas, small town sincerity allows for strong emotion. After visiting Mike, her husband-to-be, at his National Guard boot camp, Ruthie wrote to him: “I want you to know how proud I am of you. I can’t wait to get home and brag on you. You just look so sharp and handsome in your uniform. It just made me want to cry every time I looked at you. You make me feel so good inside when you compliment me and look at me with those beautiful eyes.”

2 ) Unforgettable characters and their connection to the land define the place: “Fun for the Lemings often meant summer afternoons down at Thompson Creek, near Ronnie Morgan’s camp. They call it the Starhill Riviera. Ronnie is a longtime neighbor and contemporary of my parents, but perpetually youthful in his crackpot joie de vivre…As Starhill’s version of Jimmy Buffett by way of Hunter S. Thompson, he would get the Margaritaville vibe going down at his camp in the late afternoon.  Ronnie cooked potluck -- gumbo, jambalaya -- and all you had to bring was cold beer, a bottle of whiskey, and, if you liked, something to put in the pot.”

3 ) The community can lift you up: In 2003, all Louisiana National Guard soldiers, including Mike, were deployed to Iraq. The family’s neighbors and Mike’s fellow volunteer firefighters promised him that “he wouldn’t have to worry about his family while he was in Iraq. They had his back.” They threw a community dance, the Starhill Stomp, before he left. Upon his return, he was greeted by yellow ribbons tied to trees lining the country road to his home, and the whole community gathered in the family’s yard to give him a hero’s welcome.

4 ) Small town doctors offer true primary care: Ruthie’s doctor, Tim Lindsey, finds gratification in being a country doctor. “Treating people he knew as a baseball coach or a Sunday school teacher allowed him to practice medicine in a personal, emotional way.”

5 ) Your neighbors have your back: “The news [of Ruthie’s stage-four cancer diagnosis] hit the West Feliciana community like a cyclone. As the day wore on a hundred or more friends mobbed the hospital. Some offered to move in with the Lemings to care for their children while Ruthie fought this. John Bickham told Paw that he would sell everything he had to pay for Ruthie’s medical bills if it came to that…All over town people prepared food and took it by the Leming house, which, this being Starhill, sat unlocked.”

6 ) You can make an impact: “Ruthie and I talked for a while longer about the outpouring of support for her, Mike, and the kids. She told me she expected to beat cancer, but it made her happy to hear about people choosing to change their lives because of her story.”

7 ) Elders are honored: “Though I was back in town John Bickham and Big Show remained Paw’s main supports. They loved and respected him like their own father, and they could give him things -- understanding, and practical help maintaining the land -- beyond my power to provide.”

8 ) Your spirit can expand: “I told my wife again that the purity of love these people showed to our family was so intensely beautiful that it was hard to look upon for long without feeling that it would destroy you. ‘Every angel is terrible,’ the poet Rilke wrote, meaning that God’s messengers come to us with a beauty that inspires fear. To look upon beauty that powerful is to receive a calling and a command to change your life -- and that can make you afraid.”

9 ) In staying, you grow strong roots: “Contemporary culture encourages us to make islands of ourselves for the sake of self-fulfillment, of career advancement, of entertainment, of diversion, and all the demands of the sovereign self. When suffering and death come for you -- and it will -- you want to be in a place where you know, and are known. You want -- no, you need -- to be able to say, as Mike did, ‘We’re leaning, but we’re leaning on each other.’”

10 ) In coming home, you might find what you’ve been looking for all along. Dreher finally finds peace with his aging father, who sent this email upon hearing of his son’s impending return: “I just wanted to tell you how happy your mother and I are to know that you and your family are coming home. I have prayed for this to happen for years. Now it is finally happening. I realize that it could not happen before, but now my prayers are being answered. We love you and your family, son, and welcome home. Love, Daddy.”

In mid-August 1943, 24-year-old Celia Szapka boarded a train in Newark, New Jersey, carrying a suitcase and wearing her brand new I. Miller shoes. She knew she was traveling for a job helping the war effort -- she had been working on a mysterious “Project” in New York City for the past few months -- but she did not know where she was going or how long the journey would last. Hours later, the train rolled into Knoxville, Tennessee, where it was met by a car that whisked Celia and several other young women to a muddy, makeshift encampment tucked into a bend in the Clinch river, a site that would eventually sprawl nearly 100 square miles. Tens of thousands of people, many of them young, single women, would converge on the site over the next two years, doing their part to advance what would become known as the Manhattan Project, to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. Denise Kiernan's The Girls of Atomic City shares the story of these young ladies.

An extraordinary work of journalism, biography, and scientific history, Kiernan’s book explains the origins and life of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She interweaves the stories of the women who worked there with the parallel “life story” of uranium, known as “tubealloy” -- its discovery (focusing particularly on the role of female scientists), enrichment, and use in the bomb. The separation of these stories is signaled by the use of different typefaces to tell each story, underlining the essential secrecy of the work at Oak Ridge, and the necessary ignorance in which its 75,000 residents lived.

Kiernan’s characters represent a cross-section of the society of Oak Ridge: women of different racial and class backgrounds, whose roles ranged from janitors, nurses, and secretaries to mathematicians, chemists, and physicists. Most of these women, now in their seventies and eighties, were interviewed by Kiernan in the process of her research, and she skillfully mimics their voices, with their distinctive turns of phrase and dialect, to make their stories come alive. A cast list at the beginning of the book (of people, places, and “things” like tubealloy) helps to keep the different characters straight, and also emphasizes the unreal, theatrical nature of this temporary city, in which secrecy bred a strange kind of coded language.

In addition to Celia, we meet and follow Toni Peters, a local Tennessee secretary, who first hears of the Project through the government’s program of forcible requisition of property -- her aunt and uncle’s farm is seized to make way for Oak Ridge, and like many of their neighbors, they are faced with a long, uphill fight for adequate compensation. Kattie Strickland, from Auburn, Alabama, is enticed to find work at the plant by the prospect of decent wages, despite the racial discrimination that forces her to live apart from her husband and prevents her from bringing her four children with her, although there are schools on site for white children. The upright, ambitious Jane Greer, who is “rudely yanked out of line” at the University of Tennessee and told that women cannot matriculate as engineering majors, instead trains as a statistician. She goes on to oversee a team of female mathematicians working around the clock to track production rates at Y-12, the electromagnetic separation plant at Oak Ridge.

A large part of the drama of the story, of course, comes from what we as readers know all along about the site’s purpose -- and what the women working there do not know. The book opens with a prologue, “Revelation,” dated August 1945, which dramatically depicts the wildfire conversion of “the Secret” into “the News”: “Slowly the entire Reservation was igniting, ripples of information expanding outward via word and wire.” But the story of Oak Ridge doesn’t end with the bomb, or the end of the war that spurred its development. The atomic city’s population dropped after 1945 but soon ramped up again, with the advent of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. Oak Ridge was placed under civilian control in 1947, and its gates, identification badges, and checkpoints were removed to turn the place into something closer to an ordinary town, yet much of its secrecy and notoriety remained in place.

Kiernan briefly traces the postwar fortunes of her central characters, and the changing attitudes to what they unknowingly created in their mysterious wartime home. It’s clear that those years were formative and unforgettable for the women who survived them -- years when domestic and military life were entwined, and when, despite their gender, they were entrusted with their government’s most important work. By focusing on the details of their everyday lives and vividly evoking their different characters and personalities, Kiernan gives Celia, Kattie, Vi, Jane, Toni, Dot, and their thousands of peers the testament they deserve -- without at any point losing sight of the devastating consequences of their work.

My mom drove, and I sat in the passenger seat beside her. It was late summer 1997, and we were traveling from what was until then my home in Connecticut to Boston, where I was starting college. She asked what I wanted to do after graduation. My eighteen-year-old self didn't hesitate: “Write for The New Yorker.”

With her hands at ten-and-two-o’clock on the wheel, she continued to look ahead at the road and said something to the effect of, “That’s a pretty lofty goal for right after school. Don’t get your hopes up.” She might disagree with my memory of the conversation, but that’s how I interpreted her response. She is cautious in driving and in life, and knowing her, she was trying to protect me from disappointment.

Undeterred, I shot back, “John Updike did it.” The gifted and prolific writer of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction would have been eighty-one today. He died in 2009, and he is as alive in my psyche now as when I was a teenager. Although I knew little of his work at that point, a high school teacher must have mentioned that he was on staff at the magazine in his early twenties.

He graduated from Harvard summa cum laude in 1954, and in June of that year, his story Friends from Philadelphia was accepted by The New Yorker. As he told The Paris Review, the publication of that story was “the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life.” He was a staff writer for the magazine's “Talk of the Town” section from 1955 to 1957 until he left the city with his wife and growing family. The New Yorker remained his lifelong professional home, and his contributions to it number more than 800.

On the opening page of his memoir Self-Consciousness, a collection of essays in the style of Emerson chronicling his inner life up to the age of fifty-five, he writes, “From early adolescence on, I had longed to get where now, for a brief interview, I was: inside The New Yorker's offices.” I am heartened by such a transparent admission of ambition. It lights the way. Since around the age of eighteen, I've found it difficult to express my own literary aspirations. Maybe it's because I came of age during the grunge era, when not caring -- or seeming not to care -- was the paragon of cool, or maybe it's because I've inherited my mother’s caution to a certain degree. Quietly, though, I have found comfort and inspiration in the reality of Updike’s path. His college was across the river from mine, and we crossed the same city streets.

His body of work is so vast that it barely fits on the “Books By John Updike” page on the inner flap of Self-Consciousness. In order to fit all the titles on one page, the publisher had to shrink the margins. His towering talent and industriousness might have been close to superhuman, but his memoir's accounts of his battle with eczema and heartbreak prove that he was very human. An illuminated one, even, showing me the right course.

Sonali Deraniyagala has survived the unthinkable. In her memoir "Wave," published last week, she describes the experience and wrenching aftermath of losing her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the 2004 tsunami triggered by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean. Of the roughly 275,000 people killed by the impact of waves that reached up to a hundred feet high, five of them made up her entire world.

It was December 26, and the family was on vacation from London at Yala, a national park on the southern coast of Sri Lanka. The book’s opening lines, so understated in hindsight, capture the ordinariness that can shift, in an instant, to pure shock: “I thought nothing of it at first. The ocean looked a little closer to our hotel than usual.”

At the time, Sonali’s husband Steve was in the bathroom, and their sons -- Vikram, seven, and Malli, five -- were on the hotel room’s back veranda playing with their new Christmas gifts. By the time she noticed the growing white froth of the sea, “Vik was sitting by the back door reading the first page of The Hobbit. I told him to him to shut that door. It was a glass door with four panels, and he closed each one, then came across the room and stood by me.”

The waves became furious and menacing, and Sonali called Steve out of the bathroom. Barefoot, she grabbed her boys by the hands, and the family ran. They ran past the door of her parents’ adjacent room without knocking or shouting to warn them. There was no time. The jumped into a Jeep, the driver pulled away, the water entered, and she never saw her immediate family again.

That Sonali survived by holding onto a branch after getting tossed and pummeled by the raging water is a miracle. That she sat down to write this book -- to communicate the physical and emotional anguish that followed, and the power of memory to ravage and to heal -- is a testament to human resilience and to the cathartic potential of storytelling. There may not be a solution, or even any resolution, to her terrible circumstances, but there are hints of renewal in the book’s arc through numbness, grief, and her grounding ability to put one foot in front of the other as she travels between their family homes in London and Sri Lanka to her new home of New York City.

We feel pity and sorrow for Sonali, as we would for any tragic heroine. But with ancient Greek drama, there is a safe distance separating us from its symbolism. When Medea, Electra, and Cassandra go mad, we shudder at the horrors of myth. When Sonali compulsively Googles ways to kill herself, drinks and drugs herself into oblivion, and smashes her head against the sharp wooden headboard of the bed in self-mutilation, her terror feels frighteningly close.

Sonali’s story might drive you to seize this day, this instant, and live the most compassionate, loving, and fulfilling life possible. You might want to share her story with anyone who has suffered any kind of loss. In reminding others that they’re not alone, you’ll also be reminding yourself. Our empathetic physical responses to the understated poetry of Sonali’s sentences -- chills that make every hair stand up, shortness of breath, tender tears rolling down cheeks -- make one thing clear: what happened to her could happen to any of us. Why it happened is a mystery.

There’s a reason Yoko Ono peers penetratingly from the jacket cover of Rolling Stone journalist Jonathan Cott’s slim volume of reminiscences and outtakes from the multiple interviews he conducted with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, including a nine-hour conversation with the ex-Beatle that took place days before Lennon died. But in the context of this book, Ono plays the role of the lead guitarist plucking out audacious (and, at times, indecipherable) riffs while Lennon strums a steady rhythm in the background to create a riveting portrait of one of the most vilified and exalted love stories of the twentieth century.

Cott, a Beatles Alpha-fan, who serendipitously slid into a coveted gig as Rolling Stone’s first European editor, penetrated the fortress that the notoriously private Lennon had erected around himself by tracking down the rock legend through channels in London’s avant garde art world at the precise moment when he’d fallen for a brash young artist by the name of Yoko Ono. Cott’s first interview with Lennon in 1968 took place in the basement flat the singer-songwriter shared with Ono in the early days of their romance. Shortly after arriving, Cott instantly passed muster and was welcomed into the Ono-Lennon fold and whisked off to Abbey Road studios to watch the Beatles record several tracks on the “White Album.” For a hardcore Beatlemaniac like Cott, that experience was the equivalent of a white-light encounter with the divine. He lovingly renders the evening in granular detail, from the tinkering that went into “Glass Onion” to the wild anarchy that erupted during the “Helter Skelter” jam session.

Far more revealing, however, are the intimate moments Cott spends with Lennon and Ono, who remain virtually inseparable throughout the book. The day after the Abbey Road experience -- and off-and-on over the following thirteen years -- Cott's encounters with the couple exposes Lennon to be a diehard music nerd with a particular affinity for American rock and soul like Smokey Robinson, whose “I’ve been good to you” inspired the Beatles’ “Sexy Sadie.” Cott also leads Lennon into some interesting revelations about the emotional source material for “Strawberry Fields.” Overall Lennon comes off as an affable and surprisingly unpretentious chap who ultimately can’t wait to shift his focus back to Yoko, who is never more than a shout away.

In December of 1980, Cott was assigned to interview the two of them for the upcoming release of their final album, “Double Fantasy.” His longstanding relationship with the couple earned him unparallelled access into what Lennon jokingly refers to as the “inner sanctum.” The wide-ranging nine-hour conversation took place at the couple’s sprawling apartment at the Dakota just three days before Lennon was murdered by a deranged fan just outside of Central Park.

Throughout the interview, the couple come off as a symbiotic unit, fused together by a mutual desire to transcend conventional notions about art, music, expression, activism, and relationships. Lennon, in particular, revealed a self-aware candor on a number of subjects, including rock star behavior (“promiscuity is wanting your mummy, wanting all the mummies in the world") and the struggle to be a good parent (“play, I can’t. I can watch TV with him, I’m great at that. I can watch any garbage as long as I don’t have to move around”).

Throughout the book, Cott goes to great lengths to explain the nature of Lennon and Ono's bond while highlighting Ono’s unique gifts as an individual artist. To this end, Cott’s memoir culminates with a one-on-one conversation with Ono that took place in Stockholm in March of last year. The Ono of today comes off as slightly less opaque and cryptic than she did in previous vignettes, as she reflects on a wide range of subjects, from what it was like  being “the most hated woman in the world” to the similarities between “Imagine” and Japanese poetry. The conversation ends on a sentiment that goes a long way toward explaining Ono’s world view and her enduring and positive influence on Lennon and, arguably, some of the best late Beatles songs. “Beauty will save the world,” Ono says. “You know what beauty is? It’s something you recognize in yourself. Actually you don’t have to feel the beauty within. But within you just feel the beauty of everything.” Imagine that.

This weekend, more than 10,000 writers and readers will descend on Boston for the 2013 conference and book fair organized by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Hundreds of panels and presentations will aim to give writers and students an inside look at the publishing business, while agents and editors will hear pitches from aspiring authors and share their own wisdom about what it takes to succeed. There are now more than 500 college programs that aim to teach students how to become writers -- but what do writers themselves think about how, and why, they do what they do? Here, we’ve assembled ten of the best memoirs and meditations on the writing life, from inspiration to publication.

Eudora Welty’s spare and concise "On Writing" was originally part of a larger book, "The Eye of the Story," and it wastes no words or time striking to the heart of what makes fiction work. With chapter subjects including place, voice, memory, and language, the book draws on Welty’s own expertise and her sensitive close readings of a wide range of stories and novels in order to create an indispensible single-volume guide to the craft of writing and the life of a writer.

One of North America’s most eclectic and beloved authors, Margaret Atwood brings the authority of her experience to bear on her collection "Negotiating with the Dead." Tackling questions both large and small -- from the existential quandary of what it means to be a writer, to the everyday frustrations of the literary life -- this candid inquiry dispels the mystique of writing, in conversation with contemporary and ancient masters of the art.

Similarly concerned with the mysteries of writing and the neverending riddle of how to do it well, Norman Mailer’s "The Spooky Art" exposes the undercover life of the novelist. Frank, funny, and opinionated, the book collects Mailer’s own wisdom as a fiction maestro alongside studies of craft and technique in a range of other genres. Part handbook, part memoir, and part dinner-party conversation with a dazzling array of imaginary guests, from Faulkner to Freud to Jonathan Franzen, Mailer’s book is essential reading for the fearless writer.

In Joyce Carol Oates’s "The Faith of a Writer," the immensely prolific novelist, poet, and memoirist discusses her childhood inspirations and gives a glimpse of the varied and unpredictable mindset of the writer at work. She pays tribute to the writers who have inspired her, and at the same time emphasizes the importance of hard work, patience, skill, and dedication: “Inspiration and energy and even genius are rarely enough to make ‘art’: for prose fiction is also a craft, and craft must be learned, whether by accident or design.”

Finding one’s voice as a writer involves complicated negotiations with memory and identity -- never more so than when that identity is layered within a tormented post-colonial past. In "Reading and Writing," West Indian novelist V.S. Naipaul revisits his childhood in Trinidad and his English education in a memoir reflecting on cultural assimilation and dislocation, how a child becomes a writer, and how the novel emerged in the Victorian era as a unique form for depicting contemporary society.

A classic guide to the writer’s craft, Anne Lamott’s "Bird by Bird" is one of a handful of books that belongs on any MFA student’s bookshelf. Her title comes from a family memory, of her brother’s procrastination-induced panic at a homework assignment to produce a report on birds, and their father’s advice when the task seemed insurmountable: “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” In a similar tone of solidarity, intimacy, and encouragement, Lamott urges the reader on through the unglamorous daily slog of writing.

Often cited along with "Bird by Bird," Stephen King’s vivid writer’s memoir and practical handbook "On Writing" was recently re-released in a tenth-anniversary edition with an updated reading list. The book combines advice about literary technique with two sections of autobiography: the first depicting King’s childhood and his early struggles to become a published author, and the second examining the essential role writing played in his recovery from a road accident that almost killed him during the writing of the book.

Two books titled "The Writing Life," by Annie Dillard and Ellen Gilchrist, explore the practical and emotional challenges of combining art and literary creativity. Dillard, a self-styled “gregarious recluse,” offers an idiosyncratic, witty, and tough-minded approach to a demanding life that deserves to be taken seriously and undertaken with passion. Gilchrist’s collection of essays and meditations on writing, teaching, and editing take a breezier tone and more practical approach to the reality of a working writer.

The novelist, poet, playwright, and memoirist Christopher Isherwood was a central player on the twentieth-century English literary stage. "Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties" is the absorbing tale of his coming of age as a writer, alongside outsized talents like his friend, lover, and collaborator W.H. Auden. The memoir brilliantly evokes the perennial struggle of young writers to throw off the weight of the past and the distractions of the present, in order to find their unique voice.