Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell narrates Jonathan Safran Foer's novel a year after his father was killed in the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Oskar is an inventor, a Francophile, a tambourine player and a pacifist who writes letters to Stephen Hawking and Ringo Starr. In his father's closet he finds a key in an envelope inside a vase and begins a secret hunt across all five boroughs for the lock it opens, meeting New Yorkers who are each survivors in their own way. The novel became a New York Times best seller and a film directed by Stephen Daldry.

Bryan Callen, co-host of The Fighter and the Kid, included it in his Top Three Must Reads recommendations.