Forget the bestseller list—we’re stacking our to-read pile with novels in which cars are the main characters.

IT WAS A MEDIOCRE BOOK, the kind you pick up at the airport and forget by the time you get to baggage claim. I couldn't tell you the plot, but I can tell you which cars were in it. I remember because they were unusual models: an Oldsmobile 442, a Dodge Shelby Charger, and a '73 Plymouth Road Runner.

- ELANA SCHERR

I tried to ask the author what prompted his choices, but he must have been busy working on the sequel, because he never responded. Maggie Stiefvater, another author whose novels tend to involve a car or two, was more enthusiastic to chat. Her most recent book, The Listeners, charmed me by having not only several dachshunds but also a Pierce-Arrow limo. Her best-known works, a series called the Raven Cycle, feature several memorable cars, including a second-generation Camaro that regularly leaves teenage protagonist Gansey stranded.

“I had a 1973 Camaro at the time,” Stiefvater tells me. “Every time it broke down, I would make Gansey break down in the book.” She eventually had to stop giving her character car problems. “They were never getting anywhere,” she explains.

But Gansey’s unreliable Chevrolet isn’t just an affectionate tribute to Stiefvater’s. “It’s an amplifier,” she says. “It says something about the character that he drives this kind of car, that he wants to build something from the ground up.”

A car can add so much character to a character.