Ron Charles recently reviewed Hillary Jordan's novel Mudbound, which had won the Bellwether Prize for "socially responsible" fiction. Ron didn't much like the book, which for his taste was too preachy and predictable.

What turned him off seems to be exactly what turned on Barbara Kingsolver, who established the prize to encourage literature that advocates for "positive social change." As the prize's Web site explains, "The mere description of an injustice, or of the personal predicament of an exploited person, without any clear position of social analysis invoked by the writer, does not in itself constitute socially responsible literature."

Reading the criteria for the Bellwether Prize got me thinking about the line between morality and moralizing, righteousness and self-righteousness.

Writing that is overtly, intentionally "socially responsible" is hard to oppose in theory, but it's hard to like in practice. I resist any resounding social commentary that is spoon fed to me: It's not that simple, I think to myself, or if it is that simple, it's not interesting.

And yet, I've been moved by books, both fiction and non-fiction, that are full of righteous indignation, have clear moral messages and seem aimed at "positive social change." Here's a list of five (as always) and some thoughts on how they broke through my resistance. Which overtly, intentionally "socially responsible" books have you loved, and which have you despised?

1. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
I read Sinclair's blood-and-sweat soaked description of the meatpacking industry in Mrs. Jones's ninth grade social studies class. I had not really given a thought to where meat came from or to the people who produced it, other than farmers. I was shocked not just by Sinclair's descriptions (some of which I assumed were no longer true) but by my ignorant, callous, blithe dependence on people and conditions far away. I re-live those feelings of guilt and vulnerability every time I read about fish farming, factory work and chemical production in China.

2. Hiroshima, by John Hersey
What socially responsible theme could be more obvious, and therefore uninteresting, than that atomic warfare is a horror to be avoided? Even at 14 or 15, when I first read Hersey's book, the underlying message was no revelation. But I challenge anyone to come away from Hersey's book unmoved. Survivors' stories, simply told, with little of Hersey's voice but all of his journalistic attachment to detail and his novelistic talent for pacing. It's still the closest one can come to being there in 1945. Still the best argument for nuclear disarmament.

3. Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, by James Carroll
A former Catholic priest, now a Boston Globe columnist, Carroll examines his own conscience along with the history of Christian anti-Semitism. I've seen Carroll attacked as anti-Catholic, but that makes no sense to me. What comes across in the book is his deep love for the church, which for him necessitates a deep examination of its historical role in anti-Semitism. It clearly is not easy or comfortable for Carroll to think about the church and the Holocaust; I found the book an exemplar of hard introspection.

4. Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, by Matthew Scully
I did not expect this book to move me, but it nearly turned me into a vegetarian. Were I a better person, it would have.

Scully was a speechwriter for President Bush from 2001 to 2004. Dominion, which takes its title from the Bible, is a religious argument for better treatment of animals. You might think it would be easy to dismiss Scully's argument either as irrelevant to non-believers or as the sheer sentimentality of a man who never got over the loss of his childhood dog.

You would be wrong. The way we treat animals is wrong; Scully has me convinced.

5. Standard Operating Procedure, by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
I'm now reading this detailed account of the events and personalities behind the Abu Ghraib torture photographs. The whole episode is still appalling, of course, but it's also becoming more understandable -- not rational, not excusable, but no longer unthinkably bizarre. For one thing, I'm beginning to get a sense of who the prisoners were and what they were thinking. The one who haunts me is the one who turned the psychological tables on his captors by intentionally inflicting on himself all the humiliation they doled out; if they rammed hooded prisoners against a wall, for example, he rammed his own head against the wall with his eyes wide open, wearing no hood.

-- Alan Cooperman

We're becoming more and more wedded to genres: labeling books as mystery, literary fiction, Western chick-lit, travel, American history and so on, while expecting them to live up to expectations and abide by boundaries.

But some of my favorite books defy easy pigeonholing -- and may be the better for it.

1. The Ring and the Book, by Robert Browning (1869).
No doubt about it - this is poetry, taken to great lengths. But it's a narrative poem about a murder and subsequent trial in medieval Florence that strongly resembles a novel, and one far ahead of its time. The closest 20th-century analogue is probably "Rashomon," Akira Kurosawa's classic film about a killing as seen by various witnesses and participants. Browning pioneered that technique in this work, which might be called a novel in verse form told from multiple viewpoints.

2. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West (1941).
Originally published in two volumes, this 1,200-page masterpiece has the lineaments of a travel book on what became (but did not remain) Yugoslavia, but it is much more. One of its many set-pieces, for example, is a thrilling 30-page history of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo - the catalyst for World War I. The book also partakes of philosophy, psychology, political science and art criticism, all laid out in West's scintillating prose.

3. The Devils of Loudun, by Aldous Huxley (1952).
This is ostensibly an account of a sensational 17th-century case in France, where a convent of nuns charged one of its confessors with being an agent of the devil. It's a lurid story, expertly told, but also a platform on which Huxley makes use of the decades he spent studying the world's religions and fashioning a personal creed.

4. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, by Wallace Stegner (1954).
The literal-minded will want to call this a biography of the one-armed Civil War veteran who rafted down the Colorado River and went on to head the U.S. Geological Survey. But it's also a work of environmental philosophy in which what interests Stegner most about Powell is his visionary notion of how the West should be divided up - according to watersheds, as suited its dry climate, rather than by the squared-off surveying that had shaped the more temperate East. According to Stegner, Powell's failure to make himself heard (when he gave speeches warning Western farmers of the minimal rainfall they could expect to make do with year after year, they booed him) doomed the West to a "half-century of exploitation and waste."

5. Young Men and Fire, by Norman Maclean (1992).
Reviewing this superb book for The Post when it first came out, I compared it to Moby-Dick. That may sound like hyperbole, but I stand by it. Though less of a grab-bag than Melville's novel, this true story of a Montana wildfire and the 12 smoke jumpers killed by it embodies an obsession in which a wildfire becomes rather like the great white whale. Young Men and Fire is a model of journalistic fact-finding, a meditation on the nature of fire and a compelling story all rolled into one.

Please add your own nominations for memorable books that defy categorization.

-- Dennis Drabelle

I was a fanciful child, desperate for the romance and adventure that seemed far away from the suburban sprawl of Reno, Nevada, where I grew up. So when I read books, I read them hungrily, eating up the details of places and times distant from my own. If I loved a book, I'd imagine myself into the plot (as the brave, witty, preternaturally wise heroine, of course). There were some books that I would read over and over again, just to get myself back into them. It's that intense reading experience that I miss as an adult. Here's the list of books I wanted (and still do) to climb into:

1. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Okay, this brands me as an all-time geek, and not very original either, but I read this trilogy to pieces. The cover came off, the pages started to crumble, while I strode across Middle-earth as some magical combination of elf warrior and woman wizard.

2. The Dragon Riders of Pern, by Anne McCaffrey. Even geekier than Tolkien, this science-fiction series features fire-breathing dragons and their telepathic riders using flames to prevent "thread," a destructive spore, from consuming the planet. Literature, it ain't. But one night when I was around 12, I dreamt myself onto Pern and for the rest of the week tried to sleep in exactly the same way as I had during the dream. No luck, just some painful cricks in my neck.

3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis. In this, the third book in the Narnia series, Lucy and Edmund and their unpleasant cousin Eustace sail with Prince Caspian (now king) to the end of the Narnian world. The thing is, this time the children get into Narnia, not through a wardrobe, but through a picture of a ship that comes to life. I swear that my grandmother had a picture that perfectly matched the cover of my copy of the book. But try as I might, I could not get her ship to sail.

4. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Another book I read to pieces. I wanted to be clever and quick with a comeback like Elizabeth Bennett and wear Empire-waist dresses and dance at balls. Now, I think how terrible it must have been to have one's whole financial well-being hinge on marrying well, but such sober thoughts didn't cross my mind back then.

5. Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I wanted to live on Prince Edward Island, with its lush gardens and cozy cottages, so very different from the brown sagebrush hills that surrounded my town. I wanted to have the intense friendships, and inspire the intense feelings, that Anne did. And I wanted to ride in a wagon down the White Way of Delight, when all the blossoms were in bloom.

I bet I'm not the only one with an over-heated imagination. Which books did (or do) you want to climb into?

-- Rachel Hartigan Shea

Ah, April -- whatever else it is ("cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain," per T.S. Eliot, or the month that "put a spirit of youth in everything," per Shakespeare, or "wet contentious April," as Thomas Carlyle thought), it's also National Poetry Month, inaugurated 12 years ago by the Academy of American Poets. Those poets and poetry-lovers may have had ulterior motives, but bless them for establishing this month-long celebration in the hope that, as the Academy asserts on its Web site, a National Poetry Month lessens the effect if Eliot's right in his judgment.

For me, poetry is personal. I read a range of it and always want more. I often pick poems by their titles, just as I sometimes choose a book by its cover. I have a long list of poets whom I love either because one poem spoke to me or the entire body of their work speaks volumes -- Edwin Arlington Robinson, Theodore Roethke, Gwendolyn Brooks, Dylan Thomas, John Greenleaf Whittier, Deborah Garrison, Mary Oliver, William Butler Yeats. To use an appropriate cliché, the list goes on. But here are five (I'm being forced to choose, but if I were to make this list tomorrow, I might well choose others) who have staying power for me. Their words, their rhymes (in some cases), their thinking, their power have stayed with me over time. They're listed here roughly in the order in which I came to know them.

1. Robert Frost: I might have read Frost earlier than the 8th grade but I remember that it was Mrs. Raach, my fearless leader of a teacher who led us into new lands, including grammar and language and poetry. It was likely in those hallowed junior high halls that I discovered "Mending Wall," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Death of the Hired Man." I will never forget my first reading of that welcome definition "'Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in."

2. ee cummings: It's not surprising that I first fell into cummings at a time when I was in love with love itself, and that I should come back to cummings's love poems (and all his others) again and again. I loved the little I knew about him, especially that from the time he was 8 until he was in his early 20s, he wrote a poem a day. I first read him in college and he seemed to have a vitality that I was drawn to -- the very words had energy. He experimented and didn't pay attention to rules, which I liked and admired but was too risk averse to seriously try. I find I misquote him as often as not, but I always like what I misremember.

3. Edna St. Vincent Millay: I first read Millay at a time when I was burning my own candle at both ends, so naturally her work resonated with me. Look at any of her lyrical collections - A Few Figs from Thistles, Second April (appropriate now), Wine from These Grapes -- but a good place to start is with The Harp-Weaver, and Other Poems, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. So many of her first lines pull me right into the poem and hold me -- for example, "I will put Chaos into fourteen lines," "all I could see from where I stood," and "Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike." She somehow encouraged me with lines like "Oh, the things I haven't seen and the things I haven't known." I read her still.

4. Billy Collins: The mischievous but wise Billy Collins is a poet who writes what I call "real world" poetry - that is, he's someone I recommend to my friends who think you need an interpreter to explain anything that falls under the poetry rubric. His are poems for people who don't want to read footnotes; it's understandable stuff from which you can easily, without working up a sweat, draw your own conclusions. Collins, who was the 11th U.S. poet laureate (in 2001) is kind of the rock star of poetry, giving readings to full houses of adoring fans. Start with "Forgetfulness" from his 2001 collection, Sailing Alone Around the Room, and sail on from there.

Jack Prelutsky, the nation's first children's poet laureate. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

5. Jack Prelutsky: Prelutsky, who in 2006 was named America's first children's poet laureate, plays with words, and anyone who has read him or heard him read can play along. He just makes you laugh, reason enough to rhyme. I first read him when I picked out some of his books for my kids -- Ride a Purple Pelican was maybe our favorite, although it's a close call, with several vying for the top spot. He writes great nonsense rhymes, which, oddly, often make great sense. His Web site notes that as a youth, he didn't like poetry because a teacher "left me with the impression that poetry was the literary equivalent of liver. I was told it was good for me, but I wasn't convinced." Well, I'm convinced that his poetry is good for me. Prelutsky's been called "one of poetry's bad boys." If so, we want more from this bad boy.

Which poets have staying power for you?

-- Evelyn Small