A few years back, several people all at once, each unbeknownst to the other, asked me what titles I would recommend to a reader who was starting at "Go." I mulled it over some, thinking about syllabi and reading lists. More importantly, however, I went with my heart and in an hour or so of brainstorming came up with the following list of "Must Reads."
Undoubtedly, you have only to glance down the page before a thousand omissions become apparent. No Shakespeare, for example...but maybe I wouldn't recommend Shakespeare at the starting line; better to run a couple of laps first. Not necessarily thematic or consistent or even rational, this list represents the titles that came to mind that day when I asked myself "What books are you really glad that you have read?"
I hope you will enjoy at least some of these suggestions:
VERY OLD FAVORITES FROM WAY BACK
These were the soul - searchers:
The Fantasticks
by Tom Jones & Harvey Schmidt
Our Town
by Thornton Wilder
The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint Exupery
I Heard the Owl Call My Name
by Margaret Craven
Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert Heinlein
The Water is Wide
by Pat Conroy
MYSTERIES
If you’re in the mood for a thriller,
I think these are all above average:
The Daughter of Time
by Josephine Tey
Summer’s Lease
by John Mortimer
The 7th of July
by Jill McCorkle
Fatal Inversion
by Ruth Rendell
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
Turtle Moon
and
Second Nature
both by Alice Hoffman
The Erasers
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
TRAVEL
As mentioned awhile back,
you should read everything by Bill Bryson;
also these American travelogues:
Blue Highways
and PrairyErth
both by William Least Heat Moon
Mama Makes Up Her Mind
and Sleeping At the Starlite Motel
both by Bailey White
WORLD WAR II
Loss, sadness, and European history:
Badenheim 1939
by Aron Appelfeld
The Tin Drum
by Gunter Grass
War Time Memories
by Louis Begley
The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
How German Is It
by Walter Abish
Hiroshima
by John Hersey
Slaughterhouse Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
The White Hotel
by D. M. Thomas
MISC. WORLD LIT
Nearly all from my classes with
Professor Leonard Orr:
The Metamorphosis
and The Trial
by Franz Kafka
The Wanderer
by Henri Alain-Fournier
Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
Out of Africa
and "Babette's Feast"
both by Isak Dinesen
Kitchen
by Banana Yoshimoto
If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino
AMERICAN STANDARDS
Don't worry, I'm leaving out Moby Dick:
Bartleby, the Scrivener
by Herman Melville
My Antonia
by Willa Cather
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Winesburg, Ohio
by Sherwood Anderson
The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
In Our Time
by Ernest Hemingway
"Appointment in Samara"
by John O’Hara
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
by Tennessee Williams
Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger
MORE RECENT AMERICAN NOVELS
Modern and post-modern despair:
Dangling Man
by Saul Bellow
Miss Lonelyhearts
by Nathanael West
The Universal Baseball Association
by Robert Coover
Edwin Mullhouse
by Steven Millhauser
84 Charing Cross Road
by Helene Hanff
Still Life With Woodpecker
by Tom Robbins
Breakfast of Champions
Cat's Cradle
Slapstick
and Jailbird
all by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Ragtime
by E. L. Doctorow
Bright Lights, Big City
and Brightness Falls
both by Jay McInerney
Moo
by Jane Smiley
A FEW PICKS FROM MY GRAD SCHOOL READING LIST
Modern British and Irish fiction:
Far From the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
Sons and Lovers
The Man Who Died
The Captain’s Doll
all by D. H. Lawrence
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
by Angus Wilson
Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
Hurry On Down
by James Wain
My Strange Quest for Mensonge
by Malcolm Bradbury
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
by George Orwell
The Ice Age
by Margaret Drabble
Dubliners
and Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
by James Joyce
The Third Policeman
by Flann O’Brien
My Left Foot
by Christy Brown
Murder in the Cathedral
by T. S. Eliot
A Man for All Seasons
by Robert Bolt
The Importance of Being Ernest
by Oscar Wilde
SOME SLIGHTLY EARLIER BRITISH LIT
You can substitute other Dickens' titles if you want,
but I preferred these to David Copperfield or Oliver Twist:
A Tale of Two Cities
and Great Expectations
both by Charles Dickens
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
Wonderful list, and I'm going to go back and investigate a few of these I had passed over before (although I've read most). Two recent books I enjoyed were Then We Came To The End, by Joshua Ferris, and Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. I could see that the latter wouldn't be for everyone, but I think it raises some good questions about the role of technology in our lives. Then We Came To The End is a brilliant first novel; I'm dismayed that 49 people on Amazon gave it only one star. There's no accounting for taste, not even mine, so if these don't work for you c'est la vie.
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