So if you're on Facebook - and you know you are - there's one of those endless lists floating around, 100 books the BBC (or so this list claims) indicates you should read, that most people haven't read...or something along those lines. The list is, of course, patently ridiculous (Da Vinci Code? Really?) but half the fun is to gripe about it.
Anyway it prompted me to do my own list, considerably shorter, as I am lazy, and it's also kind of short on the old classics. But what of it? Do you REALLY want to read David Copperfield on your days off? No. You don't. No one does. That ship has sailed.
I'm a book editor. I know this stuff.
Here are 50 books, in no particular order, that I think everybody should read, just because they're GOOD, and they do what a book should to your brain. Also, I am bossy. Also there may not exactly be 50, because I have poor math skills (thank you, Broward County public education).
London Fields, Martin Amis
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Persuasion, Jane Austen
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury, W. Faulkner
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
Tourist Season, Carl Hiaasen
Howards End, E.M. Forster
On Beauty, Zadie Smith
Servants of the Map, Andrea Barrett
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Widow for One Year, John Irving
Close Range, Annie Proulx
Possession, A.S. Byatt
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
The Last Good Kiss, James Crumley (best opening line in the English language0
John Adams, David McCullough
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz (it really IS as great as they say)
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides (Memo to Jeff: For the love of God, write another one)
We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates (it's accessible! I swear!)
Emperor of the Air: Stories, Ethan Canin
Childhood: A Biography of a Place, Harry Crews
Experience, Martin Amis
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
Desert Solitude, Edward Abbey
A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding (don't knock this book. I wish I'd written it.)
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Continental Drift, Russell Banks
Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (will change your mind about graphic novels)
Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb
Voyage of the Narwhal, Andrea Barrett
Peace Like a River, Leif Enger (have yet to meet someone who didn't love this)
The Once and Future King, TH White
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Louise Erdrich
Cross Creek, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The Anna Papers, Ellen Gilchrist
What opening line can compete with "It is a truth universally acknowledged ..."?
Posted by: Bibliophile | February 18, 2009 at 08:53 AM
as i lay dying? you're KILLING me. i'd rather read david copperfield. my mother is a fish!
Posted by: Jill Cassidy | February 18, 2009 at 02:59 PM
White Teeth?? Did you have to do it? Wasn't On Beauty enough to represent Zadie Smith??
Posted by: SilviaC | February 18, 2009 at 04:04 PM
Hah! Glad to see that Jill and I use the same argument against As I Lay Dying. "My mother is a fish." Again, why not let The Sound and the Fury represent Faulkner?
Posted by: SilviaC | February 18, 2009 at 04:08 PM
Ha! I don't have to be the first one to flag the double dose of Zadie Smith. I will, however, be the first to note the inexplicable absence of anything by Michael Chabon (Kavalier & Klay? Yiddish Policeman's Union?) and the (slightly more explicable) absence of David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas? Ghostwritten?).
Very glad, however, that you finally got on the Oscar Wao bandwagon.
Posted by: Matt Pinzur | February 19, 2009 at 09:05 AM
I don't understand how you knuckleheads can't understand what "My mother is a fish" means. KNUCKLEHEADS.
I thought about Chabon and might've put K&K on there but for the annoying Antarctica bits. I really liked it except for that. Yiddish was also under consideration and could easily be on there (though I seem to have loved that book more than most people).
David Mitchell is easy: I haven't read him. Cloud Atlas is on the list, though.
Silvia: Light in August really deserves a spot too, I know...
Posted by: cogle | February 19, 2009 at 09:32 AM
As I Lay Dying is a brilliant book.
Posted by: patrick | February 19, 2009 at 04:07 PM