Newsweek is out with a variation of the “books you should read” list. Rather than simply a best of list, the magazine says its Fifty Books for Our Times “open a window on the times we live in.” I’m still struggling with how a couple of the choices, particularly the first, made the list — but since I haven’t read them I can’t say the description supporting the selection in the magazine is wrong.
Here’s the list, with the ones I’ve read in bold:
- The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
- The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
- Prisoner of the State, Zhao Ziyang
- The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr
- The Bear, William Faulkner
- Winchell, Neal Gabler
- Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
- Night Draws Near, Anthony Shadid
- Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
- God: A Biography, Jack Miles
- The Unsettling Of America, Wendell Berry
- A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor
- Underground, Haruki Murakami
- Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen
- Air Guitar, Dave Hickey
- Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
- The Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin
- City: Rediscovering The Center, William H. Whyte
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
- Benjamin Franklin, Edmund S. Morgan
- The Mississippi Books, Mark Twain
- Among the Thugs, Bill Buford
- Brooklyn, Colm Toibin
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
- Bad Mother, Ayelet Waldman
- Guests of the Ayatollah, Mark Bowden
- Whittaker Chambers, Sam Tanenhaus
- Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
- American Prometheus, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
- The Lost, Daniel Mendelsohn
- Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
- Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris
- Kim, Rudyard Kipling
- Walking With the Wind, John Lewis
- The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst
- The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
- Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
- Underworld, Don DeLillo
- Why Evolution is True, Jerry A. Coyne
- American Pastoral, Philip Roth
- The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan
- The Regeneration Trilogy, Pat Barker
- Senator Joe McCarthy, Richard H. Rovere
- Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
- Gone Tomorrow, Lee Child
- Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
- American Journeys, Don Watson
- Cotton Comes To Harlem, Chester Himes
- The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson
It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time in which to read them.
Arthur Schopenhauer, “The Art of Literature”
Gilead and Among the Thugs. Two down, 48 to go.
I thought I was pretty well read–I have read only one on this list–American Pastoral. I've never even heard of some of these. Have I been wasting my time reading schlock?!?
Actually, looking at the list again, I've also read Things Fall Apart-Both this and American Pastoral were powerful books.
I've seen American Pastoral on several "best of" lists and your mention of it yesterday led me to reserve it at the library. That way, I'll have it for the long weekend.
In just the pst few days, I've seen several references to an author Philip Dick. Have you read any of his stuff? What's it like?
PKD is a SF writer from the late '50s into the '70s. I enjoy much of his work, particularly his short stories, although several of his last few novels are more than a bit confusing (he had a series of "visions" in 1974). His books and short stories have been the basis for the movies Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and Paycheck. His worlds are somewhat dystopian and often explore what is "reality",If you like SF, you'dl probably like him. If not a huge fan, I'd suggest one of the collections of his short stories. Otherwise, the Library of America has published three collections of his novels or you might try The Man in the High Castle, which won the Hugo Award, or Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.
I've seen all those movies and liked them — especially Blade Runner. I think I will have to read something of his! Thanks so much for the info!
Yes. Thank god for Twain and Trollope, else I’d never understand the modern world. (blink. blink.)
That’s definitely a list of fifty good books (from what I can tell), but the selection criteria is a bit woolly.