The 75 Books Every Man Should Read
I've died and gone to heaven.If you've been wasting your time reading this blog same as I've been wasting time writing it, you should already know how much I love the silly "Best of..." "Top 10..." lists.
This time I have a doozy -- The 75 Books Every Man Should Read, as compiled by my favorite magazine, Esquire. If you're a woman, tough -- go find your own list. This one is ours.
It's gratifying to see that I have already read many of these books (exactly six). And though I would have liked to see other favorite books on this list, I can't disagree with the inclusion of those I've already read. So this must be a pretty damned good list.
When I include books from this list that my wife, BalticTiger, has read, AND books that my eldest son, VonEldest, has read, well, then I begin to almost feel good about Our Well-Read Family. Plus, my youngest son, GoganTheDrummer, is currently reading one of these books as part of a high school journalism class assignment (#59, which is a primo example of "New Journalism".)
I'm gonna wade into this list myself since the library should have most of them. The library is about five blocks away from our home, and my architecture firm is running a bit slow right now owing to Great Depression II that most of us are currently enjoying.
Anyway, here's the list. How many have YOU read? (No Cheating! -- and movies don't count...)
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver
- Collected Stories of John Cheever
- Deliverance, by James Dickey
- The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
- Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
- The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Known World, by Edward P. Jones
- The Good War, by Studs Terkel
- American Pastoral, by Philip Roth
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O'Connor
- The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
- A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter
- The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
- Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis
- A Sense of Where You Are, by John McPhee
- Hell's Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson
- Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
- Dubliners, by James Joyce
- Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
- The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
- Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone
- Winter's Bone, by Daniel Woodrell
- Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison
- Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry
- The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
- The Professional, by W.C. Heinz
- For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
- Dispatches, by Michael Herr
- Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
- Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates
- As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
- The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
- Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
- All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
- Sophie's Choice, by William Styron
- A Fan's Notes, by Frederick Exley
- Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
- Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian
- Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
- A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
- Affliction, by Russell Banks
- This Boy's Life, by Tobias Wolff
- Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin
- The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
- Women, by Charles Bukowski
- Going Native, by Stephen Wright
- Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
- The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John LeCarré
- The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders
- War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
- The Shining, by Stephen King
- Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
- Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
- Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
- Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
- The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe
- The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
- American Tabloid, by James Ellroy
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley
- What It Takes, by Richard Ben Cramer
- The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett
- The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
- So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell
- Native Son, by Richard Wright
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans
- Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
- The Great Bridge, by David McCullough
- The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac
- Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
- Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
- Underworld, by Don DeLillo
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
posted by Howard at 4:00 PM
6 Comments:
Nice list! I have read eight so far and several have been on my list forever (how can I have made it to my 50's without having read Huck Finn?).
I'm in at 10. Tho I'm a little surprised at "The Crack Up" by F Scott Fitzgerald over "The Great Gatsby"
Yeah, The Crack-Up DID seem a bit suspicious. So I looked up what Esquire had to say about it:
"Because Fitzgerald knew Lindsay, Britney and the Olsens better than we do. (And because it was first published in Esquire.)"
Ah ha!
I have to add that if I could count movies made from these 75 books, I've seen 20 of them on the big screen. But again, movies don't count.
I AM INDEED THE MOST MANNED UP WOMAN IN THE UNIVERSE!
OMG. I cannot believe this. I have read:
14 (that is FOURTEEN)
of these books! I do not know how many movies I have seen because I really don't "do" movies. I definitely have not seen most of these 14 books' movie versions.
I am in shock. Better go shave my back for awhile. I am SUCH a man! hahahaha!
I remember reading 18 of these, but I am an old guy and don't cycle as much as you. Will be in that fabulous blue state of yours the next two weekends (eg through Thanksgiving)....if there are any Hypoxian rides let me know.....also got in the MS150 again this year...HoustonXtrain
Yeah, sure, every new comment just keeps listing higher and higher numbers. By next week, we'll have posters claiming to have read all 75... multiple times! Damned old people!
Actually, I made it over to the branch library near our home this morning with a list of 15 of the most promising books. The library had exactly.... TWO! So I grabbed them -- The Sportswriter by Richard Ford and The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer.
Xtrain,
The weekend before Thanksgiving, I'll be down in Tucson for the el Tour de Tucson. However, there ARE plans for a Club Hypoxia ride on Friday after Thanksgiving. I think I have your email (at least I SHOULD!), and I'll let you know the details when I hear them (or make them up) myself.
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