Saturday, July 20, 2013

List of 50 Books Everybody Ought to Read

Flavorwire has a list of "The 50 Books Everyone Needs to Read, 1963-2013" one per year:
1963 — The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
1964 — Herzog, Saul Bellow (begun but never finished)
1965 – The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
1966 – Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
1967 — The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov (I've seen part of a TV series based on it.)
1968 — Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
1969 — I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
1970 – Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume
1971 – The Complete Stories, Flannery O’Connor
1972 – Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
1973 – Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (It's on my to-be-bought list.)
1974 – The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
1975 – The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux
1976 – Speedboat, Renata Adler
1977 – The Shining, Stephen King (I liked the movie.)
1978 – The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
1979 – The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
1980 – Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
1981 – Outside Over There, Maurice Sendak
1982 – The Color Purple, Alice Walker
1983 – Cathedral, Raymond Carver
1984 – Money, Martin Amis
1985 – The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
1986 – Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
1987 – Beloved, Toni Morrison
1988 – Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
1989 – Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
1990 – The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
1991 – Possession, A.S. Byatt
1992 – The Secret History, Donna Tartt
1993 – The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
1994 – The Ice Storm, Rick Moody
1995 – Sabbath’s Theater, Philip Roth
1996 – Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (on my to-be-bought list, it's #10 on the list of longest English-language novels)
1997 – Underworld, Don DeLillo
1998 – Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
1999 – Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
2000 – Pastoralia, George Saunders
2001 – Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
2002 – Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
2003 – The Known World, Edward P. Jones
2004 – The Epicure’s Lament, Kate Christensen
2005 – Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
2006 – The Road, Cormac McCarthy (much over-rated, imo)
2007 – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
2008 – Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser
2009 – Lit: A Memoir, Mary Karr
2010 – A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
2011 – Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan
2012 – Building Stories, Chris Ware
2013 – The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner
The few I've read are in bold print. Some on this list are collections of essays or short stories, and I prefer novels.

HT: SF Signal

6 comments:

  1. I have only read 4 The Shining,The Road, Middlesex, and The Handmaid's tale.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. i've heard the shining is good, and i want to read it. i found the hoopla over "the road" annoying. it was like literary critics had never seen anything like it before. it was a fine story but hardly unique in the annals of literature :/

      Delete
  2. I kind of liked the Road but I like end of the world scenario's

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. yes, i liked the road, too for your same reason. it just irritated me that the critics treated it as something new and different. i haven't seen the film yet.

      Delete
  3. I think I'm relatively "we'll read" but Lots of titles here I never heard of, much less read!

    ReplyDelete