- Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
- John Cheever, Collected Stories of John Cheever. (I read something here or there in college, but I barely remember it.)
- James Dickey, Deliverance.
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. (I have read Steinbeck, just not this).
- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
- Edward P. Jones, The Known World.
- Studs Terkel, The Good War.
- Philip Roth, American Pastoral. (This is one of those I honestly could not care less.)
- Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find. (Earlier in life I might have joked she is not looking hard enough. These days, I definitely concur. Then again, a good woman can also be hard to find, which makes one wonder how hard can it be for the good ones to find each other.)
- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried.
- James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime. (To be honest, never heard of this one until this list.)
- Jack London, The Call of the Wild. (Read this as a young lad.)
- Martin Amis, Time's Arrow.
- John McPhee, A Sense of Where You Are.
- Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels.
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.
- James Joyce, Dubliners.
- John Updike, Rabbit, Run.
- James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice.
- Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers.
- Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone. (Another one I never heard of until this list.)
- Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall.
- Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano. (These days, there are quite a few folks I would love to toss into a volcano.)
- Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead.
- W.C. Heinz, The Professional.
- Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bells Toll.
- Michael Herr, Dispatches.
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer.
- Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road.
- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying.
- Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. (I read his Breakfast of Champions.)
- Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men.
- Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
- William Styron, Sophie's Choice.
- Frederick Exley, A Fan's Note. (Another I never heard of, or as we say back in Puerto Rico, "en su casa lo conocen y le guardan comida.")
- Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim.
- Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
- Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander.
- Kent Haruf, Plainsong.
- John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces.
- Russell Banks, Affliction.
- Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life.
- Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale.
- Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March. (Curiously enough, I did know a boy named Augie back in middle school. Thought it was the strangest name ever. No idea if he was named after the titular character here or not.)
- Charles Bukowski, Women.
- Stephen Wright, Going Native.
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
- John LeCarré, The Spy Who Came from the Cold.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up. (I read what most everyone reads by this guy, namely, The Great Gatsby, which personally I did not think was so great.)
- George Sanders, Civilwarland in Bad Decline.
- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
- Stephen King, The Shining. (I have read quite a bit of King, but this is one of the ones I have not read.)
- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio. (Read it somewhere in graduate school. Don't really remember it.)
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick.
- Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children.
- Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (and by the way, I read it in the original Spanish. As the writers in Esquire write about this book: "Packs more into three pages than most writers pack into a career." I think that gives me a pass on the rest of the pretentious tripe and the unheard of items in this list.)
- Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff.
- Richard Ford, The Sportswriter.
- James Ellroy, American Tabloid.
- Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. (This has been on my TBR list for a long time. I need to get to it sometime soon.)
- Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes.
- Dashiell Hammett, The Continental Op. (I have read some of his other stuff, but not this.)
- Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (again, a case of I have read his other stuff. However, unlike Hammett, whom I liked, I could not care less about Greene.)
- William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow.
- Richard Wright, Native Son.
- James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Know Praise Famous Men.
- Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose.
- David McCullough, The Great Bridge. (I have not read any of his books yet. Another bunch of stuff in the TBR list).
- Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (I read his On the Road. I did not care for it, so I have no intention to pick up the other book.)
- Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove.
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita.
- Don DeLillo, Underworld. (I did have to read some DeLillo in graduate school, but I do not recall what the hell it was, which tells you how little an impression he left. Another case of something I was forced to read.)
- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (I read it in sixth grade, along with Tom Sawyer.)
- Don Winslow, Savages.
- Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son.
- Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.
- Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin.
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road.
So I read 9 books and add 13 other authors. Good thing I am fairly secure in my masculinity or I would be worried. If this is what passes for what every man should read, I honestly have to wonder about modern manhood.
2 comments:
Let's see: They're all by men and only 3? of these guys have another language than English as their first language.
When it comes to this list words fail me.....
Eva: Yea, there was that too (the all by men and all, except one or two, in English).
Best, and keep on blogging.
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