28 Books You Should Read If You Want To

Lists Notable Articles
February 18, 2014 | 46 3 min read

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Earlier this month Amazon released a list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime. It joins Esquire’s 80 Books Every Man Should Read, The Telegraph’s 100 Novels Everyone Should Read, Huffington Post’s more manageable 30 Books You Should Read Before You’re 30, and The Guardian’s ambitious and inflexible 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read.

These lists serve a purpose if you’re Jay Gatsby furnishing a library or if you’ve, say, just arrived from Mars and have no knowledge of Earth books. What they miss is that one of the greatest rewards of a reading life is discovery. In my 10 years working at bookstores, no one ever came in and asked me what they should read before their death — they would ask me what my favorite book was, or if there were any great new books no one was talking about, or they would just want me to leave them alone so they could explore on their own.

I discovered one of my favorite books because the author called our store and charmed the living daylights out of me. I found another in a box of old books that my Russian literature professor left outside his office to give away. So while I do think that you should read the canon if it interests you, I think it’s more important that you read the books that find their own way into your hands.

With that in mind, here is my list of books you should read (if you want to):

You should read the book that you hear two booksellers arguing about at the registers while you’re browsing in a bookstore.

You should read the book that you see someone on the train reading and trying to hide that they’re laughing.

You should read the book that you see someone on the train reading and trying to hide that they’re crying.

You should read the book that you find left behind in the airplane seat pocket, on a park bench, on the bus, at a restaurant, or in a hotel room.

You should read the book that you see someone reading for hours in a coffee shop — there when you got there and still there when you left — that made you envious because you were working instead of absorbed in a book.

You should read the book you find in your grandparents’ house that’s inscribed “To Ray, all my love, Christmas 1949.”

You should read the book that you didn’t read when it was assigned in your high school English class. You’d probably like it better now anyway.

You should read the book whose author happened to mention on Charlie Rose that their favorite band is your favorite band.

You should read the book that your favorite band references in their lyrics.

You should read the book that your history professor mentions and then says, “which, by the way, is a great book,” offhandedly.

You should read the book that you loved in high school. Read it again.

You should read the book that you find on the library’s free cart whose cover makes you laugh.

You should read the book whose main character has your first name.

You should read the book whose author gets into funny Twitter exchanges with Colson Whitehead.

You should read the book about your hometown’s history that was published by someone who grew up there.

You should read the book your parents give you for your high school graduation.

You should read the book you’ve started a few times and keep meaning to finish once and for all.

You should read books with characters you don’t like.

You should read books about countries you’re about to visit.

You should read books about historical events you don’t know anything about.

You should read books about things you already know a little about.

You should read books you can’t stop hearing about and books you’ve never heard of.

You should read books mentioned in other books.

You should read prize-winners, bestsellers, beach reads, book club picks, and classics, when you want to.

You should just keep reading.

Image via Abee5/Flickr

is a staff writer for The Millions. Janet is a freelance writer and semi-professional baker living in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in The Awl, The AV Club, the Chicago Reader, and Chicago Magazine. She is the co-host of YouTube's The Book Report and blogs about presidential biographies at At Times Dull. Follow her @sojanetpotter.

Lists

Before They Were Notable: 2016

Lists
November 24, 2016

This year’s New York Times Notable Books of the Year list is out. At 100 titles, the list is more of a catalog of the noteworthy than a distinction. Sticking with the fiction exclusively, it appears that we touched upon a few of these books and authors as well:

The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan (I Want Complete Freedom When I Write: An Interview with Karan Mahajan)
Barkskins by Annie Proulx (A Summer Reading List for Wretched Assholes Who Prefer to Wallow in Someone Else’s Misery)
Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein (Humanity’s Dogged Endurance: On Alexander Weinstein’s Children of the New World)
Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer (A Year in Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer)

The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay (Martin Seay’s The Mirror Thief as Explained by Martin Seay)
Moonglow by Michael Chabon (Two Kinds of Aboutness: The Millions Interviews Michael Chabon)
Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams (50 Reasons Why You Should Read Joy Williams)
Nutshell by Ian McEwan (The Body Doesn’t Lie: On Ian McEwan’s Nutshell)

 

Still Here by Laura Vapnyar (Making Strange: On Laura Vapnyar’s Still Here)
Swing Time by Zadie Smith (Nameless and Undefined: On Zadie Smith’s Swing Time)
Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Scars That Never Fade: On Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad)
The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Taste Is the Only Morality: On Han Kang’s The Vegetarian)

 

War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans (Brutal and Tender: On Stefan Hertmans’s War and Turpentine)
Zero K by Don DeLillo (The End of the Self Is the End of the Universe)

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Essays Notable Articles

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write ‘The Marriage Plot’

Essays Notable Articles
October 17, 2011 | 24 4 min read

Appropriately, The Marriage Plot arose from an act of literary adultery. In the late 90s, during an impasse in the writing of Middlesex, I put the manuscript aside. (I hadn’t fallen out of love, exactly, but I wasn’t sure where the relationship was headed.) Over the following weeks I began flirting with another novel, not a comic epic like Middlesex but a more traditional story about a wealthy family throwing a debutante party. At first, the new novel seemed to be everything I was looking for. It was less demanding, easy to be with, and rather nicely proportioned. Before I knew it I’d written a hundred pages – at which point the novelty wore off. It dawned on me that this new affair was going to be every bit as demanding as the book I was trying to escape. I missed Middlesex, too. I had an idea why we hadn’t been getting along. And so, with a renewed sense of commitment, almost giddy with joy, I went back to it.

After Middlesex was published, I returned to the debutante novel. Its hundred pages were just as I’d left them. They seemed O.K. However, as I resumed work on the book, something kept bothering me. The novel felt old-fashioned. The writing was perfectly acceptable, even good in spots, but in others it felt lifeless, second-hand. The story was told from multiple points of view, in short sections of a few pages apiece. One of the characters was named Madeleine. As I wrote her section, I began to wander once again. Instead of placing her in my debutante-party plot, I began imagining her boyfriend troubles and the books she was reading, and soon I was straying off into memories of my own college days, when the craze for semiotics was at its height in American universities. Something changed in the prose I was writing as well. I can pinpoint when this shift occurred. It came with the line: “Madeleine’s love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love.” The tone of this sentence differed from the tone of the rest of the book. It was more intimate, more colloquial, and more knowing. All at once, the fustiness of the book that had so displeased me dropped away. The debutante novel had felt like an actual 19th-century novel. It smelled like an old couch brought back from the flea market. In contrast, Madeleine’s section felt fresher, more energetic and alive. It sprung directly from concerns and details in my own life. When the narrative ceased to be a pallid replica of a 19th-century novel and became a novel about a young woman obsessed with the 19th-centry novel, and about what such an obsession does to her romantic expectations, the book jumped forward a century. It became contemporary and sounded contemporary and allowed me to write about all kinds of things I hadn’t been able to write about before, religion and Mother Teresa, manic depression, the class system as it operated at an Eastern university in the 1980s, Roland Barthes, J.D. Salinger, the Jesus Prayer, and Talking Heads. Pretty soon, I had over a hundred pages of this new section.

The irony was clear: here I was, cheating on a novel that had once been my mistress! Madeleine’s section just kept getting longer. The longer it got, the more I liked it. Over the course of a painful two weeks, I surgically separated the two manuscripts, taking out three of the characters – Madeleine, Mitchell, and Leonard – and giving them their own book.

I didn’t know, at that point, that the book would be called The Marriage Plot, or that it would have anything to do with marriage. But gradually, as I pushed forward with the book, other things I’d been thinking about began to make their way in. In 2004, for the online magazine Slate, I had discussed the legacy of Joyce with the novelist Jim Lewis. During that exchange, I lamented the fact that the marriage plot, which had given rise to the novel, was no longer available to the modern novelist. In my book The Marriage Plot, I put these slightly reactionary thoughts into the mouth of Madeleine’s elderly thesis director, Professor Saunders:
In Saunders’s opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter who Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn’t mean anything anymore, and neither did the novel.
It didn’t happen right away. But as I wrote about my three undergraduates, describing the end of their time at university and the beginning of their adult lives, such academic thoughts as these attached themselves to my story and provided me with a solid structure for the book. Instead of writing a marriage plot, I could deconstruct one and then put it back together, consistent with the religious, social, and sexual conventions prevailing today. I could write a novel that wasn’t a marriage plot but that, in a certain way, was; a novel that drew strongly from tradition without being at all averse to modernity.

That’s the intellectual background of The Marriage Plot. But you don’t write a novel from an idea, or at least I don’t. You write a novel out of the emotional and psychological stuff that you can’t shake off, or don’t want to. For me, this had to do with memories with being young, bookish, concupiscent, and confused. Safely in my 40s, married and a father, I could look back on the terrifying ecstasy of college love, and try to re-live it, at a safe distance. It was deep winter in Chicago when all this happened. Every day I looked out my office window at snow swirling over Lake Michigan. After separating the two books, I put one in a drawer and kept the other on my desk. I ran off with The Marriage Plot and didn’t look back. I changed completely, became a different person, a different writer; I started a new life with a new love, and all without ever leaving home.

Essays Notable Articles
| 24 4 min read
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46 comments:

  5. Marcia Muller writes a series of mystery novels about a private investigator named Sharon McCone. They’re pretty good, too.

  7. “You should read books mentioned in other books.”

    I did that. I’ve started reading classic Russian literature after Hemingway recommended it in his books. Once I got there I never went back to Hemingway, and that I do not regret.

  8. Maybe it should be books to think about rather than books to read.

    Of course you can’t think much about a book if you haven’t read it.

    But I have read many books that I decided weren’t worth thinking about and therefore were not worth reading. The trouble is I didn’t know until after I had read them.

    Lord of the Rings was not worth reading. The Door into Summer by Robert Heinlein is worth thinking about.

  9. The only book i have come across where the main character shares my name is Rape, A love story by Joyce Carol Oates. It was actually quite a disconcerting experience,maybe not shared by people with common names who see their name in books all the time.

  13. Diving into a book from the library I came across the previous reader’s return ticket for several books. Feeling the karma I checked out two and that’s how I found Geek Love and The Dinner. Good reads I had not heard of before. You never know how inspiration hits

  15. Good list!!! And also the first list that doesn’t make you feel that if you haven’t read a certain book then you have not read anything. Of course to add to it the books you dhould read that you haven’t heard about before but two of your friends just keep arguing about it. :-D

  16. I do read ALL the time……when we go on a trip I buy paperbacks, I read them and then leave them wherever I am. Love them.

  17. Best List Ever. Thank you.

    (Discovered Scott Turow as I was sitting across from a woman on a train who was reading the last few pp. of Presumed Innocent faster and faster the closer we got to the terminal and then whispered, “Ooh . . . shit!!”)

  18. Definitely read the one where the main character has your own name, in fact I was named after Bronwyn in How Green Was My Valley

  19. Yes! Some of my favorite books are the ones I’ve stumbled upon. I love stopping into a small bookshop and asking for a recommendation. Also, when I go to someone’s house for the first time, I always check out their shelves.

  20. I found one of my favorite books because it had been reserved at the library for someone with the same name. I picked up the four books I reserved and when I got home, I saw this other book, “St. Dale” by Sharyn McCrumb. It had just come out and I’m sure the other “Gigs” was anxious to have it, but I read the jacket and thought, “Well, that sounds right up my alley!” I read it in two days and returned it to the library with a note to the other “Gigs” both apologizing for picking up her book and thanking her for her excellent taste.

  22. Yes, yes. It’s all about discovery. Not only the story within the pages but what might fall out. I wrote a column this week about such discoveries — and found new treasures. I told readers I have a 1936 edition of “The Complete Works of O. Henry” that I bought from a pile of books on a picnic table. I later found a four-leaf clover within the pages. After writing this column, I flipped through the thin, fragile pages again last night. I was surprised to discover a total of 28 clovers, pressed and saved. All had four leaves except a few with two. Amazing, yes?

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  27. I once bought a leather-bound, gold-embossed Dickens from the late 1800s for $10, just for its look and feel. It was Dombey & Son, which I’d never heard of. A couple of years later, I thought it would be so cool to hold it in my hands and read it. Whoa! Amazing! Dickens! The happiest of accidents!

  29. Speaking of what books we do and do not hear about: thanks for posting VIDA’s new findings about “Dudesville” magazines that mostly hire male reviewers and mostly publish male books.

    Makes me mad.

  31. Just read ! When I was bored as a child, I would read the ingredients on the ketchup bottle! My mum used to tell me, “Don’t Read ! You’ll get Ideas!'” Just read ! :) It is a gift !

  32. Love this list.

    Would you mind if I turned your words into a poster to put up in my school library? This year’s Book Week Theme in Australia is “Connect to Reading” and (most of) your list would be perfect to support that theme in a school with girls from 3 to 17 years of age. What doesn’t suit the girls should speak volumes to the staff.

    Obviously, I’ll cite the source (currently trying to really reinforce the whole “plagarism is not okay” message with best practise examples) but I understand if your answer is no.

    Either way – fantastic list!

  33. Some of my favorite books that I suggest are ones that get discarded from the local library and get put in the book sale. Just because no one has borrowed them doesn’t mean they aren’t good books, or if they’re falling apart they’ve been read many times and show promise of being loved.

  34. I read Watership Downs because Stephen King mention it in The Stand. Still one of my favs!! (Both actually are).

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  38. The Gutenberg project has just about everything turned into digital. Ot however one would phrase that process. I think that is where I got that Chretian deTroyes Arthurian thing.

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Notable Articles The Future of the Book

Bandaids for Broken Book Sections

Notable Articles The Future of the Book
April 24, 2007 | 5 3 min read

It’s no secret that newspaper book sections are endangered. Earlier this month, the Atlanta Journal Constitution eliminated its book editor position, placing the fate of the paper’s well regarded book section in question. Many are assuming the worst, that the newspaper will eliminate the section entirely. There’s even a petition to protect the AJC book review.With newspapers increasingly under fire from investors as once robust profit margins sag due to unprecedented competition from the Web and other forms of media and entertainment, many of these companies are looking to trim their operations in order to cut down on the costs of newsprint and personnel. Viewed in this light, book sections are dead weight.The problem is that the book section business model is broken. As The Wall Street Journal reported (sub. req.) last month, publishers, the natural advertisers for book sections, don’t spend much on ads because they find the ads to be too expensive or ineffective. This fact puts book sections at a big disadvantage as compared to other parts of the newspaper, all of which must pull their weight. Business sections, for example, do well because the financial profile of their readers inspires a willingness among advertisers to spend big bucks to reach them.The broken business model of book sections has led a number of newspapers to take drastic steps. To this end, the LA Times recently unveiled a combined books/opinion section. The Chicago Tribune, the LA Times’ sister paper, has taken a different tack, announcing that it will move its book section from Sunday to Saturday. The Tribune says that this move will “usher in a new era of the Tribune’s coverage of books, expanding our coverage of books, ideas and the written word throughout the newspaper and across the week.” In addition, “moving the section to Saturday will separate it from the Sunday newspaper, which already is bursting at the seams with essential reading, and make a prominent place for it on a new day of the week.” This is all well and good – and certainly better than eliminating the book section altogether – but as the Chicago Reader noted over a year ago, when the book section switch was originally floated, “Saturday’s press run is some 400,000 copies smaller than Sunday’s. The annual savings in newsprint alone would reach half a million dollars.” When the Tribune realized that stuffing an extra section into the Saturday paper would require them to pay their distributors more, they backed off, and converted the section to tabloid format, another newsprint saver. Seventeen months later, the paper appears to have realized that a switch to Saturday makes financial sense after all.Ultimately, however, none of these measures will be satisfying to book section readers, and the fact is, except perhaps at the New York Times, there is little future for book sections showing up with our Sunday papers. The future of newspapers isn’t in paper, and the same is doubly so for book sections.I’ve been surprised that the many blogs that have decried the disappearance of book sections are the same ones that point out the obsolescence of newspapers – particularly their cultural coverage – in the face of a wealth of online alternatives. If our newspapers are going to be obsolete, our book sections will become obsolete as well. The tricky solution to all of this, of course, is the very medium that continues to beguile newspapers: online. There are still challenges here – as yet online ads don’t pay nearly as well as print – but as book blogs have in some respects shown, there is a big audience for online book coverage, and online allows the discussion of books to break out of the “review” mold that may be contributing to the decline in the viability of newspaper book sections. The important thing to remember, I think, is that the disappearance of book sections isn’t a book section problem, it’s a newspaper industry problem, and the solution to book section woes will come with the solutions to the larger newspaper industry problems.

Notable Articles The Future of the Book
| 5 3 min read
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