READING LISTS ARE arbitrary and capricious, but most people like them, and so do I. My most satisfying secondhand experiences as a reader have come through recommending books, especially to my children. And I will never forget the summer reading lists I created for my sister when she lived with us during college vacations. One day she came in with a worn paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice and said peevishly, “Just tell me now if she marries Mr. Darcy, because if she doesn’t I’m not finishing the book.” How pleased Jane Austen would have been. How pleased I was.
Here are a few arbitrary and capricious suggestions for fellow readers:
10 Big Thick Wonderful Books That
Could Take You a Whole Summer to
Read (but Aren’t Beach Books)
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
Henry and Clara by Thomas Mallon
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
10 Nonfiction Books That Help Us
Understand the World
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
Lenin’s Tomb by David Remnick
Lincoln by David Herbert Donald
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
How We Die by Sherwin Nuland
The Unredeemed Captive by John Demos
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro
10 Books That Will Help a Teenager
Feel More Human
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Lost in Place by Mark Salzman
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? by Peter Hedges
The World According to Garp by John Irving
Bloodbrothers by Richard Price
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
The 10 Books I Would Save in a Fire
(If I Could Save Only 10)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
The Collected Poems of W B. Yeats
The Collected Plays of William Shakespeare
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
10 Books for a Girl Who Is Full of
Beans (or Ought to Be)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Julius: The Baby of the World by Kevin Henkes
Betsy in Spite of Herself by Maud Hart Lovelace
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The BFG by Roald Dahl
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans
Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi, Ruth E. Murray
10 Mystery Novels I’d Most Like to
Find in a Summer Rental
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P. D. James
Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie P. King
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
Dancers in Mourning by Margery Allingham
The Way Through the Woods by Colin Dexter
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey
10 Books Recommended by a Really
Good Elementary School Librarian
The View from Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg
Frindle by Andrew Clements
My Daniel by Pam Conrad
The Houdini Box by Brian Selznick
Good Night, Mr. Tom by Michelle Magorian
No Flying in the House by Betty Brock
My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett
Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye
Mudpies: And Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls by Maijorie Winslow
The Story of May by Mordecai Gerstein
10 Good Book-Club Selections
Fraud by Anita Brookner
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton
The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
Paris Trout by Pete Dexter
Eden Close by Anita Shreve
10 Modern Novels That Made Me
Proud to Be a Writer
The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser
True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
Falconer by John Cheever
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Information by Martin Amis
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
10 of the Books My Exceptionally Well
Read Friend Ben Says He’s Taken the
Most From
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Coming Up for Air by George Orwell
Something of an Achievement by Gwyn Griffin
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham
Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
Heretics by G. K. Chesterton
The Wapshot Chronicles by John Cheever
(With addendum: “Now I can’t believe I settled for that list. What about William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf, or Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris? ”)
10 Books I Just Love to Read, and
Always Will
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Group by Mary McCarthy
The Blue Swallows by Howard Nemerov (poetry)
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Acknowledgments
MOST OF THE books used as source material are acknowledged within the body of this extended essay. But I would like to especially thank Alberto Manguel for his marvelous A History of Reading. Edward de Grazia’s Girls Lean Back Everywhere provides an invaluable education on the issues of literary censorship. I’m also grateful for two reference books, Writing Changes Everything, edited by Deborah Brodie, and The Columbia Book of Quotations, edited by Robert Andrews.
Many dedicated readers helped me think about the issues raised in this book. I would like to thank Eden Ross Lipson, Eugene Kennedy, Una Cadegan, Eden Stewart Eisman at St. Luke’s School in New York City, Carol Miles at the American Booksellers Association, Joyce Meskis of the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, and the members
of the St. David’s book club, who invited me in for coffee and conversation one winter night: M. Karen Redmond, Maud Walker, Joyce Guyer, Sylvia Severance, Patricia Graham, Jeanne McGuigan, Diane O’Hara, Jean Welz, Ann Crapo, Linda Edie, Margaret Murphy, Phyllis Hughes.
As always, Kate Medina and Amanda Urban make everything possible for me professionally. And personally there are Janet Maslin and Ben Cheever, Quin, Christopher, Maria, and Gerry Krovatin.
A special thank-you to teachers and librarians. If not you, not me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANNA QUINDLEN is the author of the national bestseller, A Short Guide to a Happy Life, and three bestselling novels. Her New York Times column “Public and Private” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and a selection of these columns was published as Thinking Out Loud. She is also the author of a collection of her “Life in the 30’s” columns, Living Out Loud, and two children’s books, The Tree That Came to Stay and Happily Ever After. She is currently a columnist for Newsweek and lives with her husband and children in New York City.