100 Book Recommendations

By way of a 100 day challenge, I’m sharing 100 book recommendations of literature that I’m drawn to – whether inspired by personal events or relevant to what’s happening in the world.

The Bell Jar

The person unable to move forward in life is probably just a person who can't accept anything less from themselves than a perfect job.

Moby Dick

Melville's book, published on Oct 18, 1851, is about a monster and also about a whale.

Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness

Among other things, Oe writes about the madness of male-dominated warrior culture and the disaster it inflicted on Japan.

The Geneva Bible

We're wrapping this 100-book odyssey across 500 years of dramatic literature with an oldie but a goodie, the 1560 edition of the Geneva Bible. This is the book that started it all, at least for Americans. This bible is the second shot fired in a religious war we call the Reformation.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Though it's a tragedy, it's also a melodrama, and a comedy about human folly. It's one of those books that, while you are reading it, seems to be about everything. It's about creating, and everyone who creates knows that creating is about first destroying in order to free up materials needed for building.

Collected Stories by Frank O’Connor

How many times do conflicts and wars that appear to be about something else turn out, in the final analysis, to be about class?

Anywhere but Here by Mona Simpson

What's the truth about what's really happening to the ordinary folks we have trivial encounters with once or twice a week, like the grocery cashier or the girl who puts up the mail in our building?

The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

In every age, we have needed the child standing by the parade route with the courage to yell that the emperor has no clothes on.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

With the election near and fears of Russian tampering afoot again, this is a good time to look back at where it all started.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

How free are we in this free country of ours to go off and become our most authentic selves?

The Safety of Objects by A. M. Homes

If you ever wondered how distorted female body image got started in America, ask Barbie.

Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.

What is it about fiction writers, anyway?

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

The reason for much of the aggression between men and women is perhaps not such a secret.

Roland Barthes by Andy Stafford

If there is only one quest, that must mean we are all headed for the same ultimate destination.

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

Karen Russell shows us that the price of admission into 1st World cultures has always been incredibly high.

Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

Here's another Beat/Post-Modern novel that has a lot more to say about the pitfalls of Western male lives than its apparent subject.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

If it's getting hard to know what to feel anymore, Camus' heroes can relate.

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

How bizarre that the victims of the '29 market crash would wind up taking to the open road and ending up on the doorsteps of rich celebrities in our entertainment capital.

A Curtain of Green by Eudora Welty

James Baldwin said "All music begins with a cry" and Eudora Welty showed us just what he meant.

All The Days and Nights by William Maxwell

If life has taken on a surreal, otherworldly feeling lately, you are not alone. Check out this short novel in this collection by the author of They Came Like Swallows, a novel on the 1918 flu epidemic.

The Boy in the Field by Margot Livesey

Loneliness and isolation can induce hysteria in susceptible people. Margot Livesey's new book is about three young people whose lives are altered by this overwhelming emotion.

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

Who do we admire most, the survivor or the warrior?

Tickets, Please by D. H. Lawrence

The stories of D.H. Lawrence show the storytelling that's possible when a writer is in touch with their inner demon.

Hue and Cry by James Alan McPherson

In difficult times, we should not forget all the sweeping changes the country has survived, or James Alan McPherson, or trains.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Sometimes a picture isn't any good until it's in the right frame.

Break It Down by Lydia Davis

Even when you break it down, it's very hard to understand why the world consists of a tiny leisure class and a massive working class.

We the Living by Ayn Rand

Is an economic system that allows those who can to do whatever they wish really better than one that prevents such behavior?

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Where does our cultural obsession with the super-powered mild-mannered do-gooder come from? That's right. Prague.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Here's one more productive way to deal with the feelings of helplessness and loss of control that come from confronting a disease.

White Noise by Don DeLillo

When listing books that deal directly with the hysteria and paranoia of big cultural crises, don't forget this one.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Here's a banned book the writer had grave doubts about writing, though not for moral reasons.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

While we are remembering Black Wall Street or the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, let's not forget about Eatonville.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Read Ellison's Invisible Man and this book back to back and an unavoidable truth may leap out at you.

Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro

Few writers have had more to say about the divide between women and men than Alice Munro.

Grendel by John Gardner

During the Vietnam War, when we almost forgot what common sense is, we also almost forgot what good storytelling is.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O'Connor's stories have a funny way of giving her characters what they need instead of what they think they want.

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Where did we get the idea that having a leisure class would be such a great thing?

Cold Snap by Thom Jones

In memory of Thom Jones whose first novel we had long awaited when he passed away in 2016.

The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute

Being poor in America was never more obviously a problem of our system of distributing money than in Carolyn Chute's work.

Ironweed by William Kennedy

The pandemic and economic crisis have caused us to wonder just how compassionate we are capable of being while also feeling stressed and afraid.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William H. Gass

Given our history, what will we as Americans have to give up in order to make this a kinder place?

The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

A problem we still have not conquered in America, even though we started talking about it in the 70s, is disconnection and the number of young people who feel disconnected from meaningful relationships with others.

Going Native by Stephen Wright

The sudden dismantling of our social practices due to pandemic has caused speculation about whether we are being made better through adversity. Here's a book that also speculates about the value of stopping everything and reflecting on who and what we've become.

The Stories of John Cheever

The fear of venturing out in our industrial age is a not-so-new problem, as the work of John Cheever reminds us.

A Midnight Clear by William Wharton

Here's a period war novel that demonstrates a plain fact about period novels which is that they're never about the period they occur in -- their real subject is the present moment in which they are written.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Here's one for the novelist whose hero is on the ropes.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

Literature often demonstrates that the will of the people to believe is stronger than just about everything else.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Here's a story about a whole neighborhood of women who won't venture out. Though here the problem is not a pandemic but a place called Mango Street.

Light by Eva Figes

Eva Figes was a proto-feminist who wrote Patriarchal Attitudes, which came out before Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. Her father was arrested on Kristallnacht. All four of her grandparents died in death camps. Her short novel makes a great companion to Katherine Mansfield's Prelude. Need I say more?

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

For the longest time, we've been looking for a champion, pure of heart, to find the Grail Castle, attain the Holy Grail, and make the land well again.

Second Skin by John Hawkes

America has suffered some major growing pains since WWII and we have the beats to thank for shining light into these dark corners and showing us what we might otherwise have missed.

Mrs. Bridge by James Salter and Evan S. Connell

Why do we think we do someone a favor when we don't tell them the hardest truths about how the world runs?

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

Once the pandemic is over, what will home look like? Will we ever be able to go home again?

Billy Budd by Herman Melville

In this short novel, Melville shows how to write the double-bind of tragedy in which the hero must choose quickly between the lesser of two bad outcomes, one of which is death with dishonor and the other is simply death.

No Name by Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins' novels are great studies of the human need to fingerpoint in a crisis.

The Complete Tales of Edgar Allen Poe

If you are currently encountering some hysterical and despairing people, or if you are feeling that way yourself at times, Poe has got you.

The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas

It's hard to find fresh ways to write mental illness and the patient-therapist relationship that actually respects the profession, so here's a book that does both.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

The last time we had a pandemic, art changed so drastically, it's hard to find much in common between who we were before and after.

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

If Shakespeare was the first modernist, who was the first post-modernist? What if post-modernism was actually the bard's first really groundbreaking innovation?

Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver

How many stories and how many writers have directly taken on the problems in the current state of affairs between women and men?

Winter’s Tales by Isak Dinesen

Here's a story for anybody confronting the tough choices required when managing people.

A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes

In 1957, nobody even wanted to acknowledge the real situation in African-America's capital city of Harlem.

Emma by Jane Austen

How much concern do you feel for women who are handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition?

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

It was Truman Capote who showed us what fiction can do that no other dramatic form can, which is take us directly inside the mind of a killer.

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Here's another primer on subtext for the novelists, a book that seems to be about something it was never really about.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

What does it take to feel truly safe, comfortable and at home in the world?

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

Let's talk about the enduring power of minimalism and Amy Hempel's story "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," a story that doubles its own power and richness by layering one story on top of another.

Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

Who says a novel has to be 400 pages long? This short novel is a masterpiece of storyline juggling and compression and comes in at just 15,000 words.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Novels are known for being clearly-structured literary forms, so it's noteworthy when a well-known novel seems to have none. It takes skill to pull off and that's a reason writers should probably not forget about this book.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Storytellers, here's a textbook on story framing and a bedtime story from Uncle Henry.

The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler

Back in 1930, Spengler said something unpopular and unwelcome about the West. In doing so, he was referring to his own German culture as well as all Western nations and America. We didn't want to listen then and maybe don't want to now, but he predicted WWII so maybe he's worth a second look . . .

New Zealand Stories by Katherine Mansfield

Are you about ready to throw in the towel on that novel project? Maybe it's not too late to adjust your vision and try again.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Here's one especially for you self-published authors, one of whom was Virginia Woolf.

The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle

The book would make a good pairing with Dante's Inferno because it's about how, for an illegal immigrant, entering America and trying to survive for even a matter of weeks is like a descent to the 9th ring of Hell. It's obvious that Candido and America are doomed in their quest unless someone helps them. It's also obvious that nobody would attempt such a thing if it weren't that the better place we're all trying to reach in life is right in view in our border towns, just a stone's throw from the dirt huts.

The Collected Works: Volume One by Malcolm Lowry

Nobody is like Malcolm Lowry and no book is like Under the Volcano. He struggled with alcoholism all his life. But lest anyone think his life was an abyss, one of his great friends, Conrad Aiken said he was actually “the merriest of men.”

The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin

As expedition journals go, this one gives one of the biggest votes in favor of risk-taking, taking the plunge and biting off more than we can chew. Darwin's dad called the undertaking crazy and pointless, but didn't stand in his way. Fifteen years later came The Origin of Species.

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

In honor of Civil Rights legend, John Lewis. May he rest in power.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

When Flaubert was asked how he could have created a character as terrible as Emma Bovary, he always said "Madame Bovary c'est moi!" ("What are you talking about? That terrible woman is me!")

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

If you have ever wondered why the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden was codenamed Geronimo, perhaps the real answer lies here. The parallels to Japanese internment and the Holocaust and the Vietnam War are also not hard to spot.

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

In July 1925, a jury convicted John Scopes for teaching evolution in Tennessee, a criminal offense. Darwin didn't use the term evolution and only slightly preferred "natural selection" to describe his theory. Over the course of his life, he discovered numerous exceptions and contradictions to the theory and probably wrote as much as his detractors about the reasons he could be wrong.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Fifty-one years ago, we landed on the moon -- and this post-modern masterpiece was published which set the tone for much of the absurdist fiction published in the 70s and helped cure the nation's blues from the Vietnam War.

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

In July 1799, a soldier in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign found the Rosetta stone, a black basalt slab with a single passage of writing inscribed on it in three languages, Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphic, and Egyptian demotic, an event that at last made it possible to know what is written on tombs and monuments in a language dead for two thousand years.

Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O'Connor once said that she learned the importance of "throwing the weight of circumstance against the favored character" by reading Graham Greene. O'Connor's work clearly had different aims and one was to show the South's generations-long devastation -- and efforts to move forward as a culture -- after the Civil War.

Franny and Zoey by J.D. Salinger

Salinger was among the first in American letters to sound the alarm about the growing mental distresses of an entire generation of young people questioning the inequalities and injustices of the system.

The Battle of Dienbienphu by Jules Roy

This is the book I read right after I read Michael Herr's DISPATCHES. Herr said one of the worst battles of the Vietnam War, one in which the US seriously considered using nuclear weapons, might never have happened if our leaders had read this book about what happened to the French ten years earlier at Dienbienphu.

Saul Bellow: Letters

Here is one of the great, early short novels about depression among Americans, one that comes close to openly advocating for the "tune in, turn on, drop out" culture of the 1960s. For a long time, depression in Americans was called by any other name including laziness, inaction and sloth. It wasn't until the 1980s and beyond that its real identity, and causes, were uncovered.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

There was never a better time to read Ralph Ellison's masterpiece. Though it appeared at a time when Modernism was the only game in town, it is actually a harbinger of the post-modernism that will become the Beat movement and progress into the Civil Rights and Peace movements.

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

With so much going wrong in the world, it can be hard to maintain faith that a better future does exist somewhere out there, in the dim distance. Here's a book that addresses this struggle, about a woman who discovers the ability to actually contact a better future world and offer real proof of its existence, and the effect her revelations have on those around her.

Monkeys by Susan Minot

I've always felt a kinship with Susan Minot whose first book came out about a year before mine. The writing has a very strong minimalist streak, like Hemingway's, like Didion's, and like my first collection. It's a leaning I'm sure I picked up by reading a lot of Raymond Carver and Thomas McGuane. As it turns out, Carver's minimalism was probably not entirely his own idea, and was likely the result of working with a very persuasive editor and teacher named Gordon Lish.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

Back when I was a young short fiction writer in grad school, everyone said I needed to be reading Chekhov, Alice Munro and this writer. Ever since, I have been teaching her short novels and definitely trying to emulate her by creating novellas (a word she detested) or short novels of my own. Her story "Flowering Judas" is a masterpiece about socialist-revolutionary Mexico, a subject tackled in two other great books of the time: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowery and The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.

Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway

I own an original edition of this book that I bought used and first belonged to the Memphis Public Library. It came out in 1970, posthumously, which is significant because Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays came out the same year, another important work of minimalism. Didion even plants an homage to Hemingway at the end of that book, in the last scene between BZ and Maria. The use of the word "pretty" in their dialogue echoes Jake's famous line to Brett in The Sun Also Rises ("Isn't it pretty to think so?").

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

So you're thinking about expanding that short story into a novel? Then this is the book for you. 

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

As a companion to my review of Michael Herr's Vietnam War memoir DISPATCHES, I have to sing the praises of a book that we might never have had if DISPATCHES was never written. If you ever wanted to understand what post-modernism is and what motivates post-modernist writers, just read the chapter called "How To Tell A True War Story." The keys to the post-modern sensibility are in the last paragraph.

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

With summer here, we'd normally be thinking about travel, maybe to a seaside town with a boardwalk, like Coney Island or Atlantic City. But with travel curtailed for now, maybe the next best thing is a crime novel set in Brighton, England, by the sea. Graham Greene always said he wished he'd started this novel after the murder that happens in the opening chapters, that he really wrote the book to show what happens when a sociopath named Pinkie meets a shop girl named Rose.

Dispatches by Michael Herr

On June 30th, 1967, Nguyen Van Thieu became president of South Vietnam as America's ground-force strength approached half a million. Michael Herr was there also, covering the war for Esquire magazine. His book inspired others and is a classic of "New Journalism," being part memoir, part novel and part historical document.

Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

One of the most affecting books ever written about the problems immigrants and women of color can encounter when trying to assimilate into a largely white, male dominated culture.

The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb

As the economic downturn churns on, one of the great books about the Depression comes to mind. Though it is really a book about childhood and that first encounter with evil we each must find a way to survive. It's a book about being forced to do battle with evil at a time in life when we have only a child's resources, a child's powers and a child's ability to persuade the adult world to listen.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

On June 27th, 1985, the Highway Commission decommissioned Route 66, the famed highway that ran from Chicago to Santa Monica. This was the road originally traveled by thousands of ruined farm families (like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath) during the Great Depression, who sought the only jobs available, in California's fruit orchards. Oddly enough, Kerouac's On The Road, can be read like a sequel to The Grapes of Wrath. The heroes are now the children of those desperate families, still roaming the same road in the same mood of desperate flight toward something better.

I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg

We don't know why, but summer has always been a challenging season for those who suffer from mental illness – a thing alienists began remarking on as early as the 18th century. With COVID-19 happening on top of that, I wanted to mention this 60’s book by Joanne Greenberg, which was later made into a very good 70’s movie starring Kathleen Quinlan.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

I’ve been thinking about this book in regard to racism, prejudice and bigotry in the news. All societies contain traps that are intended to weed out threats to the social order. In the 19th century, the great fear was birth outside of marriage or illegitimacy. The mechanism of this trap was unique, but the results were the same: suffering caused by prejudice for an arbitrary reason.

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

Given the more recent focus on the Me-Too Movement in the news, I’ve been thinking about this somewhat forgotten 1970 Joan Didion novel.