5 Books Everybody Should Read

[DrewDevil]

I also couldn't make it through Atlas Shrugged, but The Fountainhead is my favorite book of all time. Rand wrote it before she became rich and famous and she had to listen to editors then--so it's a much cleaner book and easier to follow. I agree that a lot of Rand is inscrutable.

The others on my list I think every American should read. Not sure about worldwide.

Huckleberry Finn
To Kill A Mockingbird
Lonesome Dove
The Right Stuff

[Born 2 Loose]

[ QUOTE ]
Travels with Charlie is an interesting choice.

I liked this book too although I'm not sure I could list in top 5 'must reads'.

[/ QUOTE ]

Today I might pick 5 others...

I love to travel and this Steinbeck novel really hits on that joy of unscripted discovery. I recommend it to anyone who's got the wanderlust.

[MicroBob]

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon (or something like that) is very similar.
Recommended to anybody who enjoyed Travels with Charley.

[MaxPower]

[ QUOTE ]
Nice list, especially Blood Meridien and Ulysses, but I'd prefer Moby Dick (how can you understand BM without it?) or Huck Finn.

For non-fiction, I'd go with Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey or Stop-Time by Frank Conroy, perhaps the greatest memoir ever written.

Walden defies categorization: it's non-fiction but better read as a novel, and it's certainly America's Bible. Every American should read Thoreau. ("We can string telegraph poles coast to coast, but what if no one has anything to say to each other." Did he forsee the advent of the cell phone?)

Poetry, sticking in the American grain: Leaves of Grass or Frost for beginners, but it seems that every American poet I've talked to (and I've talked to quite a few) has been deeply influenced by Wallace Stevens, so read his collected poems.

Drama: Oedipus Rex (when you find out who you are do you pluck out your eyes or do you smile?) or King Lear, a play so terrible in its depravity that it was performed for over two hundred years with Nahum Tate's alternative "happy ending." This is the only work of fiction that leaves me shaking.

Special Mention: I am a devoted reader of the personal essay, and as I get older, it's become my favorite form of literature. Philip Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay is a fine collection. For one essay, though, try to find William Nack's essay on the death of Secretariat, a beautifully written, ultimately moving look at the great horse. It's one of the few pieces of writting that moved me to tears.

[/ QUOTE ]

John,

I read Desert Solitaire in college as was blown away by it. I've mentioned this book to hundreds of people and no one has ever heard of it. So I would say it is the best book that no one has ever heard of. It is very similar to Walden.

When I was in high school I was assigned to read selections from Walden and was bored to tears. In my twenties I picked it up again and it would be on my top five list. I think about this book all of the time.

I was thinking about reading the essays of Montaigne. My understanding is that he is sort of the inventor of the personal essay. Is it worth my while? I'm trying to figure out which translation to get.

[evolvedForm]

1. The Stranger - Camus
2. Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
3. The Genealogy of Morals - Nietzsche
4. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - David Hume
5. The Odyssey - Homer

[John Cole]

Max,

I think if you looked at lists of nature books on Amazon, you'd find that many people who read this sort of stuff rank Desert Solitaire very highly.

I have the Penguin Classics edition, a fairly cheap paperback, which has the complete essays. You could even get the selected essays in a slightly cheaper edition.

Lopate's volume also has selections from Montaigne.

BTW, I don't know why high school students read Walden--and then only selections. The book becomes a series of aphorisms rather than the truly great work it is.

[MidGe]

I find this a very interesting thread.

I can't think about must read 5 books. It is a bit like saying it is sufficient to have read 5 books. I would have expected that a few hundred books would have been read before the end of adolescence and many more before young adulthood, in a way that "5" seem rather meaningless!

More interesting has been the books mentionned. I am starting to feel that most posters have only been exposed to either airport bookshops or the big commercial chains (like Angus & Robertson, Barnes & Nobles, etc..). An exposure to, say, City Lights in SFO, and I am sure that the titles choosen as top 5 would be different.

As I said, I could not select the 5 must read, so my comments are rather questionable. However, just to quote a few I read, like Coehlo, Rand etc... makes me wonder about the civilisation/cultural level in the USA! I guess these forums are not, I hope, representative!

[John Cole]

MidGe,

I agree with your assessment about the big chain mentality, but I think it has more to do with the current state of writing, especially in fiction. One of my favorite novels, Genoa: A Telling of Wonders by Paul Metcalf, is probably out of print, and, if not, unavailable in any bookstore. I love Gilbert Sorrentino, and I'm sure City Lights may have a better selection than my local Borders. Fortunately, I can run into Boston and Providence easily for good bookstores--although they are still, in some sense, dominated by best sellers; however, occasionally the unexpected does turn up.

Of course, I mostly forgo fiction these days anyway.

[Zeno]

Powell's books in Portland, Oregon is a great bookstore.

As for cultural level in the US that is something very hard to determine, let alone define. Suffice to say the best way to find out, in my opinion, would be a random walk across America.

-Zeno

[MidGe]

I hope there still must be "some" interesting bookshops in the USA! I was more critical of the sample of books quoted on this forum population. I know that City Lights is still thriving. I was there not so long ago. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[ QUOTE ]

As for cultural level in the US that is something very hard to determine, let alone define. Suffice to say the best way to find out, in my opinion, would be a random walk across America.


[/ QUOTE ]

I agree, and have done so, albeit on a motorcycle. I have lived in the USA, altough that was a few decades ago. Enjoyed myself tremendously at that time. Since then I revisited the USA many times. The last time was now five years ago where I stayed for about 3 months. Out of nostalgia, I went back to many places that I used to go on a daily basis whilst living there (coffee shops, restaurants, etc..). The place had a totally different feel, much less savoury than as I remembered it. (Talking here mostly of SFO and Georgetown in DC - well OK the latter not typical USA given the ratio of foreign diplomats).

The country side, or at least part of it, had always an odd/weird feel about it in many places, and has not gone any better in my observation. By the way, I did live for 6 months in a small country place of 406 inhabitants in Northen California (again decades ago) and that was one of the best time of my life. So, I have mixed feeling about the culture, but I do not think it is improving. IMO there has been a regression.