Recently a friend asked me to make a list of books I would recommend for someone who would like to read some serious literature, and in doing so, I realized that a list like this could serve as a useful primer for anyone who reads what I write in this space. That being said, what follows are not my selections for the best or most important texts from all of recorded history; they are merely a starting point for the uninitiated. My hope is that if one were to actually read everything I recommend they would be left with a broad knowledge of a range of literature and would also be inspired enough by a few novels to pursue more work by a specific author or era. So, with that in mind, please do enjoy.
- American Pastoral, Philip Roth. I’ve written about Roth and this novel specifically here, but I put it at the top of the list because it is the one book that I hope everyone will read. Each of these texts are, among many things, specific to their time, and American Pastoral is specific to contemporary society in the United States, which makes it engaging in a way that something written in the 19th century can never be.
- Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Anytime Dostoevsky is brought up in conversation (which happens all the time, right?) I make one point and one point only: Dostoevsky’s prose was so successfully experimental that his novels would be cutting edge if they were published for the first time today. One other note: if you happen to pick up a copy of Crime and Punishment make sure it’s the edition translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky who make excellent translations of the Russian.
- Where I’m Calling From, Raymond Carver. Carver’s stories are more consistent than Hemingway, easier to delve into than Chekhov or Faulkner, and more stylistically varied than O’Connor. (O’Connor’s prose is superb, but she did use a combination of arrogance and Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as the basis of almost every one of her stories. Tease: I have a full post about O’Connor on deck for next week.) I’ve also included Carver’s collection because the stories—arranged in order of publication date—reveal the fascinating progression of his skill as a writer. (Click here to read the full post I wrote about Carver previously).
- The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham. I wrote here about this book a few months ago, and have little to add to that praise except to say The Razor’s Edge is now one of the three novels I am consulting as a guiding inspiration for the novel I have recently begun working on (the other two are also on this list: American Pastoral and In Search of Lost Time). Actually, now that I think about it, this is the one book I hope everyone reads, not American Pastoral. It’s that good.
- Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov. I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned Nabokov in this space, which is a shame. Pnin is not his most famous work, but I prefer it to Lolita because I find Pnin and the academics he associates with to be such well drawn characters. One final note: Nabokov, whose native language was not English, read the Oxford-English Dictionary twice from cover to cover, so, if you pick up Pnin, be prepared for something of a vocabulary lesson.
- Anna Karenina, Leo Tolsoty. This Oprah Book Club selection makes the list because it offers a taste of the prose style and psychological exploration found in War and Peace but is only half as long. Plus it’s fun to say: An-na Ka-ren-in-na. Was that too flippant?
- In Cold Blood, Truman Capote. This is my only non-fiction recommendation for two reasons: (1) it’s so compelling and so well written that the first time I read In Cold Blood I didn’t put it down until I was finished (2) it’s so compelling and so well written that In Cold Blood makes all other non-fiction look silly. Of course, it makes a lot of fiction look silly as well. One technical note: Capote’s use of the merging narratives technique is so masterful that it made me a little mad at him.
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce. I’m not going to link to what I’ve written about Joyce in the past because you could probably select one of my posts at random from the archives and find at least a passing reference to his work. I’ve said before that I would never recommend Ulysses to anyone, but A Portrait (which is the shorthand way it’s referred to in literary criticism), though the most difficult book on this list, is just approachable enough for the casual reader. Here’s a tip: the novel applies the stream of consciousness technique to the character Stephen Dedalus, and reflective of Stephen’s developing mind, the complexity of the prose correlates to the complexity of his cognitive ability. So, what you’re reading on the first page is a textual interpretation of a baby’s thought process. See what I mean by approachable?
- Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates. Kurt Vonnegut said this is the best book written by a member of his generation, and I agree. The forerunner for all the novels and movies and television about suburban discontent and the inadequacy of the American Dream in the second half of the 20th Century, Revolutionary Road is also a painfully accurate depiction of people coming to terms with the realization in their late twenties that they are ordinary and not as brilliant and talented as they believed themselves to be a decade earlier.
- In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust. Finally, I will suggest the first volume in the newly translated four volume set of In Search of Lost Time. Yes, it is dense, and, no, Proust does not do anything to make the text easy for the reader to follow (like use chapter breaks, or paragraph breaks for that matter), but his prose is so engrossing that it simply does not matter. Swann’s Way is a self-contained story, so you can pick the novel up without feeling as though you’re committing to the full 2,288 pages of text. Then again, after the first volume, I can’t image feeling as though you have any choice but to keep reading.
