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Liz Schlemmer
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
Liz Schlemmer
This book left a greater impression on me than anything else I read in my twenties -- that one person could live many lives, could influence others to build a movement and could internally change course and his own opinions.
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The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Published in March 1939, Steinbeck’s saga of the havoc wreaked by the Great Depression was soon the country’s number one bestseller, selling thousands of copies each week despite the difficult economic times. At the same time, communities from coast to coast found it obscene and banned (and even bur...show more
Flatland
Edwin A. Abbott
A novel of mathematical whimsy, Flatland is set in the peculiar world that provides the book’s name and is home to its putative author, A. Square, a two-dimensional being in a world inhabited by lines, triangles, circles, and polygons. Ingeniously composed as a kind of dystopian memoir, Flatland is ...show more
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Composed in English and published in 1958, two years before Nigeria declared independence, Things Fall Apart was the first African novel to attain a wide international readership. It is a short, sparely told tale that nevertheless embraces themes of enormous import: fate and will, the determining i...show more
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum
There’s no greater tribute to the pleasures of L. Frank Baum’s book than to say that the story is so good that it isn’t overwhelmed by the images from the wonderful Judy Garland movie. The story unfolds with a declarative matter-of-factness that puts no barrier between the real and the imagined; bec...show more
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
To say that Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a book that captured the zeitgeist of the late 1970s and the 1980s is an understatement. Beginning as a BBC comedy radio series, it would mutate into versions in print, on stage, in comics, and on screens small and big, becoming an ...show more
The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams
Surveying national events from his birth through the era of the Civil War and the subsequent economic expansion of the United States, Adams’s distinctive autobiography is also a brilliant work of historical acumen. It depicts, with imaginative aplomb, the cultural transformations set in motion as th...show more
Interpreter of Maladies
Jhumpa Lahiri
Part of Lahiri’s appeal comes from her deft layering of substance and style: While she reckons with some of the most profound themes of contemporary global life, she does so in an unadorned voice whose effect recalls that of another great short story writer, Alice Munro. And just as Munro uses what ...show more
A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle
Troubled, feisty, and, as we shall discover, remarkably resourceful, thirteen-year-old Meg is one of the most unforgettable heroines in twentieth-century young adult fiction. Her family is rather memorable, too. There are her sympathetic parents, both of whom are scientists and one of whom, her fath...show more
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
Encouraged by their teachers and fueled by optimism, patriotism, and the promise of glory, Paul Bäumer and three friends volunteer for what would come to be known as World War I. But the reality of war in the trenches, as they witness unimagined carnage, leaves them struggling to keep their sanity a...show more
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
"Dear God, I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me." Those words belong to Celie, a poor African American girl in rural Georgia in the 1930s. Her letters, first to God and then to her younger sister, Nettie, m...show more
The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank
Anne Frank’s intimate two-year record of her family’s hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic is one of the most famous, powerful, and beloved books of the twentieth century. Encapsulating the terror of the Holocaust in the domestic drama of the Franks’ anxious existence and the private yearning...show more
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the second of four daughters of a noted proponent of Transcendentalism, Bronson Alcott. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a friend of the family, as were Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Despite her transcendentalist pedigree, Louisa May Alcott ...show more
The Complete Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi
Satrapi’s Persepolis, originally published in two volumes, is a memoir in pictures, a comic book that details its author’s coming-of-age during the Islamic Revolution. Beginning in 1980, when Marjane is ten years old, the narrative reflects—in the developing sophistication of its language and sensib...show more
Travels with Charley
John Steinbeck
At age fifty-eight, suffering from a heart condition, John Steinbeck took to the road to say goodbye to the country he loved and to engage one more time with the American themes his imagination had brought to life in his fiction. Travels with Charley is his account of the trip, which took him from N...show more
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Sherman Alexie
Drawing on Sherman Alexie’s personal experience growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a young adult novel that has more to say about big virtues like tolerance than a whole shelf of earnest adult tomes could ever manage. The book’s unflinchi...show more
Voices from Chernobyl
Svetlana Alexievich
Frightening and memorable. Impressive storytelling through oral history.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
When you discover that a person has written six books of autobiography, you’re bound to wonder: Is she just a prolific narcissist, or has she really lived a six-volume life? If she’s Maya Angelou, there’s no doubt that the latter is the case: So compelling is her private story, so extravagant her pu...show more
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
When Herbert William Clutter and his family were bound, gagged, and murdered on the night of November 15, 1959, there was little evidence of who’d done it, or why. The story of their gruesome end made the New York Times, where it was read by literary light Truman Capote, who determined almost immedi...show more
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
The best introduction to Austen’s work is surely the second of the six novels she wrote before her death at only forty-one, Pride and Prejudice, in which she introduces us to Elizabeth Bennet, the wittiest and most vivacious of five sisters on the hunt—if their mother has her way, at least—for husba...show more