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All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
James Mustich
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
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Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
One of the most beautiful and subtle studies of a small relationship you can ever read ... the first of a trilogy that tells the same ambiguous story from three different perspectives. A compelling and intellectual writer making careful use of words to convey the beauty of the small life.
The Emigrants
W. G. Sebald
No one really writes like Sebald, or should I say, no one before him did. The mix of form throughout all of his books is captivating and engrossing. This may not even be his best book, but read them all!
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner’s fourth novel. In it, he bravely indulged the experimental impulse that, under the guidance of his editors, he had kept in check in his previously published work, creating one of the landmarks of modern—and modernist—fiction. The book comprises four sections, thr...show more
Son of the Morning Star: Custer and The Little Bighorn
Evan S. Connell
The work of an idiosyncratic but engaging storyteller, Son of the Morning Star is discursive, elegant, and unflinching. The Christian Science Monitor called it “the story of Gen. George Armstrong Custer as Flaubert would have written it”; it’s a nice compliment, but the book is better than that, bec...show more
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is the Night—the last of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s four completed novels, and the author’s favorite—sprawls among dozens of characters and settings across Western Europe before and after World War I. Although its messy, heartbreaking story of mental illness, alcoholism, and the disintegration of ...show more
Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert
What a great, wonder of a book! So rich in detail and teeming with imagination. I'll never forget this book and how I felt when I read it, over 40 years ago.
The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles
The story John Fowles tells in his third novel begins on the English seaside at Lyme Regis, Dorset, in 1867. Yet it is told by a wry, erudite narrator who lets readers know he is writing exactly one hundred years later. In a tour de force of storytelling that is transporting, intriguing, and breatht...show more
The Recognitions
William Gaddis
Thank God you included this book on your list! I was scrolling slowly through the list in hopes that you did. The most underrated book of modern times, my unquestioned best book ever read. It introduced me to the possibilities of language, the scenery and emotions that can be conveyed by a natura...show more
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms was Hemingway’s second novel, appearing in 1929, three years after The Sun Also Rises. Mining autobiographical terrain, it draws upon the author’s experience as an ambulance driver during World War I. Although it authentically evokes the fraught tedium of military work and the dra...show more
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities may have the most famous opening of any novel ever written, the frequent application of its words outside the novel’s specific context giving it an edge over the nearest competition, Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice. Echoing the dichotomies invoked in its opening sentences,...show more
The Iliad
Homer
The Iliad is a narrative of divine stratagems and military exploits, of fierce courage and heroic endeavor—a tale, clearly, of epic imagination. Yet the sense of pageantry the poem evokes obscures what may be its most telling characteristic: the peculiar angle from which Homer chooses to view antiqu...show more
The Odyssey
Homer
What can one say about a story that has been entertaining, enchanting, and educating the human race from the very border of recorded history until today? Homer’s epic poem of the wandering and homecoming of Odysseus (aka Ulysses) is a grand adventure, where fact, myth, gods, and people meet, settle,...show more
The Maples Stories
John Updike
The Maples Stories, a collection of eighteen tales written between 1956 and 1994 about a married, then divorced, couple named Joan and Richard Maples, may seem too modest to single out from John Updike’s generous oeuvre. Yet considered together, these short stories offer a probing, astute, and often...show more
Mutiny on the Bounty
Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
Very nice to see this classic on the list, another book that is sadly overlooked presently. I first read this when I was in third class, and it opened a world of imagination of life at sea as an English sailor and the mysteries of Polynesia. The whole trilogy is compelling and well written. Inspi...show more
Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville
Americans should read this book and see how their current culture is reaped from seeds sown many, many years ago. It will open some eyes.
Endurance
Alfred Lansing
Despite the fact that it never reached its destination, HMS Endurance has earned a noble berth in history. And while there have been numerous accounts of its now famous voyage, no one tells the story better than Alfred Lansing. Written four decades after the events it describes, it is based on exten...show more
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
In the course of roughly a hundred pages, Heart of Darkness will journey, with a strangely leisurely intensity, into realms of depravity best encoded in the dying cry of Kurtz, the delusional, despicable character at its enigmatic core: “The horror! The horror!” Although this extraordinarily concent...show more
Independence Day
Richard Ford
Any Richard Ford book is brilliant, this one is but an example.
Into Thin Air
Jon Krakauer
Commissioned by Outside magazine to deliver an article on the rise of Everest as an expensive theme park—once a trip for only the most experienced adventurers, an ascent to the peak was increasingly being marketed as an invigorating holiday for any amateur with $65,000 to spare—Krakauer, a seasoned ...show more