A list by Olivia Diamond
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Olivia Diamond
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Call It Sleep
Henry Roth
Pretty much unknown today but a wonderful look at the Jewish community of New York in the early days of the 20th century.
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith
A missed classic often. I first read it at age 18 and again in my 60s--still impressed me as a moving story of Americana.
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The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
Appearing in three separate volumes between July 1954 and October 1955, The Lord of the Rings constitutes a single linear narrative that was segmented for publishing convenience rather than by authorial intent. Tolkien’s hero, Frodo, is the adoptive heir of Bilbo Baggins, protagonist of The Hobbit. ...show more
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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
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Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Vivid, unpredictable, insinuating, uncomfortably intimate, the voice that tells Invisible Man is one of the most supple and powerful instruments ever fashioned in American prose. His skin is black, his soul is blue, his mind is lit with both desperation and deep thought. Naturalistic and surreal, fa...show more
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Sophie's Choice
William Styron
This novel is about history, coming-of-age, the Holocaust, survival, the legacy of slavery, guilt, lust, life’s tantalizing and everlasting perishability, and—very much—writing. Discursive, provocative, intellectually probing and emotionally wrenching, Styron’s novel fits its author’s youthful descr...show more
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The Tin Drum
Günter Grass
I've read this one at least 3 times that I can remember. I love the magical realism elements and it's insight into Polish-German identities during the interwar period and following. Quite a fantastical story about the effects of the war on the European psyche.
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Angle of Repose
Wallace Stegner
Though not all of his more than thirty books are concerned with the American West, Wallace Stegner is often referred to as “the dean of Western writers,” and the best of his books illustrate how much he merits the title. Best of the best is the 1971 novel Angle of Repose. A human drama in which two ...show more
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Beloved
Toni Morrison
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, but crisscrossing time and space in an intricate series of flashbacks and shifting perspectives, Beloved tells the story of Sethe, a runaway slave raising the children she led out of Kentucky. She is tormented by what she has escaped and haunted by what she cannot: the me...show more
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Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville
Re-read this in January 2017 after disastrous presidential election because I remembered from reading it more than fifty years ago it was prescient about how democracy could succumb to mediocrity and ignorance of the masses in support of a demagogue. It is as pertinent today as it was in 1840 in ana...show more
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Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
Having been a printer’s assistant, teacher, and newspaperman in New York and New Orleans, in 1855 a largely self-taught and unknown man named Walt Whitman self-published—not just footing the bill but designing the cover and setting the type—a small book called Leaves of Grass. Containing twelve unti...show more
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Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Men of action require a field to work, and few fields have proven as fertile in this regard—in life and in the imagination—as the American West. Larry McMurtry’s 1985 epic, Lonesome Dove, may be its richest literary harvest. Set in the late 1870s, it tells the story of a cattle drive from the Rio Gr...show more
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Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Imagine a literary love child of Charles Dickens and The Arabian Nights, and you’ll have some idea of the human interest and narrative ingenuity of Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece, one of the most admired, acclaimed, and enjoyed novels of the second half of the twentieth century. Like Dickens, Rushdie ...show more
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Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
Perhaps it was the scale of Moby-Dick—the most ambitious novel ever written in America to that point, a rollicking ocean of maritime adventure, Christian allegory, metaphysical disquisition, natural history, literary escapade, and social criticism—that scared off readers of the time, because no mode...show more
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My Brilliant Friend: The Neapolitan Novels, Book 1
Elena Ferrante
“We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.” So Elena Greco, called Lenù by those who know her, describes the adventure that cements her friendship with Raffaella Cerullo, known familiarly as Lina or Lila, a friendship t...show more
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel so strange, so rich, so perfect in its singularity and timeless in its tenor, one can scarcely believe it was written as recently as 1967. At its start we are treated to an inkling of the author’s narrative conjuring: “Many years later, as he faced the firing...show more
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Poems
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson has what may be the most distinctive voice in American poetry. Immediately recognizable, it is modest and intimate, often invoking an inviting sense of potentiality. And yet there’s a streak of wild darkness animating her verse as well, which, combined with an elliptical syntax, can ...show more
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” Ernest Hemingway famously proclaimed in Green Hills of Africa, and it is the idiomatic immediacy of Huck’s voice—to say nothing of the speech rhythms of the several other spoken dialects Twain mimics in his n...show more
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The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
Gripping narrative around colonialism and evangelism in Africa laced with some humor in a rather dark portrait of the damage foisting the Bible on other cultures produces both on the missionaries and the native population.
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The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky’s final novel is one of the supreme achievements in all fiction. At the heart of the story is a crime—the murder of the loathsome Fyodor Karamazov. Each of his sons seems to be implicated. Dostoevsky gives extraordinary expressive energy to each of them; like many of his novels, this one ...show more
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