Saturday, June 4, 2011

How many of Esquire's '75 Books Every Man Should Read' have you read?

While checking out Entertainment Weekly’s books page online a few days ago, I ran across an interesting recommended reading list that Esquire magazine published on March 26.

It’s called “The 75 Books Every Man Should Read,” and Esquire editors describe it as “An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published.” Here are the books that made the list.

1. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
2. Collected Stories of John Cheever
3. Deliverance by James Dickey
4. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
5. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
6. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
8. The Good War by Studs Terkel
9. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
10. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor
11. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
12. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
13. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
14. Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
15. A Sense of Where You Are by John McPhee
16. Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson
17. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
18. Dubliners by James Joyce
19. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
20. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
21. Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
22. Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
23. Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison
24. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
25. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
26. The Professional by W.C. Heinz
27. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
28. Dispatches by Michael Herr
29. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller.
30. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
31. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
32. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
33. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
34. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
35. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
36. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
37. A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley
38. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
39. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
40. Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian
41. Plainsong by Kent Haruf
42. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
43. Affliction by Russell Banks
44. This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff
45. Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
46. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
47. Women by Charles Bukowski
48. Going Native by Stephen Wright
49. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
50. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John LeCarré
51. The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
52. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders
53. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
54. The Shining by Stephen King
55. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
56. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
57. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
58. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
59. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
60. The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
61. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
62. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley
63. What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer
64. The Continental Op by Dashiell Hammett
65. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
66. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
67. Native Son by Richard Wright
68. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
69. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
70. The Great Bridge by David McCullough
71. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
72. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
73. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
74. Underworld by Don DeLillo
75. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

To read the complete article about this list, visit http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/75-books.

Esquire’s book list reminded me of a similar list put together by Playboy magazine several years ago, “The Top 20 Books Every Man Must Read.” If you’re interested in seeing that list, visit http://leepeacock2010.blogspot.com/2010/05/top-20-books-every-man-must-read.html.

In the end, how many of the 75 books recommended by Esquire have you had a chance to read? Which did you like or dislike? Which would you recommend and why? Let us know in the comments section below.

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