75 Books Every Man Should Read

Esquire magazine recently published this list of books every man should read. I have only read a few (Plainsong, The Sportswriter, Slaughterhouse-Five and Huckleberry Finn, The Call of the Wild for school) and really should have more of them under my literary belt. What do you think? How many have you read?

The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
Affliction, by Russell Banks
All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral, by Philip Roth
American Tabloid, by James Ellroy
Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text, by William Faulkner
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Blood Meridian, Or, the Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy
The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Call of the Wild, White Fang, & To Build a Fire, by Jack London
Civilwarland in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella, by George Saunders
A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett
The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Deliverance, by James Dickey
Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac
Dispatches, by Michael Herr
Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone
Dubliners, by James Joyce
A Fan’s Notes: A Fictional Memoir, by Frederick Exley
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
Going Native, by Stephen Wright
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O'Connor
The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, by Studs Terkel
The Grapes of Wrath: John Steinbeck Centennial Edition (1902-2002), by John Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, by Hunter S. Thompson
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
The Known World, by Edward P. Jones
Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, by Jorge Luis Borges
Legends of the Fall, Jim Harrison
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families, by James Agee
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
Native Son, by Richard Wright
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
The Professional, by W. C. Heinz
Rabbit Run, by John Updike
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe
A Sense of Where You Are: A Profile of William Warren Bradley, by John McPhee
The Shining, by Stephen King
Slaughterhouse-five, by Kurt Vonnegut
So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
A Sport And a Pastime, James Salter
The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John Le Carré
The Stories of John Cheever, by John Cheever
The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction, Tim O'Brien
This Boy’s Life: A Memoir, by Tobias Wolff
Time’s Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense, by Martin Amis
Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
Underworld, by Don DeLillo
War And Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
What It Takes: The Way to the White House, by Richard Ben Cramer
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories, by Raymond Carver
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
Winter’s Bone: A Novel, Daniel Woodrell
Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin
Women, by Charles Bukowski

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Youre currently reading 75 Books Every Man Should Read.

Published:
at 8:10 AM on Sunday, September 21, 2008
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12 comments:

  1. Shamrock 10:33 AM

    I've read 7 of them, and have many more on my bookshelf. I have to say, many are extremely well known works. Furthermore, when I read Time's Arrow (Martin Amis- I read it several years ago) I hated it. I also am not a Steinbeck fan...

     
  2. Anonymous 3:05 PM

    I saw 19 of them made into movies..........

    Greatest Aunt Carol

     
  3. KHM 5:42 PM

    I've read 20 of them. But I'm not a man otherwise I'd have read several more: some are just obviously boy books.

    Lyman, do yourself a favor. Read Heart of Darkness (its a very slim volume) and then re-watch Apocalypse Now. We did that as part of my AP English class; you'll enjoy both all the more for it.

     
  4. Special K 6:54 PM

    Uh, nice list. There's ONE book by a woman on it.

     
  5. Special K 7:02 PM

    And, 16.

    That's a really strange list. For a list that "every man" should read, I have to wonder what Every Man should walk away with? War and uber-masculinity? Blech.

     
  6. KHM 7:54 PM

    Special K, I agree its a very odd list. But there are some really good ones on it.

     
  7. Lyman 12:38 AM

    And do you really have to put stuff like War and Peace and Moby Dick on a list like this?

     
  8. Carrie 9:08 AM

    I've read seven and mostly in college classes. These are not what you'd call summer reading, unless you're KHM I guess. I think men should read a least one Jane Austen!

     
  9. KHM 11:48 AM

    I'd guess I read about 3/4 of ones I have done in High School English. Not summer reading, indeed! But I will own up that the summer between sophomore and junior year in HS I read all of Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies. No sonnets.

    We all read the Bronte novels as well as Austen. I think all the boys haaaaated it! Which is about how I felt about A Farewell to Arms. Bleh.

    Seriously: am I the only one who REALLY loves Russian lit? Really? No love here for Tolstoy or Nabokov?

     
  10. Lyman 1:21 PM

    There's something about translations I steer away from. I kind of feel like I'm losing something if I'm not reading the author's actual words.

    And Jane Austen is a classist.

     
  11. KHM 7:18 AM

    Many of your readers are much more qualified than I to comment on whether or not Austen is/was a classist.

    I do think she was excessively concerned with how the social mores of the era impacted women's lives in really dramatic ways---I think that was her particular axe to grind.

    What I dislike about Austen is that adherence to those standards nearly always serves the long-suffering woman and she is rewarded with the love of a man whose foolish arrogance once broke her heart. And there's always a duplicitous female friend (I hate that!) manipulating circumstances for their own gain. But perhaps I'm too much of a modern girl to appreciate her.

    Heeeey---maybe that's why I've read so much of the Esquire's "man" book list.

     
  12. Lyman 10:27 AM

    I was making a joke but there's some truth behind it. Nobody from the lower class can marry someone from the upper class unless its revealed they have some money. That's a theme I've noticed.

     

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