75 Books – the Esquire list

Following on from the Jezebel list, here is the list from Esquire that prompted its compilation. Again, there are books I’ve read, authors whose other books I’ve read, and books I didn’t realise were books (Deliverance? Legends of the Fall?). Although I’ve read more from this list than from the Jezebel list, there are probably more books on this list that I wouldn’t read (mostly the books I thought were only movies and Blood Meridian, which I’ve tried to read but just… can’t).

The Esquire list also comes with a sentence or two for each book and some of those are just off-putting. Yes, I get that it’s a men’s mag but some of the comments are so … I don’t even know how to express it. “Glib” and “smug” don’t quite capture the squeamishness some of them sparked. Anyway, I managed to overlook most of the comments and just listed the books, but some of them I couldn’t let pass.

75 Books Every Man Should Read

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 “Because it’s all about the titty.” Yep, couldn’t let that one pass.
   
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 The comment “The best book by a modern-day Twain, high on meth, drousy with whiskey” not only confuses me, but leaves me completely disinclined to see this out.
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
    But, hey, Esquire, “Because beyond the hot ex-wife and the fatwa, Rushdie is actually a great writer” just diminishes this project. Like, yeah, we thought it was all about the hot ex-wife…
    
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 Haven’t read the book (no strikethrough) but it is on the list. It does seem somewhat creepy, though, that the compiler tags this with “So horribly dirty. So, so good.”
74. Underworld, by Don DeLillo
75. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain