The Complete Reading Lessons

Poets, novelists, essayists, journalists, and scholars name a book they prize above all others and tell us why.

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Favorite books from David Huddle, Sy Montgomery, Andrea Barrett, Willard Spiegelman, Sissela Bok, Hannah Pittard, Craig Nova, James Santel, Louis P. Masur, Sierra Bellows, Bethany Vaccaro, Martha McPhee, Will Boast, S. C. Gwynne, Neil Shea, Bruce Falconer, Aaron Sachs, Robert Roper, Ernest B. Furgurson, Stephen Goodwin, George O’Brien, Emily Fox Gordon, Rob Gurwitt, Anka Muhlstein, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Nathaniel Rich, Sudip Bose, Sheila Kohler, Thomas Laqueur, Alix Christie, Clay Risen, Fergus M. Bordewich, Ingrid D. Rowland, Dennis Covington, Elaine Showalter, Charlotte Salley, Sridhar Pappu, Mas Masumoto, Philip Marsden, David Vann, Sally Denton, Alison Case, Larry Woiwode, and Matthew Quirk.

 

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All posts

• John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
• Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace
• George Eliot’s Middlemarch
• John Steinbeck’s East of Eden
• Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
• Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry
• Richard Hugo’s 31 Letters and 13 Dreams
• Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter
• Willa Cather’s My Àntonia
• Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
• Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons
• Frances Ruth Keller’s The Contented Little Pussy Cat
• Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain
• Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game
• W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants
• José Saramago’s Death With Interruptions
• J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg
• Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare
• R. A. Montgomery’s Choose Your Own Adventure series
• Roberto Bolaño’s “Last Evenings on Earth”
• Honoré de Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece
• The Best of Gregory Clark
• Philip Roth’s Patrimony
• Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children
• Thomas McGuane’s The Longest Silence
• Horace Kephart’s Camping and Woodcraft
• Knut Hamsun’s Pan
• Wallace Stegner’s Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs
• Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio
• W. S. Merwin’s The Book of Fables
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Collected Stories
• Peter Stamm’s Seven Years
• Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy
• Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
• Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
• Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters
• Jonathan Franzen’s How to Be Alone
• Albert Camus’ The Stranger
• Harry Crews’s A Feast of Snakes
• Lagercrantz’s Art of Reading and Writing
• Virgil’s Aeneid
• Virginia Woolf’s The Years
• Henry Beston’s The Outermost House
• J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories