In comes this list. I've compiled 25 books that span from straight classics to futuristic Science Fiction and represent what I feel to be the best of what I've read. In some cases I've included multiple suggestions for an author, or a similar book by a different author to provide diversity and a wider range of options. I've tried to be brief where possible with my descriptions, and asterisks next to titles mean that the books is close to or over 1,000 pages. Whether it's due to style, content or the influence a particular book had over a period, these are the books and authors I consider must-reads, and they're listed here in no particular order. Enjoy!
1) We the Living, Ayn Rand - When people think of Rand, their first thought usually goes to one of her two doorstop books, Atlas Shrugged or Fountainhead, and often the result is trepidation - "They're over 600 pages!" But We the Living is the closest to an auto-biography that Rand ever wrote and is far more accessible while doing much less preaching than the others. Following a young girl in post-Revolution Russia, the book looks at social struggle, class warfare and love in a way that is both melancholy and uplifting. Don't get me wrong, I love both Atlas and Fountainhead, but something about We the Living gets me with every read. It also offers one of the most compelling arguments against religious belief systems I've read.
2) Middlemarch, George Eliot - Don't be fooled by the name. Most people hear "George Eliot" without ever realizing that he's a she. While all of her work is excellent, Middlemarch is a full-fledged social examination of Victorian era England. What is so powerful about this book is that Eliot takes multiple perspectives by focusing on various characters within the society and then examining the way they interact. Eliot's idea is to use "lenses" in order to shift perspective and the result here is a novel that forces the reader to start using a variety of lenses to view the world around them.
3) Ishmael, Daniel Quinn - While Rand works with the notion of "second-handers," Quinn's premise is centered around "takers" and "leavers" in an effort to explain the human condition and debase the notion that we are the pinnacle of evolution. Through educated dialogue between a man and a gorilla, Ishmael works through history and the "accepted truths" of our society in order to provide an idea that things not only can be changed, but in order for the world to survive, they must.
4) Les Miserables*, Victor Hugo - Set in Paris in the early 1800s, Les Miz follows an ex-convict, Jean Valjean, as he attempts to do good in the world despite the fact that his criminal past continues to haunt him. By focusing on an ex-convict and other destitute characters, Hugo creates a backdrop through which he explores religious, political and social issues while simultaneously questioning the ties that bind us.
5) Tess of the D'urbervilles, Thomas Hardy - Say "Charles Dickens" and people will automatically think either Great Expectations or "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," from Tale of Two Cities. But say "Thomas Hardy" and see how many blank stares you get. While often regarded well for his work in poetry, Hardy's novels also provide one of the most overlooked talents in Victorian-era literature. Hardy's prose is poetry. In this novel, the story follows Tess, a young woman who faces the hardships and pitfalls of an extremely patriarchal society, and puts forward questions of social classes, sexuality and morality.
6) Dombey and Son*, Charles Dickens - Forget Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. While these novels are good, in my mind they fail to capture the talent and breadth that Dickens possesses as an author. Dombey and Son was published in the serial novel format (a chapter released at a time) and spanned close to two years. It follows the Dombey family through both wealth and poverty while examining issues of child abuse, family ties and arranged marriages. The characters, as most of Dickens' are, are well-fleshed out and easy to either care for or despise.
7) Animal Farm, George Orwell -While this book is short, poignant and an intriguing reflection on the human condition, it is consistently overshadowed by 1984. The book takes place on a farm where animals come to take over the show and poses the question: Just why do we think we're so much better?
8) Infinite Jest*, David Foster Wallace - This book is not for the faint of heart, but it represents one of the best novels I have ever read in any genre. Wallace was a literary genius, adept at exploring various styles, ideas and themes in one of the widest collection of voices I've ever seen in an author. Infinite Jest is a book about addictions, and through the nearly 300 footnotes Wallace creates to give the stories more context, it becomes an addiction to read and decipher. Centered mainly at an upper-echelon tennis academy and a halfway house for recovering drug addicts, the book takes place in a time where American consumerism has led to subsidized years (no more 2009, just The Year of the Whopper) and a pollution problem so severe that a portion of Canada has been appropriated for dumping purposes, a place called The Great Concavity. Daunting in size, this book is worth every page. Wallace died in 2008 when he hung himself. For a more digestible version of him, try Broom of the System.
9) Life of Pi, Yann Martel - When a ship sinks in the Pacific ocean and leaves Pi on a raft for 227 days with a tiger, he must examine his own ideas of faith, humanity and spirituality. A touching and uplifting story, it has the added benefit of an ending that leaves the reader questioning their own interpretation of the text.
10) 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez - A look at a town and the people in it over the course of an unknown period of time. Marquez looks at history, time, and romance while incorporating hints of magical realism. Through the course of the book, the residents of the town and the members of the family become lenses with which to view the other, and Marquez succeeds in making you care about them all through their struggles and the places they find their nostalgia. Love in the Time of Cholera is also exceptional.
11) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen - Another Victorian-era author, Austen brings a more female-centered perspective than Hardy and Dickens. In this novel, a group of sisters must set out to find situations that will provide them with security after their father dies and the estate reverts to his male heir. Social intrigue, romantic interaction and the subtlety of both within the time period make this a fantastic read.
12) The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester - When Gulliver Foyle is marooned in deep space and left for dead, he becomes a man bent on revenge. By changing his identity, skill set and material means, he embarks on a mission to extract it. Fans of The Count of Monte Cristo will enjoy this one.
13) The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle - The issue of immigration and specifically illegal immigration has been a hot button topic for many years now. We often talk about the way the two societies have become entwined, with people from Mexico coming here for physical labor of various sorts in order to send money home and citizens exploiting this illegal labor in order to have cheaper commodities. In this novel, Boyle places an illegal immigrant family in the ravine behind a house in a gated community and then puts the two on a collision course that forces questions of morality and ethics between these two disparate socioeconomic groups.
14) Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card - Widely regarded as one of the best Sci-Fi books of all time, and certainly one of the most popular outside of traditional Sci-Fi readers, this one follows Ender Wiggin, a child soldier in an Army being trained to protect Earth from alien invasion. A page-turner in every sense of the word.
15) Revolutionary Suicide, Huey Newton - In the 60's, the Civil Rights movement was coming to a crescendo and African-Americans were sick of the treatment they had been subjected to in the century following the abolishment of slavery. Out of Oakland, CA came the Black Panthers, a group known for "Power to the people," and carrying guns, they also provided community outreach in an attempt to improve the condition of their lives. In this book, the Black Panther's founder talks about his upbringing, road to social enlightenment and the steps that formed the party while looking at inequality and injustice within the established government and social systems. Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver works as a good companion piece and different perspective from another Panther.
16) Glamorama, Bret Easton Ellis - Some people swear by American Psycho, but I think this is the strongest novel of Bret Easton Ellis. while Psycho concentrated on capitalism and consumerism, Glamorama turns the microscope on obsession with beauty and celebrity. What starts out as a humorous and shallow narrative turns odd and violent quickly as the main character, a supermodel, is exposed to a terrorist ring. In one chapter, Ellis describes a plane explosion in fantastic and disturbing detail, and at the end, as with Psycho, leaves you unsure as to where to draw the line between actual events and figments of the characters' imaginations.
17) Stranger in a Strange Land or Time Enough for Love, Robert Heinlein - One of the most prolific Sci-Fi writers, Heinlein wrote risqué and socially experimental novels that sought to question the parameters society has been constructed on. While the passage of time has made some of his theories and thoughts seem sexist, when they were written they sought to provide greater female sexual liberation than was allowed for at the time. Stranger in a Strange Land is seen as the cult classic Sci-Fi and follows Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars and raised by Martians who returns to Earth. The ideas of free-love, water brothers and "grokking" were adopted from this novel for the counterculture and hippies of the 60's. Time Enough for Love follows the story of Lazarus Long, an Immortal, through centuries of his life, creating a 700 year long span to examine humanity, culture, morality and love.
18) Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson - I'm not much of a Beat-era fan, and I certainly don't understand the mountains of praise heaped on Kerouac's On the Road. To me, the lack of coherence and the random and drawn out scribblings of a man don't make for impressive reading. However, what I did find impressive was this book for the very different perspective it offers. Joyce Johnson was Kerouac's girlfriend and Minor Characters provides a different view of him and a completely different perspective on the Beat Generation from one of its rare female voices.
19) Perv - A Love Story, Jerry Stahl - Incredibly funny, Stahl is the subject of the Ben Stiller movie Permanent Midnight as well as the creative (albeit heavily drug-addled mind) of the 80s TV show Alf. In this one, he looks at childhood romantic ideas and sexual development through the eyes of a teenager trapped in Pittsburgh in 1970 who strikes out on the road to join the waning moments of the Summer of Love in San Francisco. Stahl writes like Woody Allen talks, and the book walks the fine line between black-as-night humor and humorous horror.
20) A Room of One's Own, Virgina Woolf - A thoughtful and incredibly important piece of Feminist literature that puts the female author's point of view into perspective. By speaking about the need for the same types of space and privacy afforded to men, Woolf brings the condition of writers like Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes into greater perspective.
21) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly, Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick. Dick is often regarded as one of the grandfathers of Sci-Fi. In addition to A Scanner Darkly (Robert Downey Jr.), he also wrote Total Recall (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Minority Report (Tom Cruise.) The Man in the High Castle works on the premise that the Germans and Japanese won WWII, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was turned into the movie Blade Runner (Harrison Ford.) At the moment I'm reading one of his called, Dr. Bloodmoney or How We Got Along After the Bomb, a book centered around a bombing disaster in the Bay Area. If there's one drawback to Dick's fiction, it's that he often starts with great ideas and fizzles out towards the end of the book. He's just not a closer.
22) The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove - Christopher Moore. Generally, I'm not much of a fan of comedy books, but I've enjoyed every book I've read by Moore including Bloodsucking Fiends (a vampire love story set in San Francisco) and The Island of the Sequined Love Nun. His comedy utilizes everyday people in everyday situations that are faced with supernatural events or characters. In Lust Lizard, a small California town is thrown into chaos when the town psychiatrist replaces all of her patients' prescriptions with placebos and a sea-beast that exudes a pheromone comes out of the cove and tries to mate with things like a gas truck. Hilarity ensues.
23) The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart. A man decides to make his life as random as possible by making decisions based on the roll of the dice. As he becomes more addicted to the dice, his life slowly spirals out of control (or into control depending on your point of view.) This book looks at the decisions we make, the choices we take and the fundamental problem with relinquishing control that we all face.
24) Crash, J.G. Ballard. Not the Academy Award winner, the one that turned into a Holly Hunter movie about people who get sexually turned on by car accidents. I'd also recommend Empire of the Sun (turned into the Steven Spielberg/Christian Bale movie from the 80s about a British kid in an internment camp in WWII Japan) or Concrete Island, where a man is stranded between portions of a freeway.
25) Great Apes, Will Self. A man wakes up in London to find that the entire world is run by apes. He's looked at as insane as he struggles with the idea that he is actually human and the world has been turned upside down. Better than Planet of the Apes in that it's set in modern times, not post-apocalyptic Earth.
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