80 Books Every Person Should Read
We invited eight female literary powerhouses, from Michiko Kakutani to Anna Holmes to Roxane Gay, to help us create an updated list of books everyone should read. Each participant made 10 picks. It's a new year, a new Esquire.com. We're looking forward to reading and we hope you are, too.
What can we say? At Esquire, we messed up. Our list of "80 Books Every Man Should Read," published several years ago, was rightfully called out for its lack of diversity in both authors and titles. So we invited eight female literary powerhouses, from Michiko Kakutani to Anna Holmes to Roxane Gay, to help us create a new list. Each participant made 10 picks. We're looking forward to reading and we hope you are, too.
Michiko Kakutani, @michikokakutani
Chief book critic for The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winner, and perhaps the only person on earth with the guts to call the work of Philip Roth "flimsy" and that of John Updike "cringe-making."
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The author's darkly luminous masterpiece: the original novel about the American Dream—and the most beautifully written, ever.
–MK
$10, amazon.com.
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
The horrors of slavery are made harrowingly real in a remarkable novel that possesses the intimacy of real life and the epic power of myth.
–MK
$10, amazon.com.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The master of magical realism conjured the town of Macondo, where the miraculous and the monstrous are equally part of daily life, and in doing so, mythologized the history of an entire continent.
–MK
$10, amazon.com.
As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
In recounting the story of one woman's death and her burial from multiple points of view, this short, fierce book helped remake the modern novel and influenced generations of writers to come.
–MK
$9, amazon.com.
Underworld, by Don DeLillo
The story of one man and one family that is also the story of what happened to America in the second half of the 20th century.
–MK
$8, amazon.com.
Selected Stories Of Alice Munro
Piercing, prismatic tales about the lives of girls and women that possess the amplitude of novels, and the emotional precision of Chekhov.
–MK
$14, amazon.com.
Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon
A buddy movie starring the British surveyors who mapped the boundary between North and South in pre-Revolutionary America and a dazzling post-modernist confection that emerges as the author's most affecting novel yet.
–MK
$15, amazon.com.
The Stories Of Vladimir Nabokov
A glittering collection of tales animated by the author's fascination with the magical transactions of art and the indelible losses of exile.
–MK
$16, amazon.com.
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
A funny, street-smart portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek that unfolds into a vibrant meditation on public and private history.
–MK
$10, amazon.com.
A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L'Engle
A children's classic that—back in the 1960's—gave the world a science fiction heroine: a bright, awkward, spirited girl named Meg Murry who travels through time and space to find her missing scientist father and save the universe.
–MK
$6, amazon.com.
Lauren Groff, @legroff
Author of three novels, including President Obama's favorite book of 2015, Fates and Furies.
Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko
Ceremony is one of the great (and under appreciated) American novels. Silko writes with tremendous power, rage, and range of violence, Pueblo myth and a veteran's recovery.
–LG
$3, amazon.com.
The Collected Stories of Grace Paley
Under the seductive, crisp and funny voice of Grace Paley, there burns a great indignation and condemnation of the way the powerful prey on the weak in society.
–LG
$12, amazon.com.
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
This novel has the most capacious vision of humanity that I know of. In a crowded field of novels about small towns and marriage and idealism, it remains the best.
–LG
$8, amazon.com.
Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin
I could have chosen Baldwin's essay collections The Fire Next Time or Notes of a Native Son; if his absolutely great short story "Sonny's Blues" were a stand-alone book, it would have been a shoo-in. In Giovanni's Room, published in 1956, Baldwin wrote gorgeously of a homosexual relationship in Paris, a book so far ahead of its time that America is still catching up to it.
–LG
$8, amazon.com.
Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson
Anne Carson is my pick for greatest living writer. She has spiny brilliance, profound Classical knowledge, and an astonishing ability to slide between genres. Autobiography of Red is both a deeply affecting book-length poem about Geryon, a demon in love with Herakles. It is also hilarious.
–LG
$13, amazon.com.
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote one of the greatest works of synthesis in prose history: this novel pretends to be about a few braided love-stories but it contains more themes, characters, and political ideas than most shelves of books do.
–LG
$10, amazon.com.
The Complete Poems, by Emily Dickinson
Dickinson's poems are sharp, wild, implosive things. She will always be relentlessly modern, and is one of the parents of modern American poetry.
–LG
$17, amazon.com.
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
If Dickinson, with her compression, is one parent of modern American poetry, Whitman is the other parent, working in the expansive, wild, roaming, explosive vein.
–LG
$4, amazon.com.
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