Non-fiction and fiction savants Bland Woodward, Jess Sanchez, Able Doctor, C. McClury DeAngelo, Priam X. Steeplejack, and Jana Redd, all essayists and Arts & Culture reviewers with the Muted Trumpet, an underground publication originating in Manhattan's Zip Code 10010, recently convened over a four-day weekend, to develop their list of the Best 100 Books of All Time.
This new list includes non-fiction and fiction titles, published primarily in English (but not always). Unlike persons who work for the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, no reviewer here has ever been paid for a book review.
When unanimity was not possible, a majority vote (at least four of six reviewers) was enough to add or subtract a book from the list. A tied vote meant the book did not make the list.
Therefore, here are the Best 100 Books of All Time. Many wonderful books are not on the list. Perhaps some on the list are less wonderful than others, but this is how the votes fell.
The books are not presented in any particular order, just that each is one of the Best 100 Books of All Time, based on this particular group's deliberation.
All books are fiction unless indicated otherwise.
If you choose to comment that you want a book added to the list, you must propose which book would need to be substracted to make room for your selection. Your comments are welcome. We will read and respond to every comment. The list will be periodically updated as appropriate.
1. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. The best American novel. Soldiers travel west along the Mexico-Texas border, to California, being paid for human kills by the scalp. If the stories of Jesus constitute the New Testament, this heavy tale by McCarthy is the Dark Testament. When you die, you might live again, but first you will die. Every sentence, paragraph, or grouping of five words or more would be impossible for any other author to write. The story is prophetic and ancient, words carved upon a rock.
-- Able Doctor
2. Strait is the Gate, by Andre Gide. Tragic tale of forbidden love between boy and girl, told through boy's narrative and later supplemented by girl's diary entries. Gide writes the simplest sentences of any author, both in French and the way they come across in the English translation. A sixth grader can read Gide. Beautifully sad, the pathway to God is so narrow that it can only be traversed one person at a time; the road is not wide enough for two to walk side-by-side. Gide gives words to the lonely aching of the human heart. And if you're reading this, why not comment and say if you liked the story or no, and if you think it is true that sometimes a person may have to go solo to get back to God, at least for part of the ride?
--Priam X. Steeplejack
3. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. A preacher, married to a younger woman, and jealous of a more able-bodied male parishioner, writes letters for his young son to read in the future. Tender letters, time bombs of hope and explanation. As a student of writing, this opened my eyes to a narrative style told through letters, a much-imitated style that many have copied but none has done as well as Robinson. Robinson demonstrates that ordinary topics like love, jealousy, religion, and boredom can have high stakes when the author is gifted and fearless. Later in a different novel, Home, she takes up the same characters and context from a different angle. Home is a tour de force in its own right, and more powerful when combined with Gilead. Both are tools for any serious author to observe the craft of writing. And if you're reading this and familiar with the book, why not comment and let someone know what you thought, did you like the style of writing, did you like the idea of writing in your journal for your child, a tough story, a tough story that would be hard to tell true, and did you like the idea of the grown-up boy later reading his dad's journal and would that help the boy?
--C. McClury DeAngelo
4. The Lager Queen of Minnesota, by J. Ryan Stradal. We say writing is to educate, inform, entertain, challenge. Above all these, reading is for comfort and pleasure. Our mothers read to us on their laps. The chattering of birds in the morning greeted us as children. Books are a meditation on the comfort of shared communication. Stradal, a former food writer, weaves a story of two estranged sisters, one who is excellent at pies, the other at beer. The novel gives noble meaning and poetry to food, that focus of our every waking hour. Resiliency, fate, envy, family, food. Eat food; read literature. Live!
--Jana Redd
5. The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman (non-fiction). Probably the best history book written in English. Imagine knowing how history turned out but still wanting to read it over and over to make sure your memory is correct, because the other possibility (the one that didn't happen) is so frightening. The French and Russian fronts against Germany in the prolonged and barbaric World War I are brought to life like a gallant, royal feast being served by countless waiters in colorful liveries with myriad personalities. Get to know some of the wisest and stupidest men who have ever lived.
--Jess Sanchez
6. 1984, by George Orwell. The most true and correct book ever written. Not a dystopian novel but a description of how orthodox religions and political groups run society. You know Big Brother is watching. A story of how group power will always and ultimately crush the individual. Will sadly be more relevant than The Bible over the coming 3,000 years; is already more relevant than The Bible.
--Bland Woodward
7. IQ84, by Haruki Murakami. A young woman and young man unknowingly seek each other across alternate universes in which an authoritarian cult leader tries to end both of their lives. Pronounced "one, Q, 84." Not "iQ84." Beautiful, haunting, brilliant, this reads like 1984 sideways and upside down. A writer with no boundaries exists in these pages. Lonely and lyrical like a yellow moon.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
8. Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver. Be the resilient hero of your own story; be the resilient superhero of your own story. The best novel of the 21st century so far. Based on the structure and conceit of Dickens' David Copperfield, this modern Appalachian tale of an orphan boy growing up in the middle of an opioid epidemic reads how Dickens would write if he had spent five years with Mark Twain. In that sense, Kingsolver improves on both Dickens and Twain in the same novel. Grabs you by the intestines from beginning to end.
--Able Doctor
9. 1776, by David McCullough (non-fiction). What McCullough knew how to do was capture someone's heart, character, spirit, and energy. Imagine writing a biography of the greatest American, 200+ years after his death, for readers living also 200+ years beyond his death, and having a shared understanding why men would die in cold rags in winter for this country's (that wasn't yet a country) first leader (who didn't know he was "first" of anything because there was nothing without him).
--Bland Woodward
10. Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank (non-fiction). The entire universe of human emotions contained in a small apartment in Holland, contained in the mind of a confined skinny Jewish teen, contained in the hand-written pages of a short diary, and solemnized in her martyr's blood. There will always be angry old men who will always come to nothing, and beauty and youth shall always outlast them. Every word she speaks is braver and truer than the nonsense spoken from political and religious pulpits.
--Priam X. Steeplejack
11. The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition, by Caroline Alexander (non-fiction). Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to follow a logical sequence. Why would men want to cross the Antarctic continent on foot? No one knows except that many living souls have had a powerful thirst for adventure. Written with great care and empathy, Alexander puts the reader in the miserable hull of a doomed ship, side-by-side with cold men eating penguin stew day after day, and then in the center of a hellish rowboat in freezing waters, where men sleep in wet rotten reindeer hair sleeping bags while drifting along arctic waters. At night I can sometimes hear the creaking sounds made by ice crushing ships.
--Jess Sanchez
12. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. Read this when you are young, so you can spend your whole long life thinking about it. This author's beautiful, brilliant, broad, unafraid mind, thirty years at least ahead of its time, tells you the size of his heart, and his characters don't need to hug and say "I love you," to prove the author's warmth. The most absurd premise, based on a VHS tape the contents of which are so odd that it causes the death of those who watch it, creates the stakes in this story of a young man at a tennis academy and his bizarre contacts and exploits, many of whom are stoned or drunk. Have you ever wondered if it is possible to commit suicide by microwaving your own head, and if so how would you get the microwave door closed with your head still inside? The best authors are prophets and historians and eavesdroppers.
--Jana Redd
13. A Curious Tour of Salt Lake City, Utah, by Ellie James. Witty, warm, engaging, intimate, awkward, deliberate, cringeworthy humor. Sometimes a book is so wonderful you want to announce it ahead of everyone else, instead of waiting for fifty years to go by for time to validate the decision. James takes you by the hand to meet, one by one, a collective of Mormons in Salt Lake City, Utah, who take care of each other whilst seeking God's individual direction. A bit Confederacy of Dunces, a bit The Pale King, a bit of Catch-22. James is the next unknown artist who will only become known after her death.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
14. The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, by Bill James (non-fiction)(published repeatedly since 1985 under a variety of different titles and formats). Authoritarian, witty, credible, passionate, James changed the way people talk about and think about baseball, and indeed all sports. Getting to first by a walk was as good as getting there by a hit. Players across eras could be compared by "win shares." We take these ideas as basic now. Revolutionary, nerdy, addictive, and mesmerizing. Skip all the other authors and books (Moneyball) who have borrowed/stolen from James. And oh yeah, Chipper Jones was better than Bryce Harper could ever dream of being, and it's not close.
--Able Doctor
15. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. This masterpiece paints snowflakes and icicles into your memories and places your memories into delicate frames. In book, on television or at the cinema, on reel-to-reel or radio, the tale of Scrooge and Tiny Tim has come to define the meaning of the western Christmas. So brief it can be read aloud to an audience in one sitting, it charms young and old alike, and moistens the eyes with eternal glimmerings, whilst the heart beats fondly for charming times future and past.
--Jana Redd
16. Germinal, by Emile Zola. The title means something between "beginning" and "embryo" and "germinal" and "revolution" and "fodder." This novel predicted the Occupy Wall Street movement, the MAGA movement, and other political revolutions. A small mining town holds wealthy owners and miserable workers, side by side: the filthy bedsheets of a mining family described in detail against a relaxed luncheon of the privileged. Sometimes violence is the answer.
--Priam X. Steeplejack
17. Killing Pablo, by Mark Bowden (non-fiction). Prior to the modern era of true crime addiction, war reporting, idolatry for fame and criminal enterprise, and television's obsession with graphic violence, Mark Bowden delivered a biography that made its centerpiece deplorable and attractive, his death justified and pitiful. Greed, politics, whores, cocaine, family, bizarre loyalty, football, Say No To Drugs, the CIA, cartels -- much earlier than Hollywood pushed these topics as daily fare. Way better than any stupid Netflix show about violence.
--Bland Woodward
18. The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck. What makes a novel great? Probably that it creates a sensory experience, a deep memory, or overlaps with real life enough that when the reader looks back on his years he can't help but see the imprint of the book there. The stink of poverty, the dust of the hot earth, a tickle of opium, the cycle of rags to riches to rags, the inevitability of change -- are these to be part of a high school education, or shall the children learn only mathematics and spreadsheets?
--Jess Sanchez
19. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates (non-fiction). Brave, honest, brutal. Thanks to Coates, I understood all the other words, said and printed, about the impact of race in the U.S.A. -- to be born into different skin, to be treated as a natural enemy. No wonder there is fear and anger.
--Able Doctor
20. The Greater Journey, by David McCullough (non-fiction). A snapshot of a time and a chronology of different Americans who were educated in arts and medicine in Europe, and a description of how cross-cultural education occurs. How come the whole world seems to make the same breakthroughs at the same time? And what did the world feel like when it was still so large and wild? How did it feel to stumble on a cathedral before you ever knew in advance what a cathedral even could look like?
--Bland Woodward
21. All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy. There is beauty in horses and in women and in purpose and in using your gifts also there is beauty. The land is born beautiful as is too the sky as is the history of a people and one can be in the midst of great beauty and not possess it. Striving and death and hunger are beautiful when performed with dignity.
--Able Doctor
22. Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (non-fiction). The genius of Lincoln was not only his patience, his way with words, his courage, his vision, but his human warmth. He loved others and they loved him; he relied on others socially and politically and surrounded himself with men who didn't always agree with him or each other. Charming to imagine a time when the President and a cabinet member lived close enough in Washington D.C. to visit each other by horseback or carriage or foot, because they desperately needed each other's company.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
23. The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. My mother treated this book reverentially, like an urn. We opened and closed the cover with great care, and didn't touch the pages with dirty hands. At age four it was a weighty prophecy that I understood and feared at the atomic level. My mother would get old, and I would watch her die, and I would get old and my children would watch me die, and so on.
--Jana Redd
24. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. A full lifetime is insufficient time to understand the magnetic pull of this book. A graph of Y = 1 / X where X is time and Y is achieving ones dreams and potential: Fitzgerald is Gatsby is America, and a third person Nick tells us about the wonderful man and place behind the haze, but Nick is too clumsy or stupid or naive, so the reader never sees what Nick claims to see and the reader becomes himself disillusioned also. The tragedy isn't the death of Gatsby, it's that Gatsby dies without Nick unveiling him first. Nick's perpetual failure is the author's perpetual genius.
--Jess Sanchez
25. My Effin' Life, by Geddy Lee (non-fiction). Many rock and roll biopics exist. This one shows the dedication, the passion, the tireless work, the boredom, the obsessiveness, across decades and decades and in all dimensions. Geddy, himself an observer and poet, narrates his own life in a sincere, unglamorized manner. People, it's about work! Geddy, a nerdy outcast Jewish Canadian, learns guitar in high school, teaches himself to sing, to play keyboard, and ultimately he and some friends become one of the world's biggest rock acts, without too much jail or infidelity or drugs. Enjoyed especially the band's creation of 2112 album. And if you're reading why not comment and say what rocker or singer or artist you wanted to be when you grew up and why and did you come close, and if you had gotten all the way there, how do you suppose things would have turned out?
--Priam X. Steeplejack
26. The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks. There have been many pulp fiction fantasy books. None better. The conceit was stolen from Tolkien, but the Sword led many to Tolkien eventually. A young boy on a quest seeks to understand the power inside and outside of himself, in order to defeat his mortal enemy, etc. Assisted by elves, a knight, a dwarf, a Druid, and so on. This book is the great-uncle to much of modern genre fiction.
--Able Doctor
27. Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen. What a debut! What makes this book addictively captivating is that Austen, like her characters, outwits her male counterparts and societal restrictions, in her real life. Warm and accurate display of intimacy among sisters and female friends, above all else. Austen takes the restricted spaces allowed to women, shines a bright light on them, and makes them more warm and appealing and even logical than the places from which women are excluded.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
28. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. The great American novel; astonishing story of wonder and delight, defying all categorization. This book has gotten about 1/100th the attention it deserves. Tracks a multi-generational Greek immigrant family to Detroit. Masterful exploration of ethnicity and gender and tradition across multiple generations and geographies. An exquisite cocoon woven from infinite strands of silk and gold where each strand is a person or an idea or a life and the whole is more complex and rich than the sum of its parts. Along with Catch-22, should be mandatory reading for all high school children in the U.S.
--Jana Redd
29. October 1964, by David Halberstam (non-fiction). Mantle, Maris, Gibson, Brock. The end of one dynasty, one way of doing things, and the beginning of another. Can a book about one of the great playoff series in baseball be more suspenseful than the games themselves? Yes. Reads like you are there. Right there. There used to be superheroes among us. They were called professional baseball players. And even the baseball writers were superheroes.
--Jess Sanchez
30. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris (non-fiction). Warm, sad, funny, Sedaris sees all the way into himself and all the way into you. The pioneer of confessional storytelling and the unheralded instigator of podcasting, his sincerity sets him apart from all the copycats who do it for money. He does it because he has to. Makes daily moments of humiliation into a triumph of acceptance and understanding. Some day when NPR is rubble this author will be the best thing we remember from NPR.
--Bland Woodward
31. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. Brilliant work of survival, strength, and adaptation. A life has many many chapters and no particular ending is inevitable. This author is every bit as strong as Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen.
--Jess Sanchez
32. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. This is not a dystopian tale but a non-fiction account of how religious and political extremists would like to govern women's bodies today. All five senses are provoked here to comprehend a state of life in which women are subservient and deferential to men. A smell of decay and dullness, bland visions, lack of touch, the sound of silence or screaming, a utilitarian taste. This author makes it despicable and disgusting to imagine the world proposed by so many male-dominant religions and political programs. Vivid scenes of religiously-motivated degradation are here that will make you sick.
--Able Doctor
33. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy says that love is a warrant: a justification and an obligation. The desire to survive and head to the oceans of California propel a man and his young son forward just after an Armageddon event. Immediate, urgent, relevant. And if you're reading, and you've read the story, and you've a child or a nephew that you love, can you think of something better than a gun with two bullets as a way of propelling a story forward, and wondering what use it will have and when and why, and how did you feel at the end, did the dad just sort of expire with delirium and wanted to know his boy would be good, or did he really get to the end, and would it even matter anyway either way what the new couple promised?
--Priam X. Steeplejack
34. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. The best, the darkest of all his masterpieces. The estate of a dead man is to be settled with the benefits to accrue to several potential heirs. How each deals with his or her potential windfall makes the story. Dickens creates two powerful female heroines here; these women are more well-rounded than most females created by Dickens. Brutal castigation of the British legal system provides pleasurable humor to the reader to offset the absurd monotony and self-gratification of the world's oldest bureaucracy.
--Jana Redd
35. Lost Illusions, by Honore de Balzac. A compendium on the prices of food, clothing, and real estate in Paris, at the end of the 19th century, locked within the eager plot of a rural man who moves to Paris for a change of fortunes. We laugh at the characters until we are ourselves indicted by our own expenditures that keep us rooted in our social positions.
--Bland Woodward
36. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J.K. Rowling. The beauty of the best art is that it reveals what we already imagined but could not put words to. Everyone has thought about how fun it would be to have magical powers but Rowling did something about it and wrote the book that changed the world.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
37. Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. A novel as heavy as all of France's cobblestones heaped together; a story as glorious as the language in which it is told. The author walks around as if with a lamp to illuminate the faces of every sort of person in this world. A hero, described in vivid dimensionality, is beloved by all but is forced to hide in plain sight.
--Priam X. Steeplejack
38. Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust. An autobiography of time itself, of how time feels on the skin and the eyes and the brain, moment to moment. Probably the most difficult literary achievement of all time, in any language. If you gave Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and George Saunders an infinity of time and paper, they could not write a single sentence worthy of being placed in this book.
--Able Doctor
39. Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre. An historian is confronted by the terrible reality that he exists. Go to the heart of ennui.
--Bland Woodward
40. Founding Brothers, by Joseph Ellis (non-fiction). Suppose you made the poor decision to attend law school in two days: reading this book would be the best way to prepare. Makes the idea of government interesting, if such be possible.
--Jana Redd
41. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. Wicked, crazy, shocking. An absolute stunner, the reader is trapped between two marital partners, each yelling into one ear. Probably indirectly responsible for 90% of the Netflix content during the past fifteen years. Every thriller looks up to this novel.
--Jana Redd
42. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. Around the time a man's wife leaves him without explanation, the cat goes missing also, and bizarre women begin appearing in his life. The line between reality and fiction is blurry. Intention, desire, fate, all blended together. Seriously write me an email, comment, what did you think of Malta and Creta Cano? Are they the most interesting and silly characters in all of literature. Holy cow.
--Bland Woodward
43. The Coldest Winter, by David Halberstam (non-fiction). Dramatic war reporting from decades after the war closed, told with the intensity and focus and detail of one present.
--Jess Sanchez
44. Bluebird, by Michael Smith. Grim southern gothic tale inspired by the writings of Cormac McCarthy. A former English professor challenges a company that pollutes water. Power is the currency most useful to humans in this small town in Missouri. Another novel that will be famous long after the author has left us.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
45. Barbarians at the Gate, by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar (non-fiction). A roller-coaster-ride-tale, witness the power of money as junk-bond raiders conquer one of America's largest companies. Based on the most delicious business reporting of all time.
--Bland Woodward
46. The Plantagenets, by Dan Jones (non-fiction). Sheds light with pomp and circumstance and poetic license on a time shrouded in mystery in darkness. Foundational to an understanding of the western world, its language, history, and endless thirst for war.
--Jana Redd
47. Antigone, by Jean Anouilh. As in plays like Becket or Dirty Hands, a dispute erupts between idealism and pragmatism, with tempers, passion, and high stakes. I read it five times and still don't know whose side I am on. Pairs nicely with The Stranger and Nausea.
--Jana Redd
48. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown (non-fiction). The white man invented a religion that invented a god who preferred the white man to indigenous peoples, and then from that wet sand created a government and an army and a narrative to satiate the blood hunger. Heartbreaking again and again, you will gasp in pain.
--Able Doctor
49. Armance, by Stendhal. A love story as exquisite and tragic as Romeo & Juliet, rounded out in full detail. The joy, when you match with someone, of replaying to each other all the prior steps that led you both there to sacred junction.
--Bland Woodward
50. The First American, by H.W. Brands (non-fiction). Skip the bloated and self-congratulatory Hamilton. Read about the person most responsible for America's handyman, entrepreneurial, industrial, practical, and poetic personality.
--Bland Woodward
51. Mayflower, a Story of Courage, Community and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick (non-fiction). History is of course more nuanced than we want to believe. The star of this account is Massasoit, the charismatic chief of the Wampanoags. We wonder what he could have achieved had he had more power or more luck: this country would have been so much more beautiful.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
52. The Pine Barrens, by John McPhee (non-fiction). Innovative and insightful account of people who live off the grid and the courage that lifestyle requires. It doesn't really look like a Subaru or Patagonia commercial.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
53. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner (non-fiction). Even the Kennedy brothers were stupid enough to believe the CIA had magical powers to fix everything. A glorious comedy of bureaucracy, hubris, and military overstepping. Read side-by-side with Infinite Jest.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
54. Call of the Wild, by Jack London. Ageless tale of the desire of all creations for independence. Two books on this list star wolves. Humans are a lot like wolves. Freedom is more critical than comfort.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
55. Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie. Exotic, mesmerizing, magical, hypnotic tour de force view of the life of an Indian man described as a parallel to Indian independence. Magnificent literary achievement. A carnival of words, ideas, feelings, and smells.
--Priam X. Steeplejack
56. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. This is the novel-form of a crescendo, the literary equivalent of Bolero. Dramatic building of tension and suspense from page one to the end, a Jenga tower about a flawed woman with big dreams. Flaubert, Balzac, and Zola together wrote of real problems within the human condition. The Pearl, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Madame Bovary, and Old Man in the Sea are all perfect novels in terms of the craft of storytelling, building words upon words, and constant escalating tension.
--Able Doctor
57. The Stranger, by Albert Camus. Camus and Sartre created the notion of ennui and the concept of a weight of existence, together with the existentialist movement. Despite some criticisms the movement is really about freedom to act rather than a type of invitation to hedonism. Once we accept that a person exists who might not cry at his mother's funeral, and that this person is our equal, we can grant that person the grace and liberty to pursue his own path.
--Jess Sanchez
58. The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The first hundred pages of this novel transports the reader through time and space into a train car in Russia in the 1800s where a man who has been receiving psychological treatment in Switzerland returns to Moscow. The women he meets immediately love him or hate him, and it's not clear why. Is he an idiot, is he innocent, or is he an actor in the events that befall him?
--Priam X. Steeplejack
59. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. An unusual convergence of film and literature has occurred here where it's hard to distinguish the book from the films. Possibly the best and most complete love story in all literature resides here. The reader knows they will get together and that they will never get together. See link below for more analysis of the great films based on this work.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
60. The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway. This pairs nicely with The Pearl by Steinbeck. You will get something other than what you want. Time and sickness wear down all men and close the window to all opportunities. It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment when success turns to sorrow.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
61. The Bible (non-fiction)(just kidding). Is it possible to imagine this world without this book? No. This book has everything, the creation, the history of the Jews, the history of the Christians, the end of the world, the life and times of Jesus, heaven and hell, beauty and suffering. We laugh at Greek and Roman and Norse mythology. In 2,000 years will this be called Western European mythology?
--Bland Woodward
62. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. What a title; so heavy, it kicks you in the gut. Powerful arguments for and against a belief in God and the possibility of salvation. The very best of Dostoevsky. The idea that it might take you longer to think about your life than to live it! The idea that a man who suffered infinitely would be justified by a single moment of clarity!!
--Jess Sanchez
63. Animal Farm, by George Orwell. "Some are more equal than others." And some have to do all the work while some live in the house. When the pig stands on two feet, you want to reach into the book and strangle the pig. Like 1984 except Animal Farm is more of a proposed analogy for Communism (and also domestic violence and abuse) while 1984 is an analog for fascism (and American religious extremism).
--Jana Redd
64. A Bend in the River, by V.S. Naipaul. More than any other book on this list, except perhaps the introductory scenes in The Idiot, Naipaul here provides a sense of geographic magnitude and claustrophobia. You really sense the weight and expanse of being in the middle of Africa; being somehow stuck in the middle of a vast space.
--Able Doctor
65. American Gospel, by Jon Mecham (non-fiction). Not long ago, in the U.S.A., we debated separation of church and state. This was before Donald Trump proposed that violence was justified for any political or religious cause that he as prophet deemed fit, and we no longer argued about charming things like flag burning or the role of religion in government. This book lays all the foundation and ground rules for state v church arguments if we should ever return to such a debate.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
66. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. A must read of the American canon. A bizarre assortment of U.S. soldiers stationed in Italy during W.W.II fight bureaucracy and foreign powers in a struggle for survival and sanity. Extremely, dangerously funny. Suppose you are on foreign soil and the U.S. government files have marked you as dead; how best to write a letter home to persuade the U.S. government you are still alive?
--Able Doctor
67. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami. An astonishing novel beyond categorization. A young man who grew up as the quiet one in a group of five high school friends realizes what impact his self-described non-personality has in the world. One can find liberation through severe introspection and humility.
--Jana Redd
68. One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson (non-fiction). Rollicking proof that truth is stranger than fiction. There is nothing this author cannot do: Babe Ruth, the first airplanes, the 1920's stock market, a corrupt presidency, terrorism in America. Glorious, sweet, strange, charming, hilarious -- like browsing a copy of every newspaper printed in America in the late 1920s. There is nothing new under the sun.
--Jana Redd
69. Kitchens of the Great Midwest, by J. Ryan Stradal. It's difficult for men to write in the voice of a woman. With 6,000 years of practice, it's easier for women to write in the voice of a man. This author, because of his close relationship with his mother, displays the incredible talent that so many male authors have missed. A true comfort and pleasure to read.
--Priam X. Steeplejack
70. Good Night, Gorilla, by Peggy Rathmann. Following my divorce years ago, I read this to my young daughter one thousand times. Like all great children's literature, it raises fears (of being alone, or of being left behind) and responds with comfort and humor (the animals figure out a way to be together with their human friend).
--Jess Sanchez
71 Illusions, by Richard Bach. Revolutionary and sacrilegious when published, it proposed that any person could be her own god or Messiah by spiritual awareness and concentration, and by accepting the true meaning of autonomy. I found this in my Mom's closet at age 10, it was like finding The One Ring.
--Bland Woodward
72. Here, by Richard McGuire. Suppose like Tom Hanks in Castaway you are summoned to fly a doomed FedEx plane across the oceans. You can take with you only one book. For me it would have to be Here or The Bible. Here is a graphic novel of the history of the universe from Big Bang until the end. The Bible deals more with the history of the spiritual world than the temporal world, but similar in scope. I might also take Infinite Jest because I would finally have enough time to read and diagram all the nutcases at the tennis academy.
--Jana Redd
73. A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway (non-fiction). Another book set in the world's greatest city, written by America's favorite author. Hemingway here teaches the reader how to write.
--Bland Woodward
74 . Killing Commendatore, by Haruki Murakami. This novel got poor reviews, is about nothing but an isolated adult man who drives from one place to another listening to classical music and then visits a hole in the ground sometimes for mysterious reasons. And yet there is no stopping or turning back once you begin reading. A great novel is something more than accurate dialogue, active plot, well-rounded characters, credible interactions, and a great hook. Sometimes you go somewhere weird and you don't want to leave and you can't explain why. Think about it. When you were born into this earth, it was the weirdest place you had ever been, scary and new and incoherent, and you stayed as long as you could! And one day you will die and go somewhere super weird and you will stay there a very very long time indeed!
--Priam X. Steeplejack
75. The Firm, by John Grisham. Grisham's greatest contribution to humanity was not his myriad tales about heroic lawyer types, but giving the reader something to do on an airplane other than chew on cyanide pills. His first ten books or so were just tasty and addictive. Maybe they weren't good for you but there's a reason everyone loves Coca-Cola.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
76. The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy. The best non-human character in literature (a wolf) resides here wild and free as in the beginning even so was the wolf made. Behold his majesty.
--Bland Woodward
77. David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens. However many non-fiction books I will read, this book will always be rooted in my memory as the first great novel I ever read. This is a drama about an orphan in industrial England but the story is rather pleasant, funny, and light-hearted for the most part. Like Catch-22: a study of bizarre characters.
--Jess Sanchez
78 and 79. The Mayor of Casterbridge and Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy: reviewing these works together. There are some novels like Madame Bovary and The Pearl that are perfect from an execution standpoint -- no wasted words, no wasted time, no wasted phrases. These books are built slowly and carefully like a tower is built. Mayor is such a novel on the tragic side: a man who has everything comes unraveled stitch by stitch; by contrast, Madding Crowd is a deliberately built love story that compares favorably to Pride and Prejudice in terms of escalation of dramatic tension.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
80. Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown. This book for young children acknowledges the fear many children have going to bed and falling asleep, to be separated from consciousness and their parents. Children are reminded that everything takes a break at night, even inanimate objects. Later in life, those same children will realize that Goodnight Moon is a meditative practice that can help a person face her own death.
--Jess Sanchez
81. The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara (non-fiction). The author summarizes the conflicts and events leading up to Gettysburg, with focus on key generals on each side, before narrating the hour-by-hour blows of some of the most important days in American history. Puts the reader on the sidelines to observe strategy, courage, stupidity, and suffering. History is the story of ordinary people acting in extraordinary situations, moment by moment.
--Priam X. Steeplejack
82. Red River to Appomattox, by Shelby Foote (non-fiction). Foote spent most of his adult life researching and writing about the Civil War. He of course was instrumental to the Ken Burns Civil War documentary, released on PBS decades ago. Foote's familiarity with the battles and players of the war allows him to narrate the story like an old man sitting around the fire, indulging and marveling his audience.
--Bland Woodward
83. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsy. One of the best crafted stories in all literature. A story of how to maintain dignity and purpose in the face of endless toil and inevitable suffering coupled with a high risk of torture and death. As the title says, the reader spends one day with the main character in a Siberian prison camp, and you will feel his heart beat and his hunger pangs along with the comfort he takes tucking himself in at night to a cold blanket.
--Jana Redd
84. The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee (non-fiction). A love story about the medicine and science of cancer, all the ups, downs, accidents, and breakthroughs over the thousands of years of humanity's attempts to grapple with its most feared disease. Cancer takes on a personality here, as a wicked actor and irrepressible pest that constantly transforms itself to perform its pirhanic work. One comes away with a sense of wonder and pity for cancer and its victims. Probably the best non-fiction written in the English language.
--Jana Redd
85. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich (non-fiction). An oral history of the fall of the Soviet empire in the early 1990's. The Russian people interviewed for this book do not follow the worn-out American script that capitalism saved them; instead they have mixed views about reasons for the fall of communism and whether they are better off (or not) now compared to before. The histories and perspectives are eye-opening, pathetic, and important. It is good to be reminded how little we know and how much false narratives permeate our national stories.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
86. The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander (non-fiction). Fundamental to any current discussion of race in the United States. Alexander uses empirical data, analogy, and feeling to communicate the urgent problem that mass incarceration, based on systemic racism in the justice and police system, has replaced Jim Crow (which replaced slavery) as a powerful tool to suppress Black bodies in this country.
--Bland Woodward
87. Where I'm Calling From, by Raymond Carver. Vital stories. The author exposes the secret motivations and fears of his characters, making them naked and shivering before the reader, who observes them with wonder, pity, empathy, or disgust.
--Jana Redd
88. Remainder, by Tom McCarthy. Powerful story of the secret powers and tricks of the human brain. Shortly after receiving a financial windfall, a man experiences a traumatic injury that pushes him to revisit parts of his life over and over again. Wonderful insight into cyclical nature of trauma and the relativity of time.
--Able Doctor
89. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle. Finding and reading this fantasy in the elementary school library felt like an act of sedition. Comparable to Illusions by Bach and the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. A young teen finds herself in the middle of a universal battle of good vs evil.
--Able Doctor
90. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco (creative non-fiction). Gritty graphic novel exploring decline of of urban centers in the face of economic insecurity and unequal wealth distribution, combined with an increasing police and security state. An electric graphic novel.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
91. Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr. Seuss (non-fiction)(just kidding). Children in America would probably still learn to read without Dr. Seuss, but it would be less fun for sure. Seuss shows kids that reading is the door to wacky, magical, wonderful characters and worlds. Language is fun, funny, rhythmic, entertaining, exploratory, and weird!
--Priam X. Steeplejack
92. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse. A story of spiritual self-discovery through non-judgment and experience. Life is a river, constantly changing in a state of permanence, neither permanent nor impermanent.
--Able Doctor
93. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. Not that John Kennedy. A story of strange and comedic characters, centered around one Ignatius, a sloppy, grumpy young man who finds himself in the middle of the wheel of fate again and again. Charming, pitiful, and hilarious. Undoubtedly influenced the writing of Infinite Jest. Compare also to the first twelve chapters of Catch-22.
--Jess Sanchez
94. Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls. A love story about humans and dogs. Billy raises two redbone coonhounds, Old Dan and Little Ann. Together they find success and regional fame in treeing raccoons. They show loyalty, purpose, and love through mutual interest and sacrifice, and the dogs ultimately pay everything to save their human.
--Jana Redd
95. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (non-fiction). A masterful achievement: describes the math and physics of atom splitting; the relevant politics of war and power; and the life and inner conflict of one of the people largely responsible for the development of the atomic bomb. About 80 billion times better than the film.
96. Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne (non-fiction). Modern-written history of the Comanches, their expertise in horsemanship and physical dominance in war against various enemies. An epic people and history hiding in plain sight.
--Bland Woodward
97. Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv (non-fiction). One of the most important topics of the last twenty and the next one hundred years. Explores how the safety culture has diminished the access children have to nature and unstructured play, and the emotional, educational, and societal consequences of that shift. The conversation we all had during the pandemic, but this was written well before we knew the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
98. A People's History of the French Revolution, by Eric Hazan (non-fiction). The French Revolution is one of the main events in modern world history and also one of the least well understood or explained. Hazan shines beautiful, rational light on the tensions between the societal classes in France and how these played out not just in Paris but all around France leading up to the Bastille.
--Priam X. Steeplejack
99. Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese. Magnetic, expansive, life-lustful, moving story of two brothers born in Ethiopia to medical professionals and the changing paths their lives dictate.
--Jan Redd
100. There, There, by Tommy Orange. Powerful, moving, intertwined stories that involve challenges of persons of Native American heritage living within the borders of the United States. One character whose mother is white and whose father is Native American says: "You're from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You're both and neither. In the bath, you'd stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub."
--Jana Redd
101. Man-Eaters of Kumaon, by Jim Corbett (non-fiction). Astonishing stories written by British hunter Jim Corbett, who hunted tigers in India about 80 years ago, usually for hire. As the title suggests, he was often hired to kill tigers because those tigers were eating humans. Makes Hemingway's adventures look silly. Well written, delightful, intense tales of the cunning of tiger and human hunters seeking each other in the night.
--Jana Redd
102. In the Shadow of the Banyan, by Vaddey Ratner. Words fail me. Exquisite beauty, endless unfathomable loss and sorrow. A novel based on the author's experiences growing up in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge in power. Never never never never forget your humanity. Never.
----C. McClury DeAngelo
103. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, by Robert Olen Butler. Please please please pretty please I beg you to read this collection of short stories about Vietnamese immigrants living in the United States. Soaring, potent, vital tales of adaptation and survival.
--C. McClury DeAngelo
104. Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges. Riddles, equations, impossibilities, illusions, and atomic conundrums captured in story form.
--Bland Woodward
105. No Death No Fear, by Thich Nhat Hanh (non-fiction). Ideas essential to peace, harmony, and maintenance of sanity. Before you were born, you were still there as a fetus, and before you were a fetus, you were still there wrapped up in the biology of your parents, and before that in the behaviors and languages and cultures of your great-great-great grandparents, and after you die, you will always always still be, and being and essence can manifest themselves in a variety of forms when conditions allow.
--Bland Woodward
106. The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy. The job of an author is to create new worlds and new languages. No one did it better, may he rest in peace. His final story, a story of questions without answers, and possibly even without questions. An airplane containing eight people crashes and only seven people are on board. 8=7. Is it OK to not believe or to not know? And if you did know or believe, would you be any closer to the truth? This novel that supposedly no one liked haunts me every day.
--Bland Woodward
107. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges (non-fiction). Brilliant, satirical, bitter mockery of America's addiction to war and war machines and war consumption. America, founded by Puritans, has thousands of churches focused on stopping vices like adultery, fornication, pornography, cigarettes, booze, gambling, and lust, but America's real addiction is war, and there are few religions or religious figures in America who speak against it.
--Bland Woodward
108. The Complete Prose of Woody Allen. Every writer has an author, first when encountered, who convinced them to write. This was mine. If I had been his only reader, his life's work would have been justified in me. It was for me, so much so that it was as if it had been by me; I knew I could amuse myself and others likewise. Before he was canceled, before he made movies, Woody Allen was a stand-up comedian, a frustrated angry philosophical quixotical man. My brothers and my Dad and I have celebrated his sense of humor for at least thirty years; an inside joke.
109. Voices from Chernobyl, the Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Alexievich (non-fiction). Life is a circle, radiation at the beginning of time causing heat and explosion and ultimately complex life, then complex life creating radiation with which to destroy all life. What I will remember most about this story is the Ukrainian firemen shoveling gravel and sand on molten hot toxic waste to block the radiation, their wives and children and unborn children and dogs and cats a short distance away from Doom, across the wind.
--Bland Woodward
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