How Reading Changed My Life (8 page)

Here are a few arbitrary and capricious suggestions for fellow readers:

10 Big Thick Wonderful Books That
Could Take You a Whole Summer to
Read (but Aren’t Beach Books)

Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
The Forsyte Saga
by John Galsworthy
Buddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
Can You Forgive Her?
by Anthony Trollope
Sophie’s Choice
by William Styron
Henry and Clara
by Thomas Mallon
Underworld
by Don DeLillo
Lonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry

10 Nonfiction Books That Help Us
Understand the World

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
by Edward Gibbon
The Best and the Brightest
by David Halberstam
Lenin’s Tomb
by David Remnick
Lincoln
by David Herbert Donald
Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson
In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote
How We Die
by Sherwin Nuland
The Unredeemed Captive
by John Demos
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
The Power Broker
by Robert A. Caro

10 Books That Will Help a Teenager
Feel More Human

The Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger
A Separate Peace
by John Knowles
Lost in Place
by Mark Salzman
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?
by Peter Hedges
The World According to Garp
by John Irving
Bloodbrothers
by Richard Price
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
The Member of the Wedding
by Carson McCullers

The 10 Books I Would Save in a Fire
(If I Could Save Only 10)

Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Sons and Lovers
by D. H. Lawrence
The Collected Poems of W B. Yeats
The Collected Plays of William Shakespeare
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton

10 Books for a Girl Who Is Full of
Beans (or Ought to Be)

Little Women
by Louisa May Alcott
Julius: The Baby of the World
by Kevin Henkes
Betsy in Spite of Herself
by Maud Hart Lovelace
Anne of Green Gables
by Lucy Maud Montgomery
The Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank
The BFG
by Roald Dahl
A Wrinkle in Time
by Madeline L’Engle
Madeline
by Ludwig Bemelmans
Catherine, Called Birdy
by Karen Cushman
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
by Avi, Ruth E. Murray

10 Mystery Novels I’d Most Like to
Find in a Summer Rental

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
by P. D. James
Gaudy Night
by Dorothy Sayers
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
by Laurie P. King
Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
Get Shorty
by Elmore Leonard
Dancers in Mourning
by Margery Allingham
The Way Through the Woods
by Colin Dexter
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Brat Farrar
by Josephine Tey
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
by John Le Carré

10 Books Recommended by a Really
Good Elementary School Librarian

The View from Saturday
by E. L. Konigsburg
Frindle
by Andrew Clements
My Daniel
by Pam Conrad
The Houdini Box
by Brian Selznick
Good Night, Mr. Tom
by Michelle Magorian
No Flying in the House
by Betty Brock
My Father’s Dragon
by Ruth Stiles Gannett
Habibi
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Mudpies: And Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls
by Maijorie Winslow
The Story of May
by Mordecai Gerstein

10 Good Book-Club Selections

Fraud
by Anita Brookner
Charming Billy
by Alice McDermott
The Book of Ruth
by Jane Hamilton
The Rise of Silas Lapham
by William Dean Howells
The Stone Diaries
by Carol Shields
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
The Patron Saint of Liars
by Ann Patchett
Sister Carrie
by Theodore Dreiser
Paris Trout
by Pete Dexter
Eden Close
by Anita Shreve

10 Modern Novels That Made Me
Proud to Be a Writer

The Sweet Hereafter
by Russell Banks
White Noise
by Don DeLillo
Martin Dressler
by Steven Millhauser
True Confessions
by John Gregory Dunne
The Death of the Heart
by Elizabeth Bowen
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
by John Fowles
Falconer
by John Cheever
The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
The Information
by Martin Amis
Portnoy’s Complaint
by Philip Roth