Esquire's Men's Literature List

[zalena]

srotu27 posted Jezebel's list of books every woman should have read. She also mentions the Esquire 'Men's' list, which I found and reposted here because the Esquire web interface is annoying. (The titles are also annoying.)

1. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver
2. Collected Stories of John Cheever
3. Deliverance, by James Dickey
4. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
5. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy

6. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Known World, by Edward P. Jones
8. The Good War, by Studs Terkel
9. American Pastoral, by Philip Roth
10. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O’Connor

11. The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
12. A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter
13. The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
14. Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis
15. A Sense of Where You Are, by John McPhee

16. Hell’s Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson
17. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
18. Dubliners, by James Joyce
19. Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
20. The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain

21. Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone
22. Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell
23. Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison
24. Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry
25. The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer

26. The Professional, by W.C. Heinz
27. For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
28. Dispatches, by Michael Herr
29. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
30. Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates

31. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
32. The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
33. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
34. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
35. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey

36. Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
37. A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley
38. Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
39. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
40. Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brian

41. Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
42. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
43. Affliction, by Russell Banks
44. This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff
45. Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin

46. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
47. Women, by Charles Bukowski
48. Going Native, by Stephen Wright
49. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
50. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John LeCarré

51. The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
52. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders
53. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
54. The Shining, by Stephen King
55. Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson

56. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
57. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
58. Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
59. The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe
60. The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford

61. American Tabloid, by James Ellroy
62. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley
63. What It Takes, by Richard Ben Cramer
64. The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett
65. The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene

66. So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell
67. Native Son, by Richard Wright
68. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans
69. Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
70. The Great Bridge, by David McCullough

71. The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac
72. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
73. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
74. Underworld, by Don DeLillo
75. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Every man should have read at least one book by a woman. Every woman should have read at least one book by a man. The woman's list reflects this; the men's does not.

(Still, why shouldn't everybody read Master and Commander? It's an awesome book. So is To Kill a Mockingbird. Bleh, these people.)

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

I thought the same thing. Grrr.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Tired last night and didn't see Flannery O'Connor. Still, one? Blarg.

[sdn.livejournal.com]

there is one woman on this list. esquire can go eat a dick. oh wait, they have.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

I've read 3 from each list. Maybe 3.5 from the Esquire list, depending on what's collected in the Borges. Most non-genre fiction is bollocks.

(To be fair, most genre fiction is bollocks, too, but at least it's interestingly bollocks, and lousy lit-fic is usually not...)

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Jesus, I've read all but 15-20 on the 'girl' list and about the reverse on the 'boy' list. (Only about 15-20). However, I feel a great deal on both is overrated. I also find the title choices by authors interesting, as I would pick different 'great books' by many of the authors. (Example: Jack London's Martin Eden, in my book rates way above Call of the Wild. In fact, I can't understand why London doesn't consistently rate with Steinbeck and Hemmingway.)

But these days, I'm really into intertextuality. We have to be able to talk about how books relate to one another, which is why I think diagramming books' relationships to one another would be a really interesting way of learning about them.

[arialas.livejournal.com]

I feel gendered. I've read 3x as many "women's" books. Hrmph.

[mahannie57.livejournal.com]

Curiously, I've read the same number of titles from both lists. I wonder what that makes me?