Recently, one of my writing professors gave the class an assignment: Write a list of the 50 books that you find to be the most important to the craft of writing. In other words – what 50 books have you found indispensable? What 50 books do you think changed the course of writing? What 50 books would you spend the rest of your life reading?
Well folks, in no particular order and with no guarantees that it won’t change tomorrow, here is THE LIST . . .
1. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
2. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
4. The Witches – Roald Dahl
5. A Box of Matches – Nicholson Baker
6. Vox – Nicholson Baker
7. Shopgirl – Steve Martin
8. Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays – Steve Martin
9. Rumo and his Miraculous Adventures – Walter Moers
10. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
11. Daisy Miller – Henry James
12. A Sicilian Romance – Ann Radcliffe
13. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
14. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
15. Child of God – Cormac McCarthy
16. The Gilded Bat – Edward Gorey
17. The Name of the Wind – Patrick Rothfuss
18. The Trouble with Poetry – Billy Collins
19. Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation – Lynne Truss
20. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
21. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
22. And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie
23. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
24. Me Talk Pretty One Day (listen to the audio book, too) – David Sedaris
25. The Twits – Roald Dahl
26. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More – Roald Dahl
27. The Life and Loves of a She Devil – Fay Weldon
28. Angels and Insects: Two Novellas – A.S. Byatt
29. I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith
30. It’s Kind of a Funny Story – Ned Vizzini
31. Teen Angst? Naaah . . . – Ned Vizzini
32. Watership Down – Richard Adams
33. Adam Bede – George Eliot
34. Carrie – Stephen King
35. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft – Stephen King
36. Exotique – Not quite sure who wrote this. This is the title of the compilation of the magazines from the 50s that I mentioned in an earlier post.
37. The Magician’s Nephew – C.S. Lewis
38. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
39. Boy – Roald Dahl
40. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
41. The Complete Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi
42. Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People – Amy Sedaris
43. The Chronology of Water: A Memoir – Lidia Yuknavitch
44. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure – Dorothy Allison
45. Youth in Revolt – C.D. Payne
46. The Collected Works of Emily Dickinson
47. Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
48. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
49. Holidays on Ice – David Sedaris
50. The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R Tolkien
Now, there are a few things to be said about this list: I do not claim to have read every book in the world and so I do not claim that these are the best ones, I only claim that they have influenced me and my writing the most. I do not prescribe these books as the end all be all of good writing, I merely recommend them and hope they can provide you with the same amount of joy and wonder that they have provided me. This list will also change as I read more and get older, and I don’t know about you, but I think that is a beautiful thing.
What’s your list? And it doesn’t have to be a list of 50, it can be a list of 5, 10, 37, 112, whatever you please!
amanda meets book 