I came late to reading. Although both my parents are big readers, I don’t remember being pushed to read much as a child. In high school and college I skirted my reading responsibilities as much as possible. Then a strange thing happened. Traveling around Europe for a year after I graduated I became an avid reader. You’d meet people on trains or in hostels and you would trade books because you didn’t have the backpack space to carry all the books you could read. This has lead to a small obsession with collecting modern first edition books.
Below is a list of some of my favorite books.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marques
Love in a Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marques
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Brothers K by David James Duncan
The River Why, by David James Duncan
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig
Ball Four by Jim Bouton
Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger
The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn
Paper Lion by George Plimpton
The Sweet Science by A.J. Liebling
A Season on the Brink by John Feinstein
Semi-Tough by Dan Jenkins,
Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby
A River Runs Through It by Norman McLean
Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella