My highest recommendations

I had a nice email this morning from a reader and book blogger. In it, she asked if I had a list of books that I think “everyone should read.”

I said I “wouldn’t presume to make a list of that nature, though I might make a list of my ‘highest recommendations.’” I want to share that list here and hear about your favorite books. In no particular order:

 

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald

The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

Peace Like a River by Leif Enger

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Lolita by Nabokov

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

“The Dead” (a short story) by James Joyce

The Elements of Style by Strunk and White

Mrs. Mike by Benedict and Nancy Freedman

The poems of Robert Frost

The poems of Elizabeth Bishop

The poems of T.S. Eliot

The poems of Robert Creeley

The poems of Charles Bukowski

[Edit: I somehow forgot this amazing book -- Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell]