[Note: At the request of a reader, I've decided to make the summer reading suggestions an annual tradition. Next Friday I'll post the recommendations for 2011. But I thought since the 2010 list contains some of my favorites that I'd repost it once more. One minor change from last year is that I've moved my top recommendations into the first ten slots.]
The following is a list of favorite works of imaginative literature compiled by a literary snob. Unlike similar lists you won’t find anything as daunting as Finnegan’s Wake or as faddish as whatever Oprah is shilling to her book club. In fact, on first glance the inclusion of children’s books and graphic novels might give the impression that it is rather lowbrow, if not philistine. But each of the entries was carefully selected because they have what much modern fiction lacks and what you need during the summer: a compelling story that makes you want to keep reading.
Until recently I’ve tended to prefer non-fiction to fiction, so there isn’t much depth to my selections. Fiction lovers—particularly those steeped in specific genres—will rightly take issue with my narrow choices. This list is meant to spark other suggestion rather than being the last word on what is truly worth reading during the summer.
A note about my prejudices: I prefer older to newer, short stories to long novels, magical realism to realistic narrative, and the fantastical to the mundane. Such taste make for an admittedly odd mix.
Here then are my favorite works to read during the lazy days of summer:
1. World War Z - Max Brooks (If I told you this book was about zombies you probably wouldn’t want to read it. So I won’t tell you. Instead, I’ll just say it is without a doubt the best and most detailed alternative histories that I’ve ever read. Highly recommended.)
2. The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell (These two books by Russell make one of the finest stories about a Catholic priest/linguist traveling to another planet that you’ll ever find. Science fiction that transcends the genre.)
3. Children of God – Mary Doria Russell (The sequel to The Sparrow.)
4. The Mad Scientists Club – Bertrand R. Brinley (The ubertext for pre-Atari Gen-X nerds.)
5. The Princess Bride: S Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure – William Goldman (The highest praise I can give it is to say that the book is as charming as the movie.)
6. Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card (A brilliant book on young geniuses, military tactics, and much more.)
7. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
8. Lonesome Dove – Larry McMurtry (McMurtry’s masterpiece gives us, among other treasures, Augustus McRae—one of best characters in American literature.)
9. Fables - Bill Willingham (Matthew Lickona mentioned Fables in an OTS article last year. What he forgot to mention is that this is one of the greatest graphic novel series (15 volumes and counting) ever produced. Start with Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, which provides a backstory that will help you determine whether this series is for you.)
10. Holes – Louis Sachar (Magical realism for tweens. A magnificient book.)
11. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
12. World Made By Hand - James Howard Kunstler (A post-apocalyptic novel for the Front Porchers)
13. Astro City: Life in the Big City – Kurt Busiek (After Alan Moore’s highly overrated graphic novel Watchmen deconstructed the superhero genre, Busiek’s Astro City series restored it to its glory.)
14. Mariette in Ecstasy – Ron Hansen
15. Starship Troopers – Robert Heinlein (Not being a fan of sci-fi, I was reluctant to read this novel when I found it on the Marine Corps’ professional reading list. But Heinlein presents some intriguing ideas in this short work. Not to be confused with the horrible film adaptation by Paul Verhoeven.)
16. Out Of The Dust - Karen Hesse (Written in stanza form, this Newberry Award Winner tells the story of a young girl in the Depression-era Oklahoma dust bowl. A beautiful story for teens that deserves to find an adult readership.)
17. Expecting Someone Taller – Tom Holt (A lighthearted gem that mixes comedy and fantasy.)
18. The Pugilist at Rest – Thom Jones (If Raymond Chandler had joined the Marines and read too much Schopenhauer, he would have written short stories like Jones’ tales of hardboiled existential angst.)
19. Cold Snap – Thom Jones
20. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation – M. T. Anderson
21. The Bear Went Over the Mountain - William Kotzwinkle
22. A Wrinkle in Time - Madeline L’Engle
23. The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye – Jonathan Lethem
24. Appaloosa - Robert B. Parker
25. Right Ho, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
26. Tooth Imprints On a Corn Dog - Mark Leyner (Sublimely weird, hysterically funny tales.)
27. Einstein’s Dreams – Alan Lightman (Lightman, a physics professor and gifted writer, presents a fascinating exploration into places where time behaves quite differently.)
28. The Giver – Lois Lowry
29. All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
30. A River Runs Through It – Norman MacLean
31. Leaving Cheyenne – Larry McMurtry (McMurtry’s first novel isn’t his best work. But the unusual love triangle at the heart of the book shows why he is one of the best—though most erratic—of American novelists.)
32. The Preservationist – David Maine (A novel about Noah, his ark, his animals, and his family. Almost as compelling as the source material.)
33. The Borderlands anthologies Thomas F. Monteleone (Editor) (These hard-to-find anthologies reinvented the horror genre and made it accessible to people who would normally flee at from anything associated with the words “horror genre.”)
34. The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
35. Ironweed - William Kennedy
36. Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk (I stumbled across this odd book long before the Brad Pitt movie made if famous. Nihilistic, but compelling.)
37. The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand (The only thing Rand ever wrote that is worth reading. Just don’t take it seriously.)
38. Where the Red Fern Grows – Wilson Rawls (The only book that ever made me cry.)
39. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales – Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith
40. Red Harvest – Dashiel Hammett (When I read David Goldman’s claim that Red Harvest was one of the “two best American novels of the 20th century” I knew I had to read it. But I admit I was skeptical. David’s description made it sounds a bit like Matewan, but the book actually inspired Akira Kurosawa’s samurai masterpiece Yojimbo, which in turn inspired the great spaghetti western A Fistful Of Dollars.)
41. On The Road With Archangel – Frederick Buechner
42. Julian Comstock – Robert Charles Wilson
43. Civilwarland in Bad Decline – George Saunders (Saunders is simply the best short story writer alive today.)
44. Pastoralia – George Saunders
45. Flatland - Edwin Abbot
46. The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde (In this charming alternate history, England in the 1980s is a place where hardcore literature fans change their name to John Milton, roving gangs of surrealists rumble with French impressionists, and “Baconians” go door-to-door like Jehovah Witnesses’ to convince people that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays. For the English in Fforde’s world, art and literature attain the type of popularity comparable to American’s fascination with sports and celebrity.)
47. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: a new verse translation – By Simon Armitage (Don’t let the classic status throw you off. A quick, fun chivalric romance.)
48. Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
49. A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
50. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes – Bill Watterson (Unarguably the greatest comic strip of all time. Calvin is the premier philosopher of the 20th century. Good for dipping into a little at a time.)
What imaginative literature would your recommend for this summer?
June 3rd, 2011 | 9:34 am
I don’t think Watchmen is overrated, but Astro City is great stuff. “Confessions” combines Vampires, Batman and Roman Catholicism in a way very respectful towards the faith.
http://www.amazon.com/Kurt-Busieks-Astro-City-Confession/dp/1563895501
June 3rd, 2011 | 10:16 am
The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis – few people have read these, even among fans of Lewis’s other works. Unlike the Narnia books, they are very much written for adults, and the issues they deal with are as relevant today as they were in the 1940s.
Anything by Guy Gavriel Kay. The best historical fantasy out there. New readers should probably start with The Lions of Al Rassan.
Treasure Island & Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.
The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald.
June 3rd, 2011 | 10:24 am
Summerland by Michael Chabon. It’s not often a pulitzer prize-winning author turns his hand to baseball, fantasy, and adolescence and scores big-time.
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, probably the best sf novel I’ve read in a year
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown, excellent memoir about the astronomer whose discovery of Eris set in motion Pluto’s demotion.
The Man With Two Arms by Billy Lombardo for the sports fan
Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon–thoughtful and wrenching
Scott Lynch’s first two novels for lovers of gritty fantasy
June 3rd, 2011 | 10:46 am
The Prince of Nothing series by R. Scott Bakker.
It’s a pretty stunning work IMO. An adult Lord of the Rings. It’s a work to read them because ther e is literally no one in the story that’s really likeable as a person but Bakker’s understanding of psychology, history and the development of religions is amazing IMO.
June 3rd, 2011 | 10:58 am
I want to thank you for having mentioned Mark Leyner this time last year. I was not familiar with his work and found it to be delightfully weird. Very refreshing summer reading!
June 3rd, 2011 | 11:17 am
A few more to consider . . .
The Help – Kathryn Stockett – read this gem before the movie comes out this summer. Hard to believe this is the first work by the author.
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury – his prose is simply breathtaking in this short, compelling novel.
Dune – Frank Herbert – forget the sequels, just read this classic intergalactic work of art (Warning: it is a loooong book.)
The Riddlemaster of Hed – Patricia McKillip – a fantasy trilogy of a society where land-rulers have an intimate telepathic link to their kingdoms and the University teaches ancient riddles and their mysterious yet meaningful answers.
The Dark is Rising (series of 5 books) – Susan Cooper – a young adult series that deserves an adult audience, based on ancient Welsh and English mythology.
The Alienist – Caleb Carr – solving murder in turn-of-the-century New York City when ideas such as profiling and the science of criminalistics are in their infancy.
June 3rd, 2011 | 11:34 am
If you’ve never read Willa Cather, try “My Antonia” or “Death Comes for the Archbishop” — two very different books. Read the first several years ago, am just now finishing the latter. However, these are both much more realistic than imaginative.
And as far as “The Princess Bride,” the book is not as good as the movie, but still worth a read. Goldman is a bit too full of himself to make it measure up to the brilliance of the movie.
Oh, and every English literate person needs to read PD James’ “The Children of Men.” It’s not like the movie.
June 3rd, 2011 | 12:08 pm
The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt. Set in 1967, 7th grader Holling Hoodhood thinks his teacher hates his guts. Heroes, friendship, Shakespeare, running, growing up…I really enjoyed this story.
June 3rd, 2011 | 12:14 pm
Thaks for this list I ‘ve read about about half the books on this list, and found them all very rewarding (with the possible exception of the Fountainhead–though superior to Atlas Shrugged).
Based on my sample, I intend to add several from this list to my Summer list.
My additional recommendations:
“Unbroken” by Laura Hildebrandt–story of track star and WWII POW Louis Zamperini.
“Remember Why You Play” by David Thomas, The story of a Texas high school football season for the powerhouse Faith Christian Lions, and their famous game with the Gainsville State Tornados–Gainsville is Texas the juuevinie corrections facilty and was winless over three seasons.
June 3rd, 2011 | 12:57 pm
#12, Jim Kunstler’s World Made by Hand now has a sequel!
It’s The Witch of Hebron. I haven’t read it yet, but I intend to! The first one is an excellent agrarian sci-fi novel.
June 3rd, 2011 | 3:06 pm
At the risk of being banned from your comments for being a relentless nag, I will again chime in with “Love in the Ruins” by Walker Percy, “Ragtime” by E.L. Doctorow and “Breakfast of Champions” by Kurt Vonnegut.
June 3rd, 2011 | 4:13 pm
Props for Astro City. Kurt Busiek is underrated. If you like it, Alan Moore’s Top Ten is good along that line. Also, Invincible is too.
Cordwainer Smith and his rediscovery of man books and stories are a must read. His short story “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” is probably one of the best stories ever showing what the Incarnation must feel like, and he’s mythic in a way few SF writers are. He also debunked transhumanism nicely, before it even existed. Perfect people, less human than the animal Underpeople they made to serve them.
I also like Timothy Zahn as an author. Books like Angelmass, Coming of Age, and Cobra show that you can be a great SF writer without needing to pander to the kind of rabid secularism a lot of SF authors do.
June 3rd, 2011 | 4:44 pm
I’m glad to see Right Ho, Jeeves on the list. Wodehouse is very addictive. I’m reading Love Among the Chickens right now. Lot’s of laughs.
June 3rd, 2011 | 5:26 pm
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/magnus-mills/
(Comments page day!)
June 3rd, 2011 | 7:02 pm
I second the recommendations of “The Eyre Affair” and “Einstein’s Dreams.” Really, I recommend the entire “Thursday Next” quartet (although the quality fell off a bit in the last book, they’re still among the most enjoyable and most brilliant books out there).
People have been telling me to read “The Sparrow” for ages, so last week when I went to the library I gave in, finally, and checked it out. I also ran across her third book, “A Thread of Grace,” which is a story of Jewish refugees in Italy during World War II. So far, it’s very compelling!
Here’s a short list of books I will always recommend:
- “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell,” by Susanna Clarke (easily my favorite novel)
- “The Martian Chronicles,” by Ray Bradbury (for fans of “The Twilight Zone”; Bradbury at his most magical and unpretentious)
- “Titus Groan” (the first book in the “Gormenghast” trilogy; luminous, Dickensian, volcanic, and sadly underrated)
- “The Magicians,” by Lev Grossman (published in 2009; the story of five disillusioned twenty-something magicians who stumble into a Narnia-like realm. Warning: strong language and sexuality)
- “The Man who was Thursday,” by G. K. Chesterton (there’s no other book like it)
- “Manalive” (one of Chesterton’s “forgotten” classics)
- “The Count of Monte Cristo,” by Alexander Dumas (just a few days ago I wrote a review of this book on my blog. It’s like a parable from God).
- The entire “Harry Potter” series (if you haven’t ever read them, now’s the time to start!)
- “The Christ Clone Trilogy,” by James BeauSeigneur (don’t let the name deceive you; this is the single best portrayal of the end times ever set on paper)
June 3rd, 2011 | 7:36 pm
“pentamom”: Yes, Willa Cather, by all means! I would add “Shadows on the Rock”, a wonderful novel of early Quebec.
June 3rd, 2011 | 9:14 pm
Boze,
I liked JOnathan Strange, read the Martian Chronicles so long ago I’ve forgotten it, I thought the Christ Clone Trilogy was very good too….still couldn’t quite ‘work’ for me at the end. There’s really no way to IMO to convincingly depict a good God that ends up destroying most people on earth without making most of those people not very convincing as people in fiction. But it stands head an tails above the Left Behind series.
Does anyone want to pitch non-fiction? One neat thing I discovered about my Kindle is that you can get lots of books for free if they are really old. I’ve gotten maybe 20% thru the first volumn of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Its very interesting to read non-fiction from long ago. A good non-fiction book I read recently was The Emperor of Maladoies, a history of cancer.
Other good books I’d plug:
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.
I’ll second The Wind Up Girl although I’m only two chapters into it.
Ulysses, June 16 is Bloomsday, the novel is read outloud all day long in many cities and on the radio, be on the look out for it!
June 3rd, 2011 | 9:50 pm
Any of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books. His alternative universe of men, werewolves, zombies, Igors, golems, wizards and a whole lot more creates a backdrop for humorous and pointed commentary on our own times. The one I started with was “Going Postal.”
Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction, especially “Gates of Fire” (about the 300 Spartans and Thermopylae) and “Tides of War” (Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War). Both offer superb insight into the culture of Greece and graphic descriptions of what hoplite war was really like.
June 3rd, 2011 | 10:31 pm
To start, Silas Marner by George Eliot is a beautiful short novel, only 170 pages. Knew the whole story, still got me.
For you Harry Potter holdouts, I’m with Boze, this really is the time. Can’t do it yet? Here is my suggested plan: Instead start with three of JK Rowling’s own treasured favorites:
- The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge, a starlit gem–you will be delighted!
- Emma by Austen, also a CS Lewis fave
- Tale of Two Cities, also an Oprah selection! Hang in there, every word pays off.
Add Frankenstein (gripping) and then you are ready for all seven HP. Read them all LOL! Then order and read “Harry Potter’s Bookshelf” and “The Deathly Hallows Lectures” by John Granger. (I am not compensated by Mr Granger.) At this point I am forecasting strange behavior on your part: you will then reread all the HPs, purchase your first copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and dig through book boxes for your Plato’s dialogs. As well as redouble your prayer life and walk with a spring in your step.
Having trouble getting into your annual summer Tolkien rereading lately? Check out Corey Olsen’s podcasts on the Hobbit for some invigorating and original exploration.
And if you finally want to conquer the Silmarillion, understand the elves on a whole notha’ level and find out why Owen Barfield was not just a third wheel kind of Inkling but a critical player, read Verlyn Flieger’s “Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World” (Revised Edition). ALL will make sense.
This reading list got me through two years of a 4-hour-a-day long haul bus commute. I look forward to trying your recommendations. I’ve already seen so many of my faves above.
June 4th, 2011 | 9:03 am
David DePerro, don’t forget “The Tales of Beedle the Bard.” If you’re going to do it, do it right.
But I’m going to have to pass on Plato and Dante. It’s summer time, not labor camp. ;-)
June 4th, 2011 | 8:01 pm
“Venetian Blinds” by Arthur VanDelay. Overlooked, but wrongly so….
June 5th, 2011 | 8:26 am
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Alexei-Sayle/e/B000APSHPK/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
June 5th, 2011 | 1:27 pm
I’ve read several on this list, and would add a few more:
“Hello Out There” by Jack McDevitt. This edition contains Jack’s 1st two novels. Of these, “The Hercules Text” is profound and thought-provoking.
“Eifelheim” by Michael Flynn. What if “First Contact” with an alien civilization took place in the Middle-Ages? And what would the theological ramifications be?
“A Canticle for Leibowitz” by Walter M. Miller, Jr. A classic — even for people who dislike Science Fiction (or think that they do!) It’s 600 years after the nuclear holocaust, and the only vestiges of civilization are preserved in a desert monastery.
“A Case of Conscience” by James Blish. A priest — who is also a biologist — contemplates the meaning of good and evil in an alien civilization which seems too perfect.
And two of my favorites by Robert Heinlein:
“Double Star” — an early, and oft neglected classic and “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” — arguably his best novel.
June 6th, 2011 | 8:55 am
I recommend “Boy’s Life” by Robert McCammon.
This book gave me my first sincere goose-bumped chill sense reading A Tell Tale Heart in middle school. However, it is not horror genre at all. There were also several LOL moments. It’s very enjoyable.
June 6th, 2011 | 3:57 pm
Interesting list. My own recommendations include:
Fiction: The Aubrey/Maturin series of historical fiction novels set during the Napoleanic wars. Jack Aubrey is a British naval officer; Steven Maturin is his medical officer. Good stories. The spirit of the times is captured well. Authored by Patrick O’Brian. The first in the series of 20 or so is “Master and Commander.”
Nonfiction: “Life and Death in Shanghai” by Nien Cheng. An unforgettable story of a brave lady caught up in the Chinese cultural revolution who simply refused to lie. There is a poignance to Nien Cheng’s life story, in that the movie rights to this book were unwittingly sold to an agent of Communist China, ensuring that no movie would ever be made.
June 6th, 2011 | 11:00 pm
Where’s my boy Jim Thompson, the greatest of American crime writers? Much of his stuff was pulpy trash, written purely for the bucks. For instance, in the 60s he wrote a novelization of the old Raymond Burr TV series “Ironside.” But when he was on his game–The Grifters, The Getaway, The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night–Thompson wrote the most evil crime novels ever penned. His books, written in the 50s when too much explicit sex and violence were not permitted, are astonishing in their relentless depiction of absolute corruption. Stephen King has called Thompson his favorite crime novel, and it’s easy to see why. His best books are in fact horror novels that feature criminals. This may hardly seem like edifying stuff for readers of First Things. But understand that Thompson is a very moral writer. In his books, vice and evil are not made glamorous or admirable. We see his antiheroes for exactly what they are–monsters. And the characters know that they are damned. The Getaway, for instance, is essentially a novel about the descent of two souls into hell. Forget the two awful, ultra-violent movies made of this book. The filmmakers clearly didn’t know what to do with its eerie, fantastical and quite horrifying conclusion, so they cut it out and gave the story a “happy ending.” The ending of the novel is far different and quite unforgettable. I mainly find my Thompsons in used bookstores–not sure whether his stuff is still in print. But it’s up there with the finest in the genre.
June 11th, 2011 | 1:50 am
The novels of Alan Furst. Although set in the run-up to World War II they are not merely historical novels. Dark Star is especially good.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact