You gotta read this.

I'm not claiming these are the best books ever. There's a top 100 list for that, and it has The Great Gatsby and all those other books. Likewise, books which are so justly famous that everyone knows about them don't get listed, like J. R. R. Tolkien's stuff. Call this the list of books which I think SHOULD be on more of those lists, but aren't.

Abbey, Edward: The Monkey Wrench Gang. The Old Testament of the ecoguerilla movement.
Adams, Richard: Watership Down. One of the great war novels of all time, a careful story of Fascism and leadership, played out by a cast of rabbits. (And one seagull.)
Allende, Isabel: Tales Of Eva Luna. Anything she writes is brilliant, but most of it tends to be rather depressingly realistic. In contrast to her other work, this book is full of short stories, varying from grand, to romantic, to raunchy, and is a lot of fun.
Andsay, A. L.: Vinegar Hill. While it would be possible to characterize this as a feminist, liberationist book, I prefer to consider it a tale of a large number of dysfunctional people, and one who realizes this and begins to change.
Barth, John: Tidewater Tales. Long, digressive book that takes place mostly on the protagonists' ship. I love Barth's work, and this is my favorite -- but any real summary I try to write just makes it sound dull. Read it. Find out for yourself.
Bryson, Bill: A Walk In The Woods. Everything I've read of Bryson's, I've loved, but this was the first piece of his I encountered, after reading an excerpt in Outside Magazine, that got me to laughing so hard I felt sick, as he and his slacker high-school friend try to walk the Appalachian Trail through snow, rain, and a nearly total lack of Twinkies. As any great book, particularly nonfiction, it rises beyond the simple description of events to directly address the human condition, which in this case is wet, tired, and hungry.
Cherryh, C. J.: The Pride Of Chanur (series). Great sci-fi. Cherryh's greatest gift is the ability to create believable aliens, with intelligent, consistent, and very foreign mindsets, and then explore the conflicts these motivations cause.
Dahl, Roald: Switchbitch. If you haven't read any of Dahl's work for grown-ups, you need to.
Davis, Tenny: The Chemistry of Powders And Explosives. Like the intellectual version of The Anarchist's Cookbook -- only his stuff works, and he had no interest in overthrowing the government. He just liked chemistry.
Elliott, Bob, and Ray Goulding: Write If You Get Work. I still think these two guys were the funniest comedians ever. Their quietly weird skits about Tippy the Wonder Dog (sponsored by Monongahela Iron Ingots, the Household Ingot -- why should you suffer the embarrassment of rusty, corroded old ingots on your dinnertable when guests come over, buy Shiny New Monongahela Iron Ingots!) probably were major formative influences for The Prairie Home Companion, but entirely lack Keillor's underlying seriousness.
Forester, John: Effective Cycling. How to not get killed riding, and change the world while you're at it.
Gaiman, Neil: Angels and Visitations. His fame for the Sandman comic series overshadows his talent at writing spooky, thoughtful speculative fiction, which is a shame, because he's quite good at it.
Gann, Ernest: Fate Is The Hunter. Stories of flying through WWII and the establishment of the commercial airlines following the war, about people who loved flying so much they kept at it until it killed them, knowing all along that they were doomed.
Gorey, Edward: The Last Caper Of Eddy Deco. Egads, not only can the guy draw wonderful pictures of creepy people with their joints in the wrong places, he can write silly stories about them as well!
Grahame, Kenneth: The Wind In The Willows. Ignore the Disney version. The real story here is of the friendship of Rat and Mole and their adventures together on the River and in the Wild Woods. This is one of the best childrens' books ever. Period.
Heinlein, Robert: The Door Into Summer. Heinlein's work for kids was better than his work for adults, if for no other reason than that he didn't talk politics, and this story is incredibly well-plotted, with an ending that is awfully satisfying.
Helprin, Mark: A City In Winter. Helprin's stuff for adults can be like Pynchon: tough to get through, although I love Winter's Tale. But this book, intended for the 8-year-old set, is just amazing, and the climax gave me goosebumps.
Irving, John: A Prayer For Owen Meany. The king of foreshadowing and tight plotting. The writing is lovely, the thoughts are introspective, and the ending is apocalyptic and perfect.
Kahn, David: The Codebreakers. Half history of cryptography and cryptanalysis, half textbook on cryptanalytic technique, this is one heavy-duty book. It focusses largely on WWI and WWII, with a little information on computer analytic technique added in the second edition, and some discussion of pre-20th-century history. There is an underlying feeling that most of politics is conspiracy. When you get done with this, you want to go work those cryptograms they have in newspapers.
King, Laurie: The Beekeeper's Apprentice (Mary Russell series). Sherlock Holmes fanfic, amazing stuff. She has a wonderful ability to evoke the sights and sounds and feel of an era, in this case the Roaring Twenties, with Sherlock as an aging but by no means feeble beekeeper, in partial retirement, and his equally bright and active protege, Mary Russell, who have crises thrust upon them, and fight for survival (and the eventual unmasking of their enemies, of course.)
Kingsolver, Barbara: The Bean Trees. Like Willa Cather for our times -- sometimes grim, sometimes romantic, always lovely Southwestern fiction, about people trying to survive in desperate situations.
Leyner, Mark: My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. Okay, this is not a GREAT book, by any stretch of the imagination, but as a set of writing exercises in extreme weirdness, it's utterly worth reading.
McPhee, John: The Control Of Nature. McPhee is my favorite writer. He can write about anything and make it interesting. He wrote a book about orange trees. It's fabulous. He wrote a book about a balloon. It was great. He's best-known for his wonderful illustration of Alaskan frontier living in the 1970's in "Coming Into The Country" but for me, "The Control Of Nature" is the book that epitomizes his talent. Three segments in the book each discuss, explicitly, attempts by humans to alter vast natural processes (the Mississippi River, lava flows on Iceland, and mudslides in California) to better suit human needs, and all implicitly address the ramifications of a society that has begun to try and change its environment rather than adapting to it.
Postman, Neil: Technopoly. I love anything that Postman does. Partially this is because he loves nothing more than to say "Books: good; Television: BAD!" and of course I'm all for that. But partially it's because he examines, questions, and attacks a lot of our underlying societal assumptions, and while I disagree with a lot of his conclusions, I feel much happier knowing why I believe what I believe.
Preston, Richard: American Steel. The more Preston writes, the less I like his stuff, but this, one of his first books, is excellent. Like McPhee, he wrote about a situation, the building and operation of a steel-manufacturing mill, and some of their then-controversial management techniques, and ends up subliminally talking about human motivation, and the way in which decisions always lead to errors, the only question being what sortof errors will show up.
Proulx, Annie: The Shipping News. There's a good reason she won a zillion awards for this book. Buy it. Read it.
Pynchon, Thomas: Vineland. I like Pynchon a lot. But, "Crying of Lot 49" left me, at the end, thinking, "wait, I must've missed something." "Gravity's Rainbow" left me thinking that about a third of the way through. "V" left me wishing I *had* missed some things. And "Mason and Dixon" is a rollicking good story. But Vineland is my favorite Pynchon (which is sort of sad, as critics seem to consider it his weakest work.) It has everything: good guys, kung-fu fighting, Pynchon's prediction of the World Wide Web and its power, secret roads, guns, kick-ass women, alien abductions, mystic societies, helicopters, drugs, and -- unique among all Pynchon books, I believe -- an identifiable bad guy who totally gets it in the neck at the end of the book. WOO HOO.
Raymer, Daniel: Aircraft Design, A Conceptual Approach. Okay, this is more tech, but it is the best book on the subject *I* have ever read, and believe me, I've read a lot.
Rostrand, Edmund: Cyrano de Bergerac. The only really great thing that Rostrand ever wrote, but boy was it good. I like it especially because of the sense of time in the book -- the thought that he wrote the first couple of acts as a young man, which is reflected in their shiny courage, and subsequent acts as he aged, and the characters in the acts age accordingly. Plus, Cyrano gets the best lines ever.
Rowling, J. K.: the Harry Potter books. Okay, yeah, but they're still fantastic, so nyeah.
Saunders, George: The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. A quick childrens' story about a town of three houses, their pest-ridden goats, and a young girl who figures out how to fix all their lives. Which gives no indication of the sheer genius and creativity that this book reflects.
Sharp, Archibald: Bicycles And Tricycles. A hundred years ago, Sharp had already analyzed and rated most of the ideas which are still being touted as New and Improved in the bicycling world, including composites, disc wheels, and suspension frames. Anyone who likes bikes from a technical standpoint should own this book.
Spiegelman, Art: Maus. I've heard that they created a special Pulitzer just to give it to this book. I can believe it. A cartoon treatment of his relationship with his father, and his father's experiences in the concentration camps, it is comparable to Elie Wiesel's "Night" but perhaps because of the format and the author's skill, comes across as a far more intimate and horrifying history.
Stephenson, Neal: Zodiac. Probably it's my interest in chemistry and radical environmentalism that makes me choose this over his other books, which are all great in their own right, but a tale of an arrogant, egocentric and mostly unlikeable chemist who cruises around Boston on a Zodiac powerboat, sampling chemical wastes and bringing huge corporations to their knees, is a story custom-written to appeal to me. That and it's got the only satisfying ending aside from "The Big U." that Stephenson has managed to write, one where you get to teh end and you don't turn the page looking for the rest of it.
Strauss, Steven: Therapy. A fun and creepy book about the fluidity of the patient-therapist boundary.
Tepper, Sheri: The Family Tree. Nice scifi about a cop who has a weed in her front yard that slowly envelops the whole city, while her fiancee gets progressively more creepy and insane, and about the time things get downright spooky, a bunch of time-travelers from the future show up in her back yard and it really breaks loose.
Thurber, James: The Thirteen Clocks. Extremely spooky but wonderful kids' book about a cold Duke who has killed time, and a young prince who must start it again, along with his invisible, amnesiac sidekick.
Watson, Richard: The Philosopher's Diet. It starts out being about food, and ends up being about how to take control of your life, and is essentially a meta-self-help book, a book about why we make decisions and some suggestions for how to approach them from an introspective viewpoint.
Willis, Connie: Bellwether. Most everything she's written is great, and it's hard to choose a favorite between this, "To Say Nothing Of The Dog" and "'Miracle' and other Christmas Stories" but I went with this one because it was the first book of hers I read. Fun story about a woman who is doing research into trends and fads, and slowly comes to realize that one of her coworkers is a person who unknowingly starts trends.
Wodehouse, P. G.: Summer Lightning. Anything Wodehouse wrote after 1925 is great. You can't go wrong. English comedies about dumb, rich aristocrats and smart, poor middle-class heros, full of intrigue and wacky plot twists, always ending in dizzying twists-within-twists on the second-to-last page. You know what the outcome will be, but you have no idea how it'll sort itself out, and the artistry of the unravelling is part of the joy of Wodehouse -- that and the LANGUAGE, the vocabulary and dialog, which mark him as one of the greatest users of English ever.
Zelazny, Roger: The Amber Chronicles. The best fantasy epic since Tolkien, and still unequalled, and I'll take you all on one at a time or in a group to prove it. (Actually the second five books in the series are a lot of fun, but nowhere near the same quality as the first five, which I consider the true Amber chronicles.)

This page written January 10, 2001, last modified Jan 15, 2001.

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