75 Books for Men

7/31/2019 75 Books for Men

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7/5/12 Print - The 75 Books Every Man Should Read - Esquire - StumbleUpon

http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/75-books

The 75 Books Every Man Should Read

An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature everpublished. How many have you read?

What We Talk AboutWhen We Talk AboutLove, by Raymond Carver

"That morning she pours

Teacher's over my belly and

licks it off. That afternoon she

tries to jump out the window."

And that's not even the best

line.


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Collected Stories of John

Cheever

He knew better than anyone

the darkness that hides behind

the costume of a carefully

manicured lawn.


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Blood Meridian, byCormac McCarthy

Just try sleeping after the

scene in which the Apaches

thunder over the hills wearing

the dresses of the brides

they've killed.


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The Brothers Karamazov,by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Freud and Einstein both hailed

it as a masterpiece, and Kurt

Vonnegut claimed that

everything you need to know

in life is smashed down intothis book. It still is.


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The Known World, byEdward P. Jones

Free black people who ownslaves. Slaves who know the

world's brutality and, more

shockingly, its beauty.


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American Pastoral, byPhilip Roth

One of the few not about

Roth. It's about that guy you

idolized in high school. Andgloves. And you.


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A Good Man Is Hard to

Find and Other Stories, byFlannery O'Connor

"She would of been a good

woman... if it had been

somebody there to shoot her

every minute of her life."

Wouldn't we all.


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The Things They Carried,by Tim O'Brien.

No one else has written so

beautifully about humanremains hanging from tree

branches.


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emem er your co ege u y s

girlfriend, the one you were in

love with? Because of her.

The Call of the Wild, byJack London

A book about dogs is equally a

book about men


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Time's Arrow, by MartinAmis

You've never seen the

Holocaust from this angle and

with this much ferocity.

Backwards.


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A Sense of Where YouAre, by John McPhee

It's about how two men can be

made better just by sharing

each other's company.


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Hell's Angels, by Hunter S.Thompson

Because it's his first book, and

because he got his ass kicked

for it, and because in the book

and the beating were the

seeds of all that came after,

including the bullet in the

head.

7/5/12 P i t Th 75 B k E M Sh ld R d E i St bl U


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character is as clearly heard

as the man who is never really

seen by the world around him.

Dubliners, by James JoycePlain and simple: "The Dead"

7/5/12 Print The 75 Books Every Man Should Read Esquire StumbleUpon


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Rabbit, Run, by JohnUpdike

Because it's one of the few

not about Updike. It's aboutthat guy you idolized in high

school. And kitchen gadgets.

And you.



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The Postman AlwaysRings Twice, by James M.Cain

Teaches men about women.

Also, there's not a single

postman in the book.



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/5/ t e 5 oo s e y a S ou d ead squ e Stu b eUpo

Dog Soldiers, by RobertStone

Begins in Saigon, ends in DeathValley. Somewhere in between

you realize that profit is

second only to survival.

Winter's Bone, by Daniel



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Legends of the Fall, by JimHarrison

Because of revenge. Because

Harrison is as masculine and

raw and unrelenting as they

come.



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Under the Volcano, byMalcolm Lowry

A terrifying riderless horse,mescaline, and this line:

"Somebody threw a dead dog

after him down the ravine."



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The Naked and the Dead,by Norman Mailer

His first book turned out to be

his best book. The skulls of

young men at war.



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,

and it's about patience, and

honing, and craft, and

sparseness, and beauty, and

crushing, awful defeat.

For Whom the Bell Tolls,by Ernest Hemingway

A lesson in manhood: Even



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Dispatches, by MichaelHerr

"Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam,

we've all been there." You'll

never forget that line. You

won't forget what precedes it,

either.



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Tropic of Cancer, by HenryMiller.

Dirty, grotesque. Beautiful.



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Revolutionary Road, byRichard Yates

The thousands of little

compromises we make every

day that eventually add up to

the loss of ourselves.


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Slaughterhouse-Five, byKurt Vonnegut

A mad hatter of an antiwar

novel that understands how a

smile, shaped like a sickle, can

cut deeply. So it goes.



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All the King's Men, byRobert Penn Warren

Crooked judges, concealed

paternity, deception, betrayal,

and lots of whiskey.



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One Flew Over theCuckoo's Nest, by KenKesey

Because sometimes you haveto go crazy to stay sane.

Sophie's Choice, byWilliam Styron



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A Fan's Notes, byFrederick Exley.

A crazy, irrational drunk who

seems all too rational and

familiar.



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Lucky Jim, by KingsleyAmis

One of the best comedies ofembarrassments ever written.

And because you shouldn't

underestimate the father.

Especially this one.



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The Wind-Up Bird

Chronicle, by HarukiMurakami

Because of the woman trapped

in the well that isn't really a

well.


Seafaring, swashbuckling


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g g

awesomeness.

Plainsong, by Kent Haruf



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A Confederacy of Dunces,by John Kennedy Toole

The fart joke as literature.



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Affliction, by RussellBanks

Think Dostoevsky in bone-cold

New Hampshire. Think lots of

boozing and brawling. Do not

think of ripping out your own

tooth with a pair of pliers.



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This Boy's Life, by TobiasWolff

A Million Little Pieces -- the

version that's true.


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Women, by CharlesBukowski

It's about Bukowski. And

women. And sex. And you.



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Going Native, by StephenWright

If Don DeLillo and Denis

Johnson had a kid, his namewould be Stephen Wright, and

he would have written this

book so they could read it to

him before bed, and the whole

shebang would make perfect,

hallucinatory sense.


Man is a powder keg with a


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short burning fuse to horror,

horror.

The Spy Who Came infrom the Cold, by JohnLeCarr



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The Crack-Up, by F. Scott

Fitzgerald.

Because Fitzgerald knew

Lindsay, Britney and the

Olsens better than we do.

(And because it was first

published in Esquire.)



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CivilWarLand in Bad

Decline, by GeorgeSaunders

Theme parks. Ghosts. Memory

downloads. Corporate

gibberish. Saunders picks up

where Vonnegut left off.



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War and Peace, by LeoTolstoy

Because what else is there?


mag ne vo ces n e

woodwork.


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Winesburg, Ohio, by

Sherwood AndersonBecause Anderson captures

how each of us is mangled by

the things we do to cope.



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Moby Dick, by HermanMelville

The first American

masterpiece. And perhaps the

greatest.


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Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis

Borges

Packs more into three pages

than most writers pack into a

career.


.

is a new breed of hero: earthly

Sinatras in outer space, hot-

bl d d k l i


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blooded rocket wranglers in a

frigid mechanical future. And,

in Wolfe's hands, an immortal

barnburner.

The Sportswriter, byRichard Ford

Because Frank Bascombe is

the new Zuckerman.



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American Tabloid, byJames Ellroy

Scandal, surveillance, and dirty

journalism written in bulls-eye

Americanese that crackles and

ricochets like rifle fire.


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This is as close as you'll ever

get to running for president.


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The Continental Op, byDashiell Hammett


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So Long, See YouTomorrow, by WilliamMaxwell

Remember your best friend

from childhood, the one who's

gone? Because of him.



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Native Son, by RichardWright

Because the novel's main

character asks this question:

"Why were there so many

[prison] cells?" Because thenovel itself is the cruel answer.


The only truly accomplished

partnership in America letters.


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Angle of Repose, byWallace Stegner



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The Great Bridge, byDavid McCullough

There is only one bridge.


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Lonesome Dove by Larry


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Lonesome Dove, by LarryMcMurtry

Two crabby old men, and oneherd of cattle, cross the gut of

a great, unformed nation.

Episodic, elemental.



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Underworld, by DonDeLillo

Because the first fifty pages

rank, bar none, among thebest pages everwritten.



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The Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn, by MarkTwain

Because a boy can disappear,

a boy can survive on his own,

a boy can become part of a

nation's hopes for itself.



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75 Books for Men