How Reading Changed My Life Read online

  READING LISTS ARE arbitrary and capricious, but most people like them, and so do I. My most satisfying secondhand experiences as a reader have come through recommending books, especially to my children. And I will never forget the summer reading lists I created for my sister when she lived with us during college vacations. One day she came in with a worn paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice and said peevishly, “Just tell me now if she marries Mr. Darcy, because if she doesn’t I’m not finishing the book.” How pleased Jane Austen would have been. How pleased I was.

  Here are a few arbitrary and capricious suggestions for fellow readers:

  10 Big Thick Wonderful Books That

  Could Take You a Whole Summer to

  Read (but Aren’t Beach Books)

  Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

  Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

  East of Eden by John Steinbeck

  The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy

  Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

  Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope

  Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

  Henry and Clara by Thomas Mallon

  Underworld by Don DeLillo

  Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

  10 Nonfiction Books That Help Us

  Understand the World

  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

  The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam

  Lenin’s Tomb by David Remnick

  Lincoln by David Herbert Donald

  Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

  In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

  How We Die by Sherwin Nuland

  The Unredeemed Captive by John Demos

  The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

  The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro

  10 Books That Will Help a Teenager

  Feel More Human

  The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

  A Separate Peace by John Knowles

  Lost in Place by Mark Salzman

  What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? by Peter Hedges

  The World According to Garp by John Irving

  Bloodbrothers by Richard Price

  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

  The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

  The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

  The 10 Books I Would Save in a Fire

  (If I Could Save Only 10)

  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

  Bleak House by Charles Dickens

  Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

  The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

  The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

  Middlemarch by George Eliot

  Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

  The Collected Poems of W B. Yeats

  The Collected Plays of William Shakespeare

  The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

  10 Books for a Girl Who Is Full of

  Beans (or Ought to Be)

  Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

  Julius: The Baby of the World by Kevin Henkes

  Betsy in Spite of Herself by Maud Hart Lovelace

  Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

  The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

  The BFG by Roald Dahl

  A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle

  Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans

  Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman

  The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi, Ruth E. Murray

  10 Mystery Novels I’d Most Like to

  Find in a Summer Rental

  An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P. D. James

  Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

  The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie P. King

  Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

  Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard

  Dancers in Mourning by Margery Allingham

  The Way Through the Woods by Colin Dexter

  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

  by Arthur Conan Doyle

  Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey

  The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carré

  10 Books Recommended by a Really

  Good Elementary School Librarian

  The View from Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg

  Frindle by Andrew Clements

  My Daniel by Pam Conrad

  The Houdini Box by Brian Selznick

  Good Night, Mr. Tom by Michelle Magorian

  No Flying in the House by Betty Brock

  My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett

  Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye

  Mudpies: And Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls by Maijorie Winslow

  The Story of May by Mordecai Gerstein

  10 Good Book-Club Selections

  Fraud by Anita Brookner

  Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

  The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton

  The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells

  The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

  Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

  The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett

  Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

  Paris Trout by Pete Dexter

  Eden Close by Anita Shreve

  10 Modern Novels That Made Me

  Proud to Be a Writer

  The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks

  White Noise by Don DeLillo

  Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser

  True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne

  The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

  The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

  Falconer by John Cheever

  The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

  The Information by Martin Amis

  Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

  10 of the Books My Exceptionally Well

  Read Friend Ben Says He’s Taken the

  Most From

  Herzog by Saul Bellow

  Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

  Something of an Achievement by Gwyn Griffin

  Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

  The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats

  Walden by Henry David Thoreau

  The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham

  Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey

  Heretics by G. K. Chesterton

  The Wapshot Chronicles by John Cheever

  (With addendum: “Now I can’t believe I settled for that list. What about William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf, or Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris? ”)

  10 Books I Just Love to Read, and

  Always Will

  Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

  My Antonia by Willa Cather

  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

  Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

  The Group by Mary McCarthy

  The Blue Swallows by Howard Nemerov (poetry)

  The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

  A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

  Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

  Acknowledgments

  MOST OF THE books used as source material are acknowledged within the body of this extended essay. But I would like to especially thank Alberto Manguel for his marvelous A History of Reading. Edward de Grazia’s Girls Lean Back Everywhere provides an invaluable education on the issues of literary censorship. I’m also grateful for two reference books, Writing Changes Everything, edited by Deborah Brodie, and The Columbia Book of Quotations, edited by Robert Andrews.

  Many dedicated readers helped me think about the issues raised in this book. I would like to thank Eden Ross Lipson, Eugene Kennedy, Una Cadegan, Eden Stewart Eisman at St. Luke’s School in New York City, Carol Miles at the American Booksellers Association, Joyce Meskis of the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, and the members
of the St. David’s book club, who invited me in for coffee and conversation one winter night: M. Karen Redmond, Maud Walker, Joyce Guyer, Sylvia Severance, Patricia Graham, Jeanne McGuigan, Diane O’Hara, Jean Welz, Ann Crapo, Linda Edie, Margaret Murphy, Phyllis Hughes.

  As always, Kate Medina and Amanda Urban make everything possible for me professionally. And personally there are Janet Maslin and Ben Cheever, Quin, Christopher, Maria, and Gerry Krovatin.

  A special thank-you to teachers and librarians. If not you, not me.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANNA QUINDLEN is the author of the national bestseller, A Short Guide to a Happy Life, and three bestselling novels. Her New York Times column “Public and Private” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and a selection of these columns was published as Thinking Out Loud. She is also the author of a collection of her “Life in the 30’s” columns, Living Out Loud, and two children’s books, The Tree That Came to Stay and Happily Ever After. She is currently a columnist for Newsweek and lives with her husband and children in New York City.