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Book List | Brave New Words
32 Books That Have Made Their Mark On Me. For Better or For Worse.

32 Books That Have Made Their Mark On Me. For Better or For Worse.

May 7, 2016 | Book List

 

  1.  Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
  2. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch
  3. To Be A Slave by Julius Lester
  4. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
  5. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
  6. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  7. The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri J.M. Nouwen
  8. Herland and Selected Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  9. Adulterers Anonymous by Exene Cervenka and Lydia Lunch
  10. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs (“Linda Brent”)
  11. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  12. Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
  13. Ulysses by James Joyce
  14. The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
  15. A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch (Clearly, I’m a fan.)
  16. The Father by Sharon Olds
  17. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  18. Violence: A National Epidemic by James Gilligan
  19. The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
  20. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
  21. The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates
  22. Passing by Nella Larsen
  23. Black Tickets by Jayne Ann Phillips
  24. The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
  25. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  26. Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
  27. The Stand by Stephen King
  28. The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King
  29. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates
  30. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
  31. Stop-Time by Frank Conroy
  32. For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing & The Roots of Violence by Alice Miller
In Memoriam: David Bowie’s Top 100 Favorite Books

In Memoriam: David Bowie’s Top 100 Favorite Books

May 1, 2016 | Book List

Click here to read at The New York Public Library blog.

I love looking at people’s reading recommendation lists. It’s fun to find out a respected reader’s tastes intersect with my own, but I also learn a lot by noting the books I’ve never heard of.
Some of my and David Bowie’s shared “book hits”: Lolita, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Madame Bovary, Black Boy, The Waste Land, 1984, and, a surprise to me, Nella Larsen’s Passing, the story of an African-American woman of Danish descent who’s forced to confront the implications of her mixed-race and bicultural identity.
But I’m completely unfamiliar with some of Bowie’s choices: Flaubert’s Parrot, Before the Deluge, Zanoni, Strange People, and The Street, to name only a few. It’s ok. My reading list just got longer.