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

Read at The Atlantic.

The Paris Review editor discusses why the best stories ask more questions than they answer.

Click here to read.

An international selection of academics explains their picks.

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.