The 50 Books Everyone Needs to Read, 1963-2013. The thing about reading is this: it takes a long time. There are innumerable books in the world, and many more good ones than can be read by any mortal in a lifetime. It’s hard to choose — especially if you’re a slow reader. So, to go along with the list of the best albums from 1963-2013, here you will find a single must-read book from each of the last 50 years. Of course, this is by its very nature an absurd undertaking, and many books have gotten the short end of the stick — there’s no other way to do it. The choices here are influenced by the following: the stipulation that any specific author should not be chosen for more than one year, a general focus on fiction over other genres, and the tastes/whims/glaring prejudices of Flavorwire’s literary editor.
Feel free to argue in the comments, but keep it nice. Unless you’re Martin Amis. 1963 — The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath. The Best Books of 2013: Halftime Report. 2013 is half-over, so we thought we’d round-up the best new books we’ve read so far this year. Let us know your favorite 2013 title in the comments. Alright, here we go: All That Is by James Salter Salter’s first novel in 34 years was hotly anticipated, and for good reason: it is gobsmackingly excellent. –Rebecca Joines Schinsky James Salter, forever and always. –Jennifer Paull The Son by Philipp Meyer Multigenerational saga + the wilds of the Texas frontier + violence and grit and oil, etc.+ a matriarchal character who is tough as nails and twice as sharp = a perfect storm of a book.
–Amanda Nelson The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner First of all, I’m a sucker for New York novels. –Jeff O’Neal Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran First off, let me start by saying the first book in this series, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, is amazing. –Liberty Hardy The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer –Rachel Smalter Hall The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown –Kim Ukura –Sean Bell –Minh Le.
S Ultimate Literary Calendar: A Bookish Event for Every Day of the Year. LibraryThing | Catalog your books online. 3 Books to Read Before You See THE GREAT GATSBY. 65 Books You Need To Read In Your 20s. Com Books: Around the World in 80 Books. From Zero to Well-Read in 100 Books. Isn’t it strange that we have the term “well-read” but absolutely no one can come close to defining it? And isn’t also strange that other art forms don’t have equivalent terms for a vague sense of someone’s total experience of that form (well-seen for movies?
Well-heard for music? Absurd). Thinking about this recently sucked me into a little thought-experiment: say someone had never read any literature and wanted to be well-read. What should they read? This hypothetical forces any given answerer to do two things: provide their personal definition of well-read and then give a list of books that might satisfy that definition. The following 100 books (of fiction, poetry, and drama) is an attempt to satisfy those competing requirements. As for the number of 100: in addition to being a nice, round number, it is also a number that, at a one-book-every-two-week pace this hypothetical reader could accomplish in just about four years–the standard length of an undergraduate program. The 25 Best Websites for Literature Lovers. It’s an interesting relationship that book lovers have with the Internet: most would rather read a physical book than something on an iPad or Kindle, and even though an Amazon purchase is just two or three clicks away, dedicated readers would rather take a trip to their local indie bookstore.
Yet the literary world occupies a decent-sized space on the web. Readers, writers, publishers, editors, and everybody in between are tweeting, Tumbling, blogging, and probably even Vine-ing about their favorite books. In case the demise of Google Reader threw your literary Internet browsing into a dark void, here’s a list of 25 book sites to bookmark. The Millions Ten years is a mighty long time in terms of Internet life, but that’s how long The Millions has been kicking out a steady stream of reviews, essays, and links.
20 Books to Read in Your Twenties. Choosing 20 books to recommend to people in their twenties is difficult! It’s hard to take my experience and generalize across all twenty year olds. So with that said, this list is by no means proscriptive or exhaustive, but it is a list of books that I read (or wish I’d read) in my twenties and that stuck with me for some reason. For instance, I think people in their twenties should read A Modest Proposal to see what real satire looks like. There’s too much “satire” floating around the Internet these days. For more book suggestions about what to read in your twenties, here’s Lindsey’s list of 20 books to read in your twenties and a list of 20 Books to Read in Your Twenties for Dudes.
About Ainsley Ainsley Sparkes is an avid reader and knitter.