#THE50BOOKS EVERYONE #NEEDSTOREAD, 1963-2014

1. 1. 1963 — The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
      
      Sylvia Plath’s only novel manages to be both elegant and filled with raw, seething emotion – no small feat, and not the least of the reasons the reading world is still obsessed with her. There were a host of other great books this year, but the Plath legend (not to mention the Plath legion) still looms so large in... our collective unconsciousness that this one seems by far the most essential to a modern reader’s repertoire.
      
      1964 — Herzog, Saul Bellow
      
      Sure, Herzog is a midlife crisis book. It’s also a triumph of style, this wordy, beautiful epistolary novel, an examination of strife both existential and practical, a philosophical experiment with emotional roots. As Jeffrey Eugenides wrote, “If you’re in the market for a safe neuro-enhancer, something to break you out of your foggy-headedness, a pill more powerful than Adderall or Provigil, with no side effects other than pleasure, then pick up Herzog and open it — anywhere — and read.”
      
      1965 – The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
      
      This book is an influential classic of American autobiography, a required volume for anyone interested in American history, spiritual conversion, race, class, politics, or just an extraordinary read.
      
      1966 – Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
      
      Sontag’s most famous collection is essential reading for anyone interested in art or literature for something more than pure entertainment. Impossibly brilliant, cocksure, and ever-curious, she will continually blow you away.
      
      1967 — The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
      
      Yes: Bulgakov over Márquez, and it’s not only because The Master and Margarita is this writer’s favorite book. Or maybe it is, a little. This novel – in which the devil and his retinue visit 1930s Moscow and raise, well, hell – is hilarious, mind-expanding, snide, brilliant, a compelling tale, a brutal satire, a rewritten history, and one of the best novels of this or any year.
      
      1968 — Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
      
      Didion’s first collection established her as a phenomenal prose stylist, an incisive mind, and a relentless chronicler of the American experience. A very few of the essays collected here seem dated in 2013, but most sing with truth even under the pressure of decades.
      
      1969 — I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
      
      Now this was a tough one. Ultimately, though, the impact of Angelou’s masterpiece, which James Baldwin called “a Biblical study of life in the midst of death,” eclipses all else published this year. The book, a beautiful work of literature in its own right, also opened pathways for African-American women – and women, and people – and launched the career of an American treasure.
      
      1970 – Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume
      
      No one gets teenagers like Judy Blume. For so many young people, this book was a revelation, and it will probably remain a cultural touchstone for all time
      
      1971 – The Complete Stories, Flannery O’Connor
      
      This posthumous collection is the only one of its kind on this list, but it was impossible to ignore. O’Connor is the enduring master of the Southern macabre, as exhaled coolly with one’s cigarette smoke. Every story is a revelation.
      
      1972 – Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
      
      This was a difficult choice, since it precludes the inclusion of If on a winter’s night a traveler later on. But while that novel is a particular favorite of a certain literary editor, you can’t argue with Invisible Cities. In this luminous exploration of the mind, the reader listens in as Marco Polo describes various imaginary, impossible, phenomenal cities to the emperor Kublai Khan. Reading this book is like jumping into a pool of cool, clear water – and then staying under until you start to hallucinate. In a good way.
      
      1973 – Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
      
      Pynchon’s masterpiece is widely heralded as one of the best American novels ever written, and one of the pillars of postmodern fiction. Complicated, very long, and mind-expanding, it’s a book for these times or any.
      
      1974 – The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
      
      There is no last 50 years without Ursula Le Guin. Or at least, there shouldn’t be. This book, which took home handfuls of Best Novel awards in the world of science fiction in its year of publication, was described by Gerald Jonas of The New York Times as being “so persuasive that it ought to put a stop to the writing of prescriptive Utopias for at least 10 years.” It might not have done that, but that doesn’t take away from its power one bit.
      
      1975 – The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux
      
      This book is one of the most important travelogues of the last 50 years, one that likely launched a thousand train trips, and written by a fascinating, outspoken literary figure the like of which we rarely see anymore.
      
      1976 – Speedboat, Renata Adler
      
      It may be a novel, or it may be an anti-novel, but whatever it is, Adler’s Speedboat is an unrelentingly magical piece of writing, filled to the brim with curls of thrilling language and commonplace observations put just so. Plus, the book manages to capture what it’s like to be young and in New York – or just to be alive and looking around yourself – like almost nothing else. You might shrug, but everyone tries to accomplish this, and almost everyone fails.
      
      1977 – The Shining, Stephen King
      
      This is the book that established King as the, well, king of the American horror novel. Smart, culturally resonant and scary as hell.
      
      1978 – The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
      
      Murdoch’s inventive Booker Prize-winning novel swirls as much as its namesake – with self-delusion, with obsession, with the ebb and flow (not to put too fine a point on it) of friendships and love affairs. A stunning novel by one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
      
      1979 – The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
      
      Fairy tales are an integral part of the way we read novels and stories – hell, they’re an integral part of the social fabric. Carter’s feminist, adult re-imaginings of the greatest hits are necessary and brutal for anyone whose parents ever read them off to sleep.
   2. 1. 1980 – Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
         
         Despite his unfortunate politics, Orson Scott Card wrote one of the best, most engaging, and most cerebral books about war, the government, and being a kid. Not to mention that he created the scariest and coolest computer game ever.
         
         1981 – Outside Over There, Maurice Sendak
         
         People make a fuss over Where the... Wild Things Are. It may be deserved, but this, this twisted, gorgeous, upsetting little book is Sendak’s masterpiece. And the masterpiece of a national treasure is worth extra.
         
         1982 – The Color Purple, Alice Walker
         
         Walker’s epistolary novel, which won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, has become a much-challenged classic for its treatment of the African-American female experience in the 1930s – with all the sexual politics, racism, and violence that that entailed. A powerful, moving American mainstay.
         
         1983 – Cathedral, Raymond Carver
         
         Carver is nearly synonymous with excellence in short stories, and with good reason. The tales in this book are brilliant, restrained, and surprising, maneuvering with careful grace.
         
         1984 – Money, Martin Amis
         
         Money is Martin Amis’s masterpiece, a fierce, hilarious book about the hedonistic downward spiral of an English commercial director. Smart and mean, this is the book that makes Martin Amis, Martin Amis
         
         1985 – The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
         
         Yikes. This year might have presented the most difficult of choices. Just look at that spread. Let’s say The Handmaid’s Tale because it’s brilliant, because it’s terrifying, and because unlike some books that are creeping up on their 30th birthdays, the older it gets, the more relevant it seems
         
         1986 – Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
         
         Spiegelman’s graphic novel/memoir of his father is one of the loveliest, best-written, and most terrifying books about the Holocaust to date.
         
         1987 – Beloved, Toni Morrison
         
         Morrison’s searing, backbreaking book tackles slavery, motherhood, and death in perfect prose. It’s probably the best book from the last 50 years. Your torn-out heart will haunt you for at least that long.
         
         1988 – Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
         
         Mary Gaitskill is the patron saint of the modern woman. Her debut collection is raw and sexy and frankly burning up with intelligence
         
         1989 – Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
         
         This novel is supremely uncomfortable, exceedingly bizarre, and at times has the potential to upset the most ironclad of stomachs and hearts. This is why it is a masterpiece.
         
         1990 – The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
         
         You probably read this in school, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t wonderful. A groundbreaking, now-classic meditation on war and memory.
         
         1991 – Possession, A.S. Byatt
         
         A literary mystery, a campus novel, a love story, and an investigation into the complex world of art and knowledge, all in one volume.
         
         1992 – The Secret History, Donna Tartt
         
         It’s hard to throw Jesus’ Son under the bus here, so if it cools your mind, consider it a tie. But Tartt’s debut is such a perfect campus novel, so palpably beautiful with all its pagan rituals, elusive love affairs, dead languages, and youths both murderous and studious, that it slinks into your mind and colors your vision for years to come. It must not be ignored.
         
         1993 – The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
         
         E. Annie Proulx is an understated master, and her Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning novel, a darkly funny treatise on the American family, bubbling with unforgettable characters, is good evidence.
         
         1994 – The Ice Storm, Rick Moody
         
         An audacious and witty dissection of the American family for anyone who has ever had impure thoughts.
         
         1995 – Sabbath’s Theater, Philip Roth
         
         Arguably Roth’s best novel, and less arguably featuring one of the most disgustingly loathsome characters in fiction, Sabbath’s Theater is stuffed to the leaking brim with depravity, brutality, wild masturbation, and then, inexplicably, tenderness. It’s hilarious, and horrible, and a great book.

         

   
   1996 – Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
   
   Screw 1996. This was the best novel of the decade. Not only is Infinite Jest challenging, hilarious, frustrating, and heartbreaking, but as the years go on, it only seems more prescient, more appropriate, more dangerous.
   
   1997 – Underworld, Don DeLillo
   
   Here’s another candidate for the Great American No...vel, a complex, ambitious book about American life in the latter half of the 20th century. Nonlinear, affecting, and (like so much of DeLillo’s work) incredibly adept at capturing the feel of our everyday American surreality.
   
   1998 – Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
   
   Lorrie Moore is the Flannery O’Connor of contemporary letters, the funniest, darkest female voice of short fiction, leading a parade of impersonators in her wake. This collection is sharp and strange and a little sideways – just how short fiction should be.
   
   1999 – Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
   
   Coetzee’s harrowing, Booker Prize-winning novel of a disgraced professor and his daughter in post-apartheid South Africa is terrible and beautiful, delving into exploitation and love and loss and the meaning of humanity. It’s no surprise that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature just a few years after its publication.
   
   2000 – Pastoralia, George Saunders
   
   There were many fantastic books published this year (see below), and the one that makes this list was neither the biggest selling nor the most extensively covered. But George Saunders is a national treasure, and this collection may be (no promises) his best. In any event, he is one of the few writers today who seems to know the way forward – however icky and strange that way might be.
   
   2001 – Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
   
   All of Sebald’s work straddles a misty, perhaps imaginary line between fiction and nonfiction, between history and present, memoir and biography. His books are dreamy, digressive, haunted by memory, each inviting endless submergence. “I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all,” our eponymous Austerlitz says, “only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead.” Both gorgeous and important.
   
   2002 – Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
   
   Eugenides’s greatest novel is a multi-generational family epic, a love letter to Detroit, and an essential exploration of youth and difference. It’s also probably the best novel ever to tackle intersexuality.
   
   2003 – The Known World, Edward P. Jones
   
   This startling, complex novel tackles an oft-ignored topic: the world of black slave owners in antebellum Virginia. Unflinching, finely woven, and sometimes devastating, it’s a must-read. The judges of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award agree.
   
   2004 – The Epicure’s Lament, Kate Christensen
   
   There may have been one or two More Important books published this year – but there weren’t any more delicious, delightful ones. Be kind to yourself and pick up Christensen’s electric, hilarious novel, featuring one of the most memorable and most lovably unlikeable characters in recent memory.
   
   2005 – Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
   
   Link’s stories are complex works of realism/fantasy/horror, sometimes cheeky, sometimes serious, always surprising and dreamlike and smart. Salon once described her writing as “an alchemical mixture of Borges, Raymond Chandler, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and well, there’s just no better way to put it than that.
   
   2006 – The Road, Cormac McCarthy
   
   2006 was a good year for books indeed. Most essential is probably McCarthy’s The Road, the epitome of the harrowing post-apocalyptic novel, which takes so many risks, not least in its language, and cuts to the marrow.
   
   2007 – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
   
   This book has been anointed with many prizes, but not without good reason. Díaz has one of the strongest voices in contemporary fiction, a rough-edged one, a slightly slick one, an essential one. All that aside, this is a great story (or set of stories) with a cast of characters you won’t forget this century.
   
   2008 – Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser
   
   Millhauser’s collection is a relative sleeper, which is why it makes the list. Millhauser is beloved by many writers and readers, but he should really be more of a household name, in particular for his stories, which are restrained and glistening explorations of strangeness, each one wilder and closer to home than the last.
   
   2009 – Lit: A Memoir, Mary Karr
   
   The always excellent Mary Karr’s latest work is both a memoir and a deconstruction of the memoir, a master class in the form. That aside, Karr’s voice is what makes her work so particularly wonderful: acerbic and matter-of-fact, but deeply felt, honest, humble, a brilliant mind at work behind a smart aleck’s grin.
   
   2010 – A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
   
   Egan’s most recent novel won the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a host of gushing accolades from just about everybody with two working eyes. Concerned with past and future, self-destruction and self-creation, family and self, and, of course, Powerpoint, it’s a pretty good candidate for the Great American Novel of the 21st century.
   
   2011 – Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan
   
   Pulphead is one of the most perfect essay collections to be published in recent memory. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll marvel at Sullivan’s brilliance and verve, at the mundanity and insanity of the secrets he uncovers.
   
   2012 – Building Stories, Chris Ware
   
   Ware’s Building Stories was a sensation last year, and with good reason. As the physicality of the book is changing, it’s important to celebrate the writers who push at the boundaries of what’s possible, what’s satisfying, what makes a good story. Ware has always done so, and never more than in this overgrown, epic graphic novel.
   
   2013 – The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner
   
   It’s hard to tell which contemporary novels will stand the test of time and which will be forgotten by this time next year, but Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, with its fiery prose and breadth of purpose, is a solid bet. At the very least, it’s this reader’s favorite novel so far this year.
   
   2014-"What Makes A Great Leaders" Engr Femi Francis Akinsiku.
   
   I love to see people succeed with their life. As the artist treasures his painting and the master craftman the quality of the violin that God created. So our Maker cherishes the dream, goals, excellence of life and the happiness you and I are to enjoy. Through searching diligently for principles for successful living. I was suddenly made aware of these two foces: The great leaders and their principles they set in motion. The combined power of these two influences i call the way of the winner. Winners are simply ex-losers who got mad. They got tired of failures. The day you get angry at failures is the day you start winning. Winning doesn't start around you-it begins inside you. Happiness begins between your ears. Your mind is the drawing room for tomorrow's circumstances. What happens in your mind will happen in time. Mind-management is the first priority for overcomer. The Great leadership follow contain the wisdom for living. circle today's date on your calendar. Declare that the happiness and most productive days of your life are beginning today! I wrote this book for you. I pray that each page will give added edge you need to make your life happier and more fulfilling than ever before.