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Copyright
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020 Copyright © Michiko Kakutani 2020 Illustrations copyright © 2020 by Dana Tanamachi Michiko Kakutani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work For permissions see here, which constitutes a continuation of this copyright page. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008421953 Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008421960 Version: 2020-09-16
For readers and writers
everywhere
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Americanah by CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
The Light of the World by ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
Muhammad Ali Books
The Greatest: My Own Story by MUHAMMAD ALI
The Muhammad Ali Reader, edited by GERALD EARLY
King of the World by DAVID REMNICK
The Tribute: Muhammad Ali, 1942–2016, by SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
Experience by MARTIN AMIS
Winesburg, Ohio by SHERWOOD ANDERSON
The Origins of Totalitarianism by HANNAH ARENDT
The Handmaid’s Tale by MARGARET ATWOOD
Collected Poems by W. H. AUDEN
Continental Drift by RUSSELL BANKS
Books by SAUL BELLOW
The Adventures of Augie March
Herzog
The Actual: A Novella
The Image by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN
Ficciones by JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Moth Presents: All These Wonders, edited by CATHERINE BURNS
The Plague by ALBERT CAMUS
The Passage of Power by ROBERT A. CARO
Pursuits of Happiness by STANLEY CAVELL
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by ROZ CHAST
Books by BRUCE CHATWIN
In Patagonia
What Am I Doing Here
The Sleepwalkers by CHRISTOPHER CLARK
Books About Foreign Policy and the World
The Retreat of Western Liberalism by EDWARD LUCE
A World in Disarray by RICHARD HAASS
Brother, I’m Dying by EDWIDGE DANTICAT
Underworld by DON DELILLO
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by JUNOT DíAZ
Books by JOAN DIDION
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
The White Album
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by DAVE EGGERS
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg by DEBORAH EISENBERG
The Waste Land by T. S. ELIOT
Books by JOSEPH J. ELLIS
Founding Brothers
American Creation
Revolutionary Summer
American Dialogue
The Founders on American Democracy
The Federalist Papers by ALEXANDER HAMILTON, James Madison, and John Jay
George Washington’s Farewell Address
Invisible Man by RALPH ELLISON
As I Lay Dying by WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Neapolitan Quartet by ELENA FERRANTE
Books by DAVID FINKEL
The Good Soldiers
Thank You for Your Service
Books About 9/11 and the War on Terror
The Looming Tower by LAWRENCE WRIGHT
The Forever War by DEXTER FILKINS
Anatomy of Terror by ALI SOUFAN
The Great Gatsby by F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Gould’s Book of Fish by RICHARD FLANAGAN
The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830–1857 by GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Sinatra! The Song Is You by WILL FRIEDWALD
One Hundred Years of Solitude by GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ
The Idea Factory by JON GERTNER
The Peripheral by WILLIAM GIBSON
The Examined Life by STEPHEN GROSZ
Seabiscuit by LAURA HILLENBRAND
The Paranoid Style in American Politics by RICHARD HOFSTADTER
The Odyssey by HOMER
Lab Girl by HOPE JAHREN
The Liars’ Club by MARY KARR
A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
by MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
On Writing by STEPHEN KING
The Woman Warrior by MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
The Language of the Third Reich by VICTOR KLEMPERER
Books About Democracy and Tyranny
On Tyranny by TIMOTHY SNYDER
How Democracies Die by STEVEN LEVITSKY and Daniel Ziblatt
The Road to Unfreedom by TIMOTHY SNYDER
The Sixth Extinction by ELIZABETH KOLBERT
The Namesake by JHUMPA LAHIRI
Books by JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget
Dawn of the New Everything
A Wrinkle in Time by MADELEINE L’ENGLE
ABRAHAM LINCOLN Books
The Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, edited by DON E. FEHRENBACHER
Lincoln at Gettysburg by GARRY WILLS
Lincoln by FRED KAPLAN
Lincoln’s Sword by DOUGLAS L. WILSON
Arctic Dreams by BARRY LOPEZ
Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West by CORMAC MCCARTHY
Atonement by IAN MCEWAN
Moby-Dick by HERMAN MELVILLE
A Gate at the Stairs by LORRIE MOORE
Books by TONI MORRISON
Song of Solomon
Beloved
Books by VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, edited by DMITRI NABOKOV
Speak, Memory
Reading Lolita in Tehran by AZAR NAFISI
A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. NAIPAUL
Born a Crime by TREVOR NOAH
Books by BARACK OBAMA
Dreams from My Father
We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama, edited by E. J. DIONNE, JR., AND JOY-ANN REID
There There by TOMMY ORANGE
1984 by GEORGE ORWELL
The Moviegoer by WALKER PERCY
Mason & Dixon by THOMAS PYNCHON
Life by KEITH RICHARDS WITH JAMES FOX
A Life of Picasso by JOHN RICHARDSON
Books About Work and Vocation
Sick in the Head by JUDD APATOW
The Right Kind of Crazy by ADAM STELTZNER WITH William Patrick
The Shepherd’s Life by JAMES REBANKS
Do No Harm by HENRY MARSH
Housekeeping by MARILYNNE ROBINSON
American Pastoral by PHILIP ROTH
The Harry Potter Novels by J. K. ROWLING
Books by SALMAN RUSHDIE
Midnight’s Children
The Moor’s Last Sigh
Books by OLIVER SACKS
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales
An Anthropologist on Mars
Where the Wild Things Are by MAURICE SENDAK
Books by DR. SEUSS
Horton Hears a Who!
The Cat in the Hat
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
Green Eggs and Ham
The Lorax
Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
The Plays of William Shakespeare
Frankenstein by MARY SHELLEY
Little Failure by GARY SHTEYNGART
White Teeth by ZADIE SMITH
My Beloved World by SONIA SOTOMAYOR
The Palm at the End of the Mind by WALLACE STEVENS
The Goldfinch by DONNA TARTT
Democracy in America by ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh by VINCENT VAN GOGH
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by OCEAN VUONG
The Poetry of Derek Walcott, 1948–2013 by DEREK WALCOTT
Infinite Jest by DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
All the King’s Men by ROBERT PENN WARREN
Educated by TARA WESTOVER
The Underground Railroad by COLSON WHITEHEAD
The World of Yesterday by STEFAN ZWEIG
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
As a child, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright August Wilson recalled in a speech that he was the one in his family who wanted to read all the books in the house, who wore out his library card and kept books way past their due date. He dropped out of high school at age fifteen, but spent every school day at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh reading history and biography and poetry and anthropology. The library would eventually give him an honorary high school diploma, and the books he discovered there, he said, “opened a world that I entered and have never left,” and led to the transformative realization that “it was possible to be a writer.”
Dr. Oliver Sacks credited the local public library he knew as a child (in Willesden, London) as the place where he received his real education, just as Ray Bradbury described himself as “completely library educated.” In the case of two famous autodidacts, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the books they read growing up indelibly shaped their ideals and ambitions, and gave them the tools of language and argument that would help them shape the history of their nation.
The pleasure of reading, Virginia Woolf wrote, is “so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed the world and continues to change it.” In fact, she argued, the reason “we have grown from apes to men, and left our caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked and given to the poor and helped the sick—the reason why we have made shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of the jungle is simply this—we have loved reading.”
In his 1996 book, A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel described a tenth-century Persian potentate who reportedly traveled with his 117,000-book collection loaded on the backs of “four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.” Manguel also wrote about the public readers hired by Cuban cigar factories in the late nineteenth century to read aloud to workers. And about the father of one of his boyhood teachers, a scholar who knew many of the classics by heart and who volunteered to serve as a library for his fellow inmates at the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen. He was able to recite entire passages aloud—much like the book lovers in Fahrenheit 451, who keep knowledge alive through their memorization of books.
Why do we love books so much?
These magical brick-sized objects—made of paper, ink, glue, thread, cardboard, fabric, or leather—are actually tiny time machines that can transport us back to the past to learn the lessons of history, and forward to idealized or dystopian futures. Books can transport us to distant parts of the globe and even more distant planets and universes. They give us the stories of men and women we will never meet in person, illuminate the discoveries made by great minds, and allow us access to the wisdom of earlier generations. They can teach us about astronomy, physics, botany, and chemistry; explicate the dynamics of space flight and climate change; introduce us to beliefs, ideas, and literatures different from our own. And they can whisk us off to fictional realms like Oz and Middle-earth, Narnia and Wonderland, and the place where Max becomes king of the wild things.
When I was a child, books were both an escape and a sanctuary. I was an only child, accustomed to spending lots of time alone. I read in the cardboard refrigerator carton that my father had turned into a playhouse by cutting a door and windows in the sides. I read under the blankets at night with a flashlight. I read in the school library during recess in hopes of avoiding the playground bullies. I read in the backseat of the car, even though it made me carsick. And I read at the dining room table: because my mother thought books and food were incompatible, I would read whatever happened to be at hand—cereal boxes, appliance manuals, supermarket circulars, the ingredients of Sara Lee’s pecan coffee cake or an Entenmann’s crumb cake. I read the recipe for mock apple pie on the back of the Ritz crackers box so many times I could practically recite it. I was hungry for words.
The characters in some novels felt so real to me, when I was a child, that I worried they might leap out of the pages at night, if I left the cover of the book open. I imagined some of the scary characters from L. Frank Baum’s Oz books—the Winged Monkeys, say, or the evil Nome King, or Mombi the witch who possesses the dangerous Powder of Life—escaping from the books and using my bedroom as their portal into the real world, where they might wreak havoc and destruction.
Decades before binge-watching Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and The Sopranos, I binge-read Nancy Drew mysteries, Black Stallion novels, Landmark biographies, even whole sections of the World Book Encyclopedia (which is how my father fine-tuned his English, when he first moved to the United States from Japan).
In high school and college, I binge-read books about existentialism (The Stranger, No Exit, Notes from Underground, Irrational Man, Either/Or, The Birth of Tragedy), black history (The Autobiography of Malcolm X; The Fire Next Time; Manchild in the Promised Land; Black Like Me; Black Skin, White Masks); and science fiction and dystopian fiction (1984, Animal Farm, Dune, The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451, Childhood’s End, A Clockwork Orange, Cat’s Cradle). My reading was in no way systematic. At the time, I was not even aware of why I gravitated toward these books—though, in retrospect, as one of the few nonwhite kids at school, I must have been drawn to books about outsiders who were trying to figure out who they were and where they belonged. Even Dorothy in Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Lucy in Narnia, I later realized, were strangers in strange lands, trying to learn how to navigate worlds where few of the usual rules applied.
In those pre-internet days, I don’t remember exactly how we heard about new books and authors or decided what to read next. As a child, I think I first heard of Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth because there were articles by or about them (or maybe photos) in Life or Look magazine. I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring because my mother was reading it, and T. S. Eliot’s poetry because my favorite high school teacher, Mr. Adinolfi, had us memorize “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I was one of those readers who experienced many things first through books—and only later, in real life, not the other way around.
“You read something which you thought only happened to you,” James Baldwin once said, “and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.”
The books I write about in these pages include some longtime favorites (A Wrinkle in Time, Moby-Dick, The Palm at the End of the Mind), some older books that illuminate our troubled politics today (The Paranoid Style in American Politics, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Federalist Papers), some well-known works of fiction that have continued to exert a formative influence on successive generations of writers (Winesburg, Ohio; As I Lay Dying; The Odyssey), works of journalism and scholarship that address some of the most pressing issues of our day (The Forever War, The Sixth Extinction, Dawn of the New Everything), works that shine a light on hidden corners of our world or the human mind (Arctic Dreams, Lab Girl, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), and books that I’ve frequently given or recommended to friends.
Some of my favorite classics are here, but there are lots of lists out there of must-read classics, not to mention the class syllabi we remember from high school and college. And so, I’ve also tried to include a lot of recent books—novels, stories, and memoirs by contemporary writers, and nonfiction works about how technology and political and cultural upheavals are bringing tectonic changes to our world.
Like all lists and anthologies, the selections here are subjective and decidedly arbitrary. It was difficult to whittle my choices down to a hundred (which is why some entries actually contain more than one book), and I could easily have added another hundred books that are equally powerful, moving, or timely.
Over the years, I had the good fortune to have some inspiring teachers who enriched my understanding and appreciation of books. And some wonderful editors—like The New York Times’s former managing editor Arthur Gelb, a mentor to many of us and a journalist equally at home in the world of culture and the world of breaking news—who made it possible for me to make a living for many years by reading.
In these pages, I’m writing less as a critic than as an enthusiast. I’m not trying to explicate hidden meanings in these books or situate them in a literary continuum; I’m trying to encourage you to read or reread these books, because they deserve as wide an audience as possible. Because they are affecting or timely or beautifully written. Because they teach us something about the world or other people or our own emotional lives. Or simply because they remind us why we fell in love with reading in the first place.
Today, in our contentious and fragmented world, reading matters more than ever. For one thing, books offer the sort of in-depth experience that’s increasingly rare in our distracted, ADD age—be it the sense of magical immersion offered by a compelling novel, or the deep, meditative thinking triggered by a wise or provocative work of nonfiction.
Books can open a startling window on history; they can give us an all-access pass to knowledge both old and new. As the former defense secretary James Mattis, who assembled a seven-thousand-volume library, said of his years in the military, “Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.”
Most of all, books can catalyze empathy—something more and more precious in our increasingly polarized and tribal world. Reading, Jean Rhys once wrote, “makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”
Over the years, I had the good fortune to have some inspiring teachers who enriched my understanding and appreciation of books.
At its best, literature can surprise and move us, challenge our certainties, and goad us into reexamining our default settings. Books can jolt us out of old habits of mind and replace reflexive us-versus-them thinking with an appreciation of nuances and context. Literature challenges political orthodoxies, religious dogma, and conventional thinking (which, of course, is why authoritarian regimes ban and burn books), and it does what education and travel do: it exposes us to a multiplicity of viewpoints and voices.
Literature, as David Foster Wallace has pointed out, gives the reader, “marooned in her own skull,” imaginative “access to other selves.”
Or, as President Barack Obama observed during his last week in the White House, books can supply historical perspective, a sense of solidarity with others, and “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes.” They can remind us of “the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day,” and the capacity of “stories to unify—as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize.”
In a world riven by political and social divisions, literature can connect people across time zones and zip codes, across cultures and religions, national boundaries and historical eras. It can give us an understanding of lives very different from our own, and a sense of the shared joys and losses of human experience.
AMERICANAH
(2013)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
With Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a wonderfully touching, incisive, and very funny coming-of-age tale that’s both an old-fashioned love story and a sharp-eyed meditation on race, class, immigration, and identity in our rapidly changing, globalized world.
Adichie’s spirited and outspoken heroine, Ifemelu, grows up in Lagos, Nigeria, where she falls in love, in high school, with Obinze, the earnest and quietly charming son of a literature professor. The two have instant chemistry—“she realized, quite suddenly, that she wanted to breathe the same air as Obinze”—and picture a future together, possibly in America, a country Obinze reveres.
When teacher strikes interrupt their college lives and Ifemelu receives a scholarship to attend university in America, Obinze urges her to take it. He tells her that he will get a visa and follow her there as soon as he completes his college degree, but harsh post-9/11 immigration policies will prevent this from happening. He will instead spend several miserable years as an illegal immigrant in London, where he is unable to find any but the most menial jobs. Eventually, he returns to Lagos, where he becomes a successful property developer, marries, and has a child.
Ifemelu, meanwhile, struggles to adapt to life in America. She compares what she sees firsthand with memories of Cosby Show episodes she watched growing up. And she hungers “to understand everything about America”—“to support a team at the Super Bowl, understand what a Twinkie was and what sports ‘lockouts’ meant,” order “a ‘muffin’ without thinking that it really was cake.” Back home, she hadn’t really thought of herself as “black,” and she’s startled by how ubiquitous arguments about race are in the United States, permeating everything from romances to friendships to on-the-job dynamics. In a blog post addressed to “Fellow Non-American Blacks,” she writes, “Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t ‘black’ in your country? You’re in America now.”
Adichie has a heat-seeking eye for telling social and emotional details, and she uses that gift to convey Ifemelu’s experiences with extraordinary immediacy.