The book lives! Whoever tells you young people don’t read is full of it. Not only do they read, they read everything. On the last day of classes at Pomona College, I asked my Creative Writing students--16 undergrads, a few of them teenagers, most in their early twenties--to give me a list of three to five of their favorite books. The idea was that we’d share our lists with each other, and perhaps stimulate some future reading. Below are their choices (some couldn’t stop at five), and what a wonderful collective list it is. The variety here is astonishing--everything from the classics, to fantasy and other genre, to world literature in translation and the avant-garde. (And forgive any misspellings--those are mine). Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov Portrait of a Lady, Henry James Short stories/essays by Rick Moody, Raymond Carver, Joan Didion King Rat, China Mieville Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison Dune, Frank Herbert Watchmen, Alan Moore Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman Octavia Butler, Dawn Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March Chris Adrian, A Better Angel, stories Haruki Murakami, The Wind Up Bird Chronicles Toni Morrison, Beloved Herman Melville, Moby Dick Flannery O’Connor, Collected Stories River Teeth, David James Duncan Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell The Sense of An Ending, Julian Barnes Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thorton Wilder The Road, Cormac McCarthy The Curious Incident of the Day in the Night Time, Mark Haddon Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri The Jade Peony, Wayson Choy Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle Class America, Jean-Robert Cadet Catcher in the Rye, Salinger Sarah’s Key, Tatiana de Rosnay East of Eden, Steinbeck Just Kids, Patti Smith Lolita, Nabokov A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce The Invisible Bridge, Julie Orringer Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself, Lipsky The Body Artist, De Lillo Bough Down, Karen Green The Waste Books, Georg Christoph Lichetenberg Bluets, Maggie Nelson Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace How Should a Person Be, Sheila Heti The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood NW, Zadie Smith, A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry Jump and Other Stories, Nadine Gordimer Fugitive Pieces, Ann Michaels Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, Hannah Arendt 1984, Orwell The Autobiography of Malcolm X A People’s History of the United States The Celestine Prophecy The Education of Little Tree The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley The Master and the Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov 2666, Roberto Bolaño Bough Down, Karen Green Griffin and Sabine, Nick Bantock A Portrait of Dorian Grey, Wilde Dubliners, Joyce Labyrinths, Borges Amulet, Roberto Bolaño Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway World War Z, Max Brooks The Road, Cormac McCarthy Black Coffee Blues, Henry Rollins Blue Nights, Joan Didion Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto The Stranger, Albert Camus Postcards From No Mans Land, Aidan Chambers White Teeth Zadie Smith This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz Pride and Prejudice, Austen Neuromancer, William Gibson Heart of Darkness, Conrad The Bible (Book of Revelations) Tattoos on the Heart, Gregory Boyle The Fault in Our Stars, John Green White Noise, Don DeLillo Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell Watership Down, Richard Adams House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy And oh, by the way, only about a third of my students were English majors. I also had political science, computer science, and math majors in my class.
Posted on: Sat, 31 May 2014 15:40:57 +0000
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