50 Books You Should Read
A Personal List
You don’t need me to tell you to read Pride & Prejudice and War & Peace (two classics with an ampersand). So here’s a list of beloved books that are well-known but not too well-known. No Henry James or F. Scott Fitzgerald, no Turgenev or Evelyn Waugh. Sorry lads! Your estates are doing fine without us.
These are novels (you remember novels), biographies and travel. Also: letters, journals and memoirs. Yes, there’s some fishing, but it’s hidden in a few places and not too much.
So get your attention off the screen and back on the page where it belongs.
Hope it’s a good reading summer for all of us.
FICTION.
1/ The Shooting Party. Isabel Colegate. A weekend in a country house, beautifully observed and perfectly paced. Masterful.
2/ The Untouchable. John Banville. An exposed spy (a thinly veiled adaptation of Anthony Blunt) by a writer at the height of his powers.
3/ A Question of Upbringing. Anthony Powell. The first of twelve novels in A Dance to the Music of Time. English school boys, social distinctions, closely held. You’ll know if it’s for you early on.
4/ The Lost Upland. W.S. Merwin. Three stories that slowly unfold in a town in Southern France that’s struggling to enter the modern world. No word wrong.
5/ Playworld. Adam Ross. This new novel that takes place in New York in the 1980s. A teenage boy comes of age on the Upper West Side. Funny, dark and brilliantly told.
6/ The New Confessions. William Boyd. A sprawling, wonderful novel celebrating art and a big approach to life.
7/ Hotel Splendide. Ludwig Bemelmans. Comic genius from an old favorite.
8/ A Month in the Country. J.L. Carr. A slim novel that takes place in post WWI English countryside. As wistful as a late-summer evening.
9/ A Way of Life, Like Any Other. Darcy O’Brien. A Hollywood childhood that is unruly, funny and completely at home with the disappointments of the world.
10/ Do You Remember England? Derek Marlowe. A love story in England, yes, and throughout Europe. Be careful what your cold heart wants.
NON-FICTION.
11/ Anthony Blunt: His Lives. Miranda Carter. He looked after the Queen’s pictures and was a reluctant (or not-so reluctant) spy. These things don’t end well.
12/ Goya. Robert Hughes. The life of one of the great artists by the most brilliant critic of our time.
13/ Being Bernard Berenson. Meryle Secrest. A brief but great book about the most famous art historians who didn’t do the right thing.