From the Brooklyn Public Library’s website:
Brooklyn Public Library is celebrating our country’s 250th anniversary the best way we know how: with a thoughtful, surprising, irresistible booklist. Organized by genre and category of interest, this all-ages list is a deep dive on the stories, voices and moments that shaped America. Selected by our expert librarians—with help from a few notable New Yorkers!—here are the 250 most influential books in United States history.
They have a not-so-little list and you can click on the titles you’ve read. There is also a printable list.
Librarians are my favorite people in my favorite profession, although there is always a minatory feeling to these kinds of lists, like I’m getting the side eye because I haven’t read them all (The 1619 Project? After The Warmth of Other Suns I don’t think I can make it through another book explaining in excruciating detail how badly people who looked like me treated our fellow citizens.) or because I had the temerity to have loathed some of them (American Psycho? Seriously?).
But these lists are always fun to read and to argue over, at least in my imagination. This one includes titles not always seen on such lists, like
the first mystery novel I ever read. And this one
Proulx’s best book. And how about
written twenty-six years ago and even more relevant today than it was then, and a terrific and somewhat harrowing pick for my book club. And
the single most important tool in the writer’s toolbox! And this
one of the most charming children’s picture books ever published, fifty-three years old and still in print today and should be in print forever.
And so many more, including Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories, a book I still haven’t been able to bring myself to read; and Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, which I thought was just a movie; and Susan Collins’ The Hunger Games, along with its two sequels one of the best anti-war novels ever written; and Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, hands down the best book about line cooks, he was such a great writer; Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, got to be right at the top of anyone’s top ten list of YA novels.
And so many more. Come to think of it, printing out this list and arguing over the titles might be a fun book club activity.
And yes, library lists and book clubs are absolutely part of #thiswritinglife.
(Atlas Shrugged? Really?)
#thiswritinglife Chatter 250 for 250 Booklist Brooklyn Public Library
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Quite a list! Several there to add to my list. Several are already on the bookshelf to read. If I read them all, it could possibly induce me to jump off a cliff! I would certainly have added a few more science fiction books if I had had a hand in it. Book lists are fun and challenging.
Absolutely agree on the SF books. I kept looking for Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country, and Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, and Becky Chamber’s Wayfarer series, and any of Heinlein’s YAs. I mean, come on.
I see The Bell Jar in the graphic twice and it’s a book I wish I’d never read once! Totally agree with your comment about Heinlein’s juveniles, my gateway drug to reading and several of which I’ve foisted upon every youngster my besties and I are related to.
Attagirl.
This made me irrationally angry, possibly because I’d been reading reports out of the nation’s alleged capital beforehand but also what a dopey list. I had read all the children’s books and I don’t think I regret any of those but I do regret having bothered with at least half the “adult” books I had read from this list, bleh, if this is what people are reading, no wonder they don’t want to read!
No Fantasy to speak of, really, and just one LeGuin and one NK Jemison? No AC Doyle or Christie or Allingham or Sayers and *that* Patricia Highsmith? How very odd.
Along with Tepper, you’ve got to also have Joanna Russ’ The Female Man! It Is Known.
And it occurs to me that I’ve not read Uncle Tom’s Cabin but can perform “Small House of Uncle Thomas” from The King and I – WITH the chorus parts — so that counts, right? I think that counts.