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