Ten reading Recommendations

Last week I was asked by a friend to do a book recommendation exchange. I was initially quite hesitant, as I mentioned in my "My Dinner with Andre" post, I am scared of disliking a work important to a friend and vice-versa. I became even more hesitant when my friend listed "The Zahir" as an example book she would recommend. (For my opinion on Paulo Coelho see the same old post. The Zahir is the worst book I have read in years.)

My friend, who is Eastern European, has read many classics of English and European literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, asked me to specifically to recommend twentieth century American authors. I am going to bend this a bit, and recommend fairly recent works, some of which are by non-Americans. These works will strike a balance between erudition, enjoyment and cocktail-party chatter. So no Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Miller, Heller, or Updike.

1. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson - My favorite post-childhood book. I gave this to my friend for Christmas in 2006, but she still hasn't read it!

2. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon - A book that was recommended to me and that I have given to a few people.

3. Underworld by Don DeLillo - The best first chapter ever written. It even made me like baseball. And this was a present from an ex-boyfriend getting his Master's in English.

4. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami - A book I read in one day in Antarctica in 2007. I only left bed for sustenance.

5. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers - The book that launched Eggers upon the litterati. I gave it to multiple people for Christmas during my junior year of college. And I mentioned it in my blog post about pretentious titles.

6. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri - The best book of short stories I have read in years. And I enjoy the author's other works (as I mentioned before) and movies made of them too.

7. Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver by Scott Stossel - Mixing it up a little, here's an amazing biography of an amazing man, Sargent Shriver, father of Maria Shriver and brother-in-law of JFK. He was essential to the founding of the Peace Corps and the Special Olympics. The interviews with him were held in haste when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

8. American Gods by Neil Gaiman - The novel that launched the author into fame beyond the comics world. I read it whilst working at the Princeton University Library circulation desk as an undergraduate.

9. Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon - The best road trip memoir there is, surpassing On the Road and Travels with Charley. Sadly, the author's River-Horse does not rise to the same heights.

10. A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe - My favorite Wolfe novel, chosen a it was the longest English-language book I could find while in hospital in Berlin.

So those are my ten for my friend- not necessarily my favorite books (for who can choose?), but ten I will stand behind. I will be just a little devastated if she doesn't like them.