| A Bend in the River | V.S. Naipaul | Flawed but very powerful story of post-colonialism in Africa. |
| A Distant Mirror | Barbara Tuchman | More than you wanted to know about the 4 horsemen in the 14th century. |
| A Frolic of His Own | William Gaddis | Badly in need of copy editing. |
| A Hero of Our Time | Mihail Lermontov | Greater than the sum of its parts, and very Russian. |
| A Modern Instance | William Dean Howells | Excellent 19th Century American social problem novel. |
| A Severed Head | Iris Murdoch | Cynical and amusing. |
| Adam's Diary/Eve's Diary | Mark Twain | Good yucks. |
| Against Criticism | Susan Sontag | Very dry, not very rigorous. |
| Among the Believers | VS Naipaul | Aspects of the anti-Enlightenment. |
| Animal Family, The | Randall Jarrell | Charming fantasy. |
| Atonement | Ian McEwan | Well written and researched, but somehow forgettable. |
| Autobiography | Benjamin Franklin | Venery for health, but not to excess. |
| Autobiography | Charles Darwin | Stick to the major works. |
| Autobiography | Dalai Lama | A sheltered childhood. |
| Autobiography | W B Yeats | Fairies in the garden of a tone-deaf laureate, but fascinating nonetheless. |
| Belinda | Maria Edgeworth | Didactic but intriguing. I preferred the characters before they reformed… |
| Benito Cereno | Herman Melville | Tabloid material transformed by genius. |
| Bible | Ywh | A popular religious text. |
| Black Prince, The | Iris Murdoch | Dark, strange and brilliant. |
| Brothers Karamazov | Dostoyevsky | Remember the TV series with Fred MacMurray? |
| Castle Rackrent | Mariah Edgeworth | Delightful 18th Century Anglo Irish satire. |
| Chaos | James Gleick | Like a good 3 part New Yorker article. |
| Collected Poems of | Elizabeth Bishop | 2nd rate |
| Confessions | Jean Jaques Rousseau | A fascinating document about a not very nice man with a persecution complex. |
| Conformist, The | Alberto Moravia | Fascism anatomized. |
| Consciousness Explained | Daniel Dennett | An amusing materialist. |
| Continental Op, The | Dashiell Hammett | Bad early stories. Read The Dain Curse or Red Harvest instead. |
| Crowds and Power | Elias Canetti | Polyymathic brilliance from the original of Iris Murdoch’s magus figure. |
| Death Comes For the Archbishop | Willa Cather | Good enough to overcome the anti-Catholic bias I acquired in parochial school. |
| Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark | Carl Sagan | People believe the goddamndest piffle. Carl deplores this at tedious length. |
| Devils of Loudun, The | Aldous Huxley | The spiritual biography of a deranged exorcist by an admirer. Bludgeoning erudition brought to bear on the evils of intellectual pride. |
| Education of Henry Adams | Henry Adams | Fascinating, dripping with ideas and beautifully written, a surprise hit. |
| Epitaph of a Small Winner | Machado de Assis | 19th Century Brazil's foremost, a philosophical fantasy narrated by the deceased protagonist. |
| Evelina | Fanny Burney | Solidly engaging, and occasionally startling in its depiction of a violent, vulgar and amoral era. |
| Fathers and Sons | Ivan Turgenev | Short and almost perfect. |
| Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | Not bad for a 19 year old girl. |
| Go Tell It on the Mountain | James Baldwin | An impressive meeting of the King James Bible and Freud. |
| Guns, Germs and Steel | Jared Diamond | Firstest with the mostest. |
| Heartbreak House | G B Shaw | For once a drama richer than the didactic purpose stated in its preface. |
| His Monkey Wife | John Collier | Exquisite irony. |
| House of Mirth | Edith Wharton | Very fine. |
| Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | Several novels about a boy. |
| Innocents Abroad | Mark Twain | The Ugly American. |
| Insurgent Mexico | John Reed | Participatory journalism by a romantic. |
| Invisible Cities | Italo Calvino | Metaphysical candy fluff. |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte | Great! Read Villette too, which is even better! |
| Jurgen | James Branch Cabell | A monstrous clever fellow. |
| Language, Truth and Logic | A. J. Ayer | Clever, clever, clever... |
| Life of Charlotte Bronte | Mrs Gaskell | A Gothic biography of a gothic novelist. Duty over pleasure. |
| Lives of A Cell, The | Lewis Thomas | Biological belles lettres. |
| Lucky Jim | Kingsley Amis | Big yucks. |
| Man Who Loved Children, The | Christina Stead | Unique and wonderful book by an unclassifiable writer. Her Letty Fox, Her Luck is also great. |
| Martian Time Slip | Phillip K. Dick | Another head-twister from the master paranoiac. |
| McTeague | Frank Norris | Not a pretty picture, but sticks to your ribs. |
| Memoirs of US Grant | Ulysses S. Grant | Another surprise hit: terrific prose, great sincerity and character. |
| Mind of A Mnemonist | A. J. Luria | Fascinating study of a man whose extraordinary memory seemed of little benefit. |
| Moby Dick | Melville | Many novels centering on a whale. |
| Mrs Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | I prefer Orlando . |
| Mysteries of Winterthurn, The | Joyce Carol Oates | Repulsive and inept 19 th century gothic pastiche. |
| Nicholas Nickelby | Dickens | Didactic and sentimental. |
| No Man Knows My History | Fawn Brodie | Bio of Joseph Smith, the man who found God in his hat. |
| No Man’s Land | Harold Pinter | I saw the original production with Gielgud and Richardson. |
| Nothing | Henry Green | A minor 20th C. English writer with a unique style and sensibility. |
| Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit | Jeanette Winterson | Slight. |
| Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The | George Meredith | 18 th century style, 19 th century psychology. |
| Our Mutual Friend | Charles Dickens | Characters you will never forget. The Master. |
| Palace Walk | Mahfouz | Solid 19 th century novel. |
| Pere Goriot | Honore de Balzac | Oddly disappointing and sentimental. Read Droll Stories instead. |
| Posession | A. S. Byatt | Talent misused. The 19th C. pastiche is clever, the 20th C. satire tedious. |
| Professor and the Madman, The | Simon Winchester | An ok version of a terrific true story. |
| Psychopathology of Everyday Life | Freud | The book that introduced the "Freudian slip" into popular culture. Ponderously Teutonic but fascinating. |
| Rasselas | Samuel Johnson | Exquisite style and charming story. 18th C. |
| Rats, Lice and History | Hans Zinsser | Our friend the plague. Fascinating. |
| Redburn | Melville | A potboiler by a genius |
| Remains of the Day | Ishiguro | Honest but forgettable. |
| Roderick Random | Tobias Smollett | A comic masterpiece. |
| Savages | Joe Kane | Journalism re South American Indians and oil politics. Well done. |
| Seven Years in Tibet | Heinrich Harrer | Someone was ready when opportunity knocked. |
| Six Character in Search of an Author | Luigi Pirandello | No doubt a novel exercise in it’s day. Seems dated now. |
| Some Buried Caesar | Rex Stout | Classic murder mystery. |
| Songlines | Bruce Chatwin | Excellent travel book on Australia , In Patagonia is even better. |
| Souls of Black Folks | W.E.B. Du Bois | Sad but true. |
| Sylvie and Bruno | Lewis Carroll | Twee. Odd. Twee. |
| Ballad of the Sad Café, The | Carson McCullers | Disappointing Southern Gothic. |
| Beast in the Jungle, The | Henry James | Short and almost perfect. |
| Betrothed, The | Allesandro Manzoni | Italy's Sir Walter Scott. Scene of ruffians carousing atop a wagonload of plague victims astonishing. |
| Death of Ivan Illich, The | Leo Tolstoy | Short and almost perfect. |
| Egoist, The | George Meredith | A Jane Austen plot and a very elaborate prose style. Not everyone's cup of tea, but I liked it. |
| Girls of Slender Means, The | Muriel Spark | Elegant! read "The Comforters", "Memento Mori" and "Ballad of Peckham Rye" while you’re at it. |
| Good Soldier, The | Ford Madox Ford | A painful gem. Also read his modernist masterpiece Parade's End . |
| Hobbit, The | Tolkien | A better if more modest work than the trilogy. |
| Killer Inside Me, The | Jim Thompson | The author is a very sick man. |
| Masterpiece, The | Emil Zola | Bleak and powerful. |
| Monk, The | Matthew G Lewis | Torture, incest, rape, necrophilia, transvestism, Satanic posession and clerical incelibacy: how can you go wrong! |
| Old Regime and the French Revolution , The | Alexis de Toqueville | A very smart guy, with some very deep insights. |
| Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The | George Meredith | 18 th century style, 20 th century psychology. |
| Oresteia, The | Aeschylus | All in the family, Greek style. |
| Sea and the Jungle, The | H M Tomlinson | Terrific travel book, and a real vocabulary builder. |
| Things They Carried, The | Tim O'Brien | Vietnam |
| Virginian, The | Owen Wister | Smile when you say that. |
| Warden, The / Barchester Towers | Anthony Trollope | A 2 piece comic gem. |
| Theory of the Leisure Class | Thorsten Veblen | Absolutely brilliant! One of the great satires, and a profoundly insightful work of sociology at the same time! |
| Tiny Alice | Edward Albee | A disturbing theological puzzle. |
| Tragic Muse | Henry James | Very minor James. |
| Travels of | Marco Polo | An utterly prosaic business man goes to another planet, and for 500 years is believed a liar. |
| Travels With A Donkey | Robert Louis Stevenson | One of the prose masterworks of the 19th C. Absolutely delightful! |
| Tristes Tropiques | Claude Levi-Strauss | Intellectually scintillating, stylistically superb, another pick hit! |
| Under Milkwood | Dylan Thomas | Music to the ears. |
| Undiscovered Self, The | Carl Jung | A highly implausible political speech which proposes direct experience of God as the only alternative to Soviet style totalitarianism, style good, content incoherent. |
| USA | John Dos Passos | Unique modernist masterpiece and sociological document at once. |
| Valleys of the Assassins | Freya Stark | An English broad with serious chutzpah (and a good prose style) wanders around Persia in the early 1930's. |
| Voyage of the Beagle | Charles Darwin | Everyone loved this: excellent plain style, fascinating observations, and a delightfully modest narrator. |
| Voyages of Dr Dolittle | Hugh Lofting | Wonderful, and thankfully not bowdlerized in my copy! |
| Wapshot Chronicle, The | John Cheever | Perhaps the finest American stylist of the post WWII era. A very funny book. |
| Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys | Skip this and read "After Leaving Mr Mackenzie". |
| Wind in the Willows, The | Kenneth Grahame | Poetically wonderful, albeit with some disturbing political angles when read as an adult. |
| Winter Notes on Summer Impressions | Dostoievski | Witty, Burkean pan-Slavism, believe it or not. |
| Woman in White, The | Wilkie Collins | Great 19th C. mystery. The Moonstone is also terrific. |
| Wonderful Life | Stephen J. Gould | Pretty unreadable. His essay collections are much better. |
| You Must Remember This | Joyce Carol Oates | Surprisingly good sex scenes. |
| Young Torless | Robert Musil | Fin de Siecle S&M in a military academy. Skip this and read The Man Without Qualities . |
| 21 Balloons | William Pene Du Bois | Delightful text and pictures. |
| 44: The Mysterious Stranger | Mark Twain | For devotees of textual variants. |
| 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea | Jules Verne | A great novel virtually devoid of psychology. |
| Undaunted Courage | Stephen Ambrose | Bipolar exploration. |
| A Coffin for Dimitrios | Eric Ambler | The pattern tale of Balkan suspense. |
| Quark and the Jaguar, The | Murray Gell-Mann | A Nobelist, lucid on how complexity derives from simplicity. |
| Decline and Fall | Evelyn Waugh | Cruel, funny and very well written. |
| Possessed, The | Dostoyesvsky | Surprisingly funny, psychologically brilliant, politically deplorable, a masterpiece. |
| Circular Staircase, The | Mary Roberts Rinehart | An old dark house mystery from the golden age. |
| Story of My Experiments With Truth, The | Ghandi | Crank diets and sexual anxiety lead to Indian independence. |
| Mysterious Island, The | Jules Verne | Men without women. Utopia. Darn that volcano. |
| Travels With Charley | John Steinbeck | An articulate boy and his dog. |
| Iris Murdoch, A Life | Peter J. Conradi | So she screwed around. Read the novels instead. |
| The Turn of the Screw | Henry James | Scary. |
| The Sixth Extinction | Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin | Dead critters. |
| A Midsummer Night's Dream | Shakspeare | Whimsical. |
| Betrayal | Harold Pinter | See the film! |
| Selected Letter of Gustave Flaubert | ed/trans Francis Steegmuller | Hard to tell if he was leading or following the trends. |
| Journal of the Plague Year | Defoe | Further proof of intelligent design. Amazing. |
| Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War | Barbara Ehrenreich | Read her sources, including Canetti, instead. |
| V. | Thomas Pynchon | Terrifying intelligence, occasional silliness. "Mondaugen's Story" will leave permanent scars. |
| Miles, the Autobiography | Miles Davis | Listen to the music, and skip this narcissistic piece of crap. |
| The Three Musketeers | Alexandre Dumas | Best villainess in literature! |
| Memoirs of a Polyglot | William Gerhardie | Fascinating memoirs of a British upbringing in pre-Soviet Russia.. |
| My Name is Red | Orhan Pamuk | A colorful and intelligent novel of ideas. |
| Two Years Before the Mast | William Henry Dana | California before the real estate boom, and well before OSHA. |
| Palimpsest | Gore Vidal | Written in a hurry, presumably for money. |
| The Greek Coffin Mystery | Ellery Queen | Enough plot for 4 mysteries. Still under the shadow of SS Van Dine. |
| Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution | Howard Rheingold | If one must read ephemera, it should be current. This was not. |
| Uncle Tom's Cabin | Harriet Beecher Stowe | A solid 19th century novel which gives the devil some of the best tunes. |
| Turkish Reflections | Mary Lee Settle | Ms. Settle seems preoccupied with her place in the pecking order of knowingness, and occasionally writes sentences that aren't. |
| Sirens of Titan | Kurt Vonnegut | This warped my juvenile mind, and holds up very well. |
| A History of the End of the World | Jonathan Kirsch | The embedded text of the Book of the Apocalypse is far more interesting than the trite commentary. |
| Parzival | Wolfram Von Eschenbach | A surprisingly readable Medieval Arthurian romance. |
| All the Shah's Men | Stephen Kinzer | The prototypical CIA "intervention", and a truly unfortunate precedent. |
| Hajji Baba of Ispahan | J.J.Morier | An hilarious amoral picaresque. |
| The River of Doubt | Candice Millard | She never met a cliche she didn't like. |
| The Bachelor of Arts | R.K. Narayan | A lovely bit of writing, doubly impressive since in the author's second language. |
| Dead Souls | Nikolai Gogol | Funny, Russian, unique. |
| The Birth of Tragedy | Friedrich Nietzsche | Utterly improbable, but brilliant. |
| Satanic Verses | Salman Rushdie | The consequences of being too famous to submit to an editor. |
| The Cheese and the Worms | Carlo Ginzburg | When belonging to a book group had consequences. |
| Shutter Island | Dennis Lehane | Proof that mysteries don't have to have literary merit. Or even coherent plots. |
| West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story | Tamim Ansary | A surprisingly uninteresting man from a very interesting background. |
| Coast of Utopia | Tom Stoppard | Read Isaiah Berlin's "Russian Thinkers" instead. |
| Bury me standing : the Gypsies and their journey | Isabel Fonseca | Fascinating look into a genuinely alien culture, and a test case for moral relativism. |
| Angle of Repose | Wallace Stegner | Why do these dual historical/contemporary narratives seem to do better at representing the past? |
| The Wisdom of Crowds | James Surowiecki | Note recent counter evidence. |
| John Adams | David McCullough | Workmanlike bio. |
| King Hereafter | Dorothy Dunnett | Her usual astonishing erudition, and a plausible representation of the mind of a political genius. |
| Map of Another Town | M.F.K. Fisher | Neurasthenic sensibility, meticulous prose. |
| The New Life | Orhan Pamuk | An endless, self indulgent, post-modern binge. |
| Rabbit, Run | Jhn Updike | He really could write. |
| The Language of Clothes | Alison Lurie | Mildly amusing journalism. |
| If Beale Street Could Talk | James Baldwin | Minor work by major writer. |
| The Letters of Abelard and Heloise | Abelard and Heloise | Love letters from Abelard to himself. The pattern intellectual male egotist. |
| Disgrace | JM Coetzee | Depressive, morally incoherent, fascinating. |
| The Buried Mirror | Carlos Fuentes | The book of the TV show meets the ramblings of the autodidact. |
| American Lion : Andrew Jackson in the White House | Jon Meacham | Earnest, but preoccuipied with tabloid scandal. |
| Billy Budd | Herman Melville | Motiveless evil, and a temptation to reductionism. |
| The White Tiger : a novel | Aravind Adiga | Black humor, and a consistent narrative voice. |
| The Canon | Natalie Angier | NY Times science journalist makes many bad puns. |
| The Wizard of Oz | L. Frank Baum | |