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I recently stumbled upon BookTube, specifically a video which mentioned the idea of a “100 Book Bookshelf” from Will Schwalbe’s Books for Life. Like the creator of the video, I wasn’t able to come up with a list of 100 books, though unlike him I’m not sad about that. I’ve come up with “25,” in quotes because there are some bonuses and “ties.” I really enjoyed putting this together and decided to post it here, partially so I can easily share with friends and ask them to produce lists too. We all have a bit more time to read these days…
I’ve sorted the list into sections based on their genre, and roughly ordered them by when I read them. I had a lot to say about some but not all of the books, which is at best loosely correlated with how strongly I would recommend them? But given that they’re on this list, I would still definitely recommend all of them. Books made this list for a variety of reasons. Some taught me something special, or changed my view of the world in a particular way. Others just spoke to me for some reason, or caused a strong emotional reaction. A lot of the non-fiction books are on this list because they were the first to expose me to a particular novel idea. I make no claims about whether they hold up / are the best presentation of that idea. So without further ado, my 25 book bookshelf. Everything has Goodreads links. Everyone should join Goodreads.
This book has both a wonderful story and beautiful prose. Aside from the below childhood favorites, it’s also the earliest-read fiction book on this list, which is a little sad because I read it in 2016. Making this list made me realize just how little fiction I read in college and the years after. The remaining fiction books were all ready between 2018 and 2020.
As people may know, I love to travel, and this is a book about travel that I mostly read at an airport. (Though sadly, the trip wasn’t to somewhere epic but rather Vermont for my sister’s HS graduation). It’s written in a beautiful melancholy tone, which tends to work for me. (Other authors I think write in this style are Elizabeth Strout and Julian Barnes). For further description, I’ll shamelessly quote the Man Booker Prize, who shortlisted the book in 2010: “A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, In a Strange Room is the hauntingly beautiful evocation of one man’s search for love and for a place to call home.”
This book has my favorite story/plot of all the books on this list. It’s strongly connected in my head with Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, and a quick Google search just now shows that I’m not the first person to have made the connection. In fact, the author himself realized the parallels. I also found lots of reviews / publisher copy describing the book as War and Peace meets Downton Abbey meets The Grand Budapest Hotel…make of that what you will.
I first heard about author Min Jin Lee for her book Pachinko, which I think become a phenomenon of sorts. I requested both of her books from the library, and this one happened to arrive first. I’m not sure how much that has to do with my belief that this is the better book (nothing against Pachinko, I also rated that five stars). Perhaps it’s because I could identify more easily with the main character, who is the child of immigrants living in New York City? Casey and I are obviously different in many ways, but I saw some of myself in her, and reading this book caused me to reflect on and confront parts of my self-image in a way that no other book has.
This is the debut novel of Ocean Vuong. He first received acclaim for his poetry, and the novel certainly reads that way. It has the most creative and beautiful prose of all the books I’ve read, resulting in me highlighting an absurd percentage of the book when reading it. I transcribed some of my favorite quotes, two of which are below (no spoilers, I think):
In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.
It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much writer as a word pressed down beside you.
I’ve recently enjoyed a number of sci-fi short story collections, and this one was my favorite of the bunch. The title story in particular is stunning.
This is the most recently read book from this whole list, as I finished it during my first weekend of aggressive social distancing. The book is just a lot. First of all, it’s over 700 pages, which makes it one of the longest books I’ve ever read. It’s in fact good for second longest amongst “serious fiction” books. But more importantly, it’s crushingly crushingly sad. I’ve never had a book emotionally wreck me like this one. I had to put it down multiple times just because of how painful it was to read. But I was so invested in the characters and the writing that I picked it up again every time. And yes, I cried, a lot. Worth noting that the book has had a lot of strong/mixed reactions that I won’t try to summarize here (watch this for a take with spoilers I agree with). Finally, this book has basically every trigger warning ever. You have been warned.
I’m going to describe these together because I read them both when I was pretty young (13ish), and in hindsight I like them for the same reason. They both describe a number of cases where the world behaves in an interesting and unintuitive way, which at the time was revelatory. Would I find the books groundbreaking if I read them now? Probably not. Does Malcolm Gladwell deserve the criticism he receives for oversimplification? Probably. But I still really treasure these books.
A history textbook? Yes, a history textbook. I credit this book and the associated class in high school for solidifying my love of history. I liked it so much that I bought my own personal copy. It’s written in a surprisingly engaging and colloquial style, with many sections having delightful names that I stlil remember to this day, like “Rockefeller Grows the American Beauty Rose.”
An honorable mention goes to The Pilgrimage of Western Man, which I think is sadly out of print. We read many chapters from this in AP Euro, with “The Two Christendoms” (about the Thirty Years War) being a particular favorite. And yes, I also own a personal copy of this.
History is often taught to children as the story of people, of great individual leaders and societies that won or lost. This book really upended that view of the world for me. It’s probably the book that altered my view of history and society the most. It advances a structuralist narrative for the “fates of human societies,” claiming that environmental factors like geography and climate have really been responsible for the arc of human history. I know Jared Diamond and this book are somewhat controversial in academic circles, and I suspect it might not “hold up” for me upon re-reading, but I’ll always treasure it because of how influential it was to high-school me. You might also recall that another one of his books, Collapse, partially inspired my trip to Easter Island.
Two tremendously sad history books about the lowest that humanity at large can go.
This is a book about how America, specifically white America, is coming apart at the seams of class. It discusses how a certain set of people are increasingly good at going to the same schools, working in the same lucrative industries, and living in the same areas. And of course, they marry each other and have privileged children, intensifying the cycle. It does a great job of comprehensively presenting the trends that have led to the differences between the proverbial “Fishtown” and Belmont.” For a longer summary, please see this piece by David Brooks. I read it in 2015, and it’s been really influential in shaping my understanding of modern day American society, and specifically the rise of a figure like Donald Trump (more on him later in this list). If you’re reading this and have talked to me with any regularity since 2015, there’s a decent chance I made you take this quiz that’s pulled from the book.
I feel obligated to mention that Murray is a rather controversial figure, and I don’t intend to endorse him more broadly than recommending this individual work. The book itself is careful to sidestep partisanship as much as possible. I think it pulls themes from both the Left and the Right, and it purposely avoids prescriptive solutions for the problems described, at least until a small bit at the end. Amusingly, I had lunch with Niall Ferguson my senior spring because I was taking a class of his, and he was pleasantly surprised that someone from our liberal elitist hotbed would recommend a book by Charles Murray. This was of course his last semester at Harvard before decamping to the conservative Hoover Institute.
This book does a tremendous job of describing the myriad of reasons, small and large, that make life in poverty difficult in America. Through the lens of eviction, it really drove home for me how precarious life is for many. The book is probably going to be unfortunately topical for a while now (the events described are from the last recession).
Both before and after the 2016 election, a lot of attention was devoted to “Trump’s America,” the white working class Americans supposedly key to his election. A quick Google search will turn up hundreds of articles in major publications profiling these people, reacting to other profiles, and of course meta-discussing this general media obsession. Amongst all of this media, this book was the most successful for me in “explaining” this part of our country. I think it does a great job of weaving a narrative that animates this part of the country, and being sympathetic while also pointing out contradictions. There’s a particularly evocative metaphor about a brown pelican cutting in line that has stayed with me. That the book succeeds on these fronts is perhaps unsurprising given that it was written by an esteemed sociologist who took the time to seriously research and understand these people. It’s lucky for her that the end of this project coincided with the 2016 election…or at least for her sales numbers? This is the book that I think many poeple wanted when they read Hillbilly Elegy, at least it was for me. And nothing against that book, it’s just much more of a personal memoir than an attempt at a explanatory narrative.
I’ve unfortunately forgotten many of the details of this book and should probably read it again. But some of its larger points about the interactions between morality and intuition have really stuck with me.
I don’t necessarily endorse the positions taken by this book, but I found it a very interesting read. Unsurprisingly, it talks about the consequences of mainstream liberal policies and their negative effects on black America. For example, it posits that minimum wage laws disproportionately disadvantage poor black Americans because they’re the ones who most need the eliminated “stepping-stone” jobs. The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is another interesting book in a similar vein.
A surprising thrilling narrative of the 2008 Financial Crisis that does a good job of explaining the complexities of the situation in an easily digestible way.
This is my go-to recommendation for understanding China’s history in the 20th century. It’s like a non-fiction Pachinko, following the three generations of Chinese women that end with the author herself.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor has unsurprisingly received a lot of attention for her identity as the first latina on the Supreme Court as well as her opinions on issues such as affirmative action. (For example, see her dissent in Schuette v. BAMN and associated coverage). This book gives the reader some insight into her background, and how it’s shaped her jurisprudence. And in my opinion, her life story overall is a powerful argument in favor of affirmative action.
There have already been a lot of memoirs about Obama’s two terms in office, and I suspect more are coming. I’ve only read a couple, but this one really spoke to me. It captures all the good things I want to believe about government and what it can do. Think of it as a real-life West Wing.
Describing this book as “self-help” is a little weird. But I’ve placed it here because reading it helped me realize some things about myself and introvertedness, which have overall made me a better and happier person.
I read both of these during senior spring, while I was trying to come to terms with being “an adult” and all that fun stuff. Both of these books really helped shaped my thinking during that period. I should probably give the second one another read, now that I’m *gasp* more than halfway through my 20s.
It didn’t seem right to include these above in the fiction section, so I’m putting them here in their own. I’m not sure this section really serves a purpose, other than indulging my own nostalgia. I also realized how many children’s series I aged out of before they could finish being published, which is quite unfortunate.
Roald Dahl was my favorite author for a couple of years in elementary school, and this is the book I recall loving the most. If you haven’t read his adult fiction, I would heartily recommend. Much of it is sick and twisted in the way that his children’s books obviously are in hindsight.
Who would’ve thought that a bunch of rodents at an abbey would be so exciting? Or that I would happily read 17 books with basically the same plot before I got bored of them? (I read them in publication order, and stopped at Rakkety Tam).
I resisted reading Harry Potter for a while, and then finally binged the first four books in five days in third grade. I think this and the fifth book are the two books I’ve read the most in my life, due to having them during some boring trips to China.
Orson Scott Card is probably the author whose books I’ve read the most of, between the Ender series, Alvin Maker, and miscellaneous others. I reread Ender’s Game one night in college and was surprised at how much it held up, though it’s hard separate the nostalgia from that opinion.