markk

When I opened up Booklikes after a few days away (thanks to work and my Arrowverse binge) I saw that my feed was filled with readers posting their list of their 25 most essential books. So here are mine, along with a short explanation as to why I rate them as highly as I do.

1. War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. When I was a kid the only thing I wanted to read was science fiction. Wells's classic was one of my favorites, in no small part to the audiobook version read by Leonard Nimoy that my parents gave me; to this day, I can't read the "ulla ulla" sound the Martians make in it and not hear it in my mind in his gravelly tones.

2. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. I first read this in middle school, and every time I return to it I find new things to appreciate about it. It can be read on so many different levels, and unfortunately we always find new ways of demonstrating the truths he talks about in it.

3. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was assigned a lot of the "great works" of American literature when I was in school, all of which I enjoyed to one degree or another. But this is the one that I appreciated the most at the time for its greatness, and one that I still enjoy rereading.

4. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. I'm convinced there is a great book to be written about the emergence of PKD as the dominant literary figure he is today. In his own lifetime, though, this was the book for which he won the most acclaim and it's one I always enjoy reading as an ur-text of alternate history.

5. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict form 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy. At the risk of dating myself, I'm old enough to remember the hype this book received when it first came out. And though a lot of it went over my head when I read it, I still took a lot from it that I still find insightful in understanding our world today.

6. The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro. I started reading Caro's volumes in college, when I was in my "learning more about the big names in contemporary American history" phase. While I've read a lot about LBJ since then, it has only deepened my appreciation for the scale of Caro's achievement with these volumes. I'm convinced that, like Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, they will become the enduring nonfiction work of our time in that they will be debated, criticized, and read long after most of the other nonfiction books on my list have been forgotten.

6. Howard's End by E. M. Forster. I read this around the time that the Merchant/Ivory adaptation came out, and while I can't remember whether I did so before seeing the movie they both exist in my mind as a intertwined capsule of everything I love about Edwardian England.

7. A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt by Geoffrey C. Ward. I have long regarded FDR as one of the greatest American presidents, but I don't think I fully appreciated him as a person until I read Ward's book while I was in college. It's the second of a two-volume work, and while the first volume, Before the Trumpet is good, it's the second one (which covers FDR's life from his marriage to Eleanor Roosevelt to his successful campaign for the governorship of New York in 1928) that is truly brilliant. Credit is due not just to Ward's skills as a writer, but the insight he brings to FDR's life as a fellow polio victim. After reading it it's impossible not to appreciate the role the infliction of the disease played in making FDR who he was as president. 

8. The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell. In the U.S., the First World War is overshadowed by its successor for many reasons. In the process, though, we Americans miss the more profound effects of the First World War upon the times in which we live. This was something I didn't appreciate until I read Fussell's book, which shows how it was that war more than any other single event which made the age in which we live, not in terms of politics but in terms of its impact upon our culture (a point that another author builds upon in one of my later selections)

9. Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. This wasn't the first work by Twain that I read, but it's the I read at the point when I first began to appreciate why he is such a great author, as opposed to just being told that by my teachers.

10. Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. If you need to understand why Americans were reluctant to get into the Second World War, this is the book to read. Trumbo captures perfectly the sense of disillusionment they felt, one informed by a character who spoke for the dead of the last war.

11. Lies my Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. This was a book that someone got me when I was in grad school as a joke. I have never been more grateful for a joke gift, as Loewen's book really gets to the heart of the problems we have today with how we teach American history in this country.

12. The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon by Stanley Kutler. Watergate is one of those things that's the historical equivalent of a literary classic, in that it's something that everybody talks about yet nobody really knows. I didn't really understand this until I read Kutler's excellent book, which is the product of the many years he spent gaining access to the Nixon tapes. Though he downplays the role of the media (Woodward and Bernstein are side players) and he published his book before Mark Felt was identified as Deep Throat, it still is the single best book for understanding what Watergate was and why it matters.

13. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins. This is a great compliment to Fussell's book, as Eksteins shows how the war catalyzed prewar modernism to make it the dominant culture of the Western world.

14. Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson. A wryly funny love note to a curious land. I can only imagine how it will read in the years to come.

15. With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene B. Sledge. Though I first learned of this book from John Keegan's list of fifty essential books on the Second World War, it wasn't until it received the post-Band of Brothers hype that I sought out a copy. I quickly grew to appreciate it for its powerful account of a sensitive man who experiences the changes brought about by war.

17. Replay by Ken Grimwood. This is a book that I approached as a science fiction novel, but it was only as I read it that I appreciated it as something much more: a broader meditation on life and what we make of it.

18. The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam. Growing up the Vietnam War was another of those omnipresent things for me, as the country was still coming to terms with its involvement with it. Because of this, I steered away from reading all of the "essentials" about it until much later, when I finally picked up a copy of Halberstam's brilliant book about the incredibly smart men who together made the incredibly dumb decision to involve the country in a war it could not win. Like Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly, it's a book that should be read to understand how disasters are created gradually.

19. Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. I've posted before about this book, and my comments then explain why it's on my list. I don't think there's a better book out there about the depth of the losses people suffered during that war and how unprepared they were for them.

20. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Part of me wonders if this book ranks so highly for me because of its association, as it was the book I read the (largely sleepless) night before my wedding. I suspect not, though, as it was the book that convinced me that Victorian fiction wasn't just the sometimes turgid paid-by-the-word prose that I was used to from reading Dickens and Joseph Conrad.

21. Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class by Jefferson Cowie. I grew up in the shadow of the 1960s, which was the defining decade in the minds of the baby boom generation. It wasn't until I read this book, however, that I fully realized that it was the 1970s that was truly the pivotal decade of the postwar world, when several socio-economic and political trends took effect that are still playing out today.

22. The War for America, 1775-1783 by Piers Mackesy. For all of the accounts there are of the American Revolution, it is truly amazing how few of them incorporate the British perspective on the conflict. This is what Mackesy does by detailing how the British state approached the war, unveiling in the process both a conflict on a far different scale than is often appreciated and how that larger scale was a key factor in why Americans won their independence.

23. Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame. As omnipresent as Abraham Lincoln is in American history and culture, it took me a long time to appreciate his greatness. Then I read Michael Burlingame's massive two-volume biography and I discovered new depths of my appreciation. Burlingame takes practically everything we know about Lincoln's life and uses it to understand why he did the things he did.

24. The Hundred Years' War by Jonathan Sumption. This is history at its finest: a sprawling four-volume account (with a fifth one to come) of a conflict between England and France that stretched from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries and explains in careful detail why developments took place the way they did.

25. The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command by Andrew Gordon. This is a book I steered away from for years because it sounded like such a narrow topic. And it is a narrow book, but one that explains why one of the most anticipated battles in modern times proved to be such a non event ⁠— not because of tactics or technology, but of the development of a cautious culture within an organization with a long reputation for aggressiveness and dash. In that respect it's the best sort of history, one that teaches us about ourselves today as well as our ancestors in the past.