Now that you have so graciously shared your recs with me, it’s my turn to return the literary love. Below are just some of the books that I love, and can read over and over again
The Hours by Michael Cunningham: A flawless weaving of the lives of three women, all tied to the novel Mrs. Dalloway: the incomparable Mrs. Woolf herself, a 1950s housewife in suburban America, and a 1990s lesbian writer in New York City. Gorgeous writing all around.
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. A collection of related short stories about the Vietnam War. I first read it for a summer report in high school – I bawled my eyes out because all the stories were so poignant and true – until the first day of class when the teacher said, you guys know it’s a work of fiction, right? It’s written on the inside jacket. I felt stupid. But that doesn’t change the fact that Tim O’Brien is a genius.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. I don’t know if there is a seminal work on grief, but the seminal work for me would be this book by Ms. Didion. Her husband of 30+ years dies suddenly at the dinner table. The first two sentences: Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. The book is an attempt to figure out the how and when and where of the instant, and what lies beyond it.
The Naked Economist by Charles Wheelan. Even if you hate economics, I’d give this a strong recommendation. Dr. Wheelan covers the subject with witty & interesting anecdotes and easy-to-understand examples – not quite as quirky as Freakonomics but just as good. No dismal science here! Har har har.
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The Things They Carried is half true, half fiction. the line between the “truth” and “fiction” is impossible to distinguish, which is used to get across the point the truth is a matter of perception, one of the main themes in the novel.
I just read the book in my class…lol
and now i’m reading Naked Economics
I didn’t get a chance to comment on your original post asking for recommendations, but thanks for your list. Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) and Steven E. Landsburg (The Armchair Economist) might be up your alley. For fiction…A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is my favorite book of all time.
Well, that’s sort of the thing about The Things They Carried, isn’t it? That all the stories are told in the style of a war memoir, and then in the last story the author confesses? The theme with which I’ve always associated the book is, as Soi says above, the fuzzy line between truth and fiction–the idea that we can use stories that aren’t factually true to explain a true thing, to convey an emotional truth.
It’s funny you read that book by Tim O’Brien. I’ve had a copy of it for years but never got around to even reading the first page!
I bought the Naked Economist book last summer on a whim at Borders in Nashville and loved how practical and funny it was especially the Tom Cruise example. Brilliance.
Steven Landsburg also wrote the greatest microeconomics textbook I’ve ever read: Price Theory and Applications. Worth reading cover-to-cover. I’m not kidding.
Agree about Didion’s book. Picked it up and couldn’t stop myself from reading it cover to cover.
I read the Things They Carried too. It was back in high school, so I should probably re-read it. Regardless of fiction or not, there are many tales like that from the Vietnam War.