I was just reading this post over at HTMLGIANT and it occurred to me that I've seen a lot of these lists for fiction, but I've seen very few nonfiction equivalents (and, to be honest, those lists all seemed fairly inadequate in terms of variety of styles/gender/ethinicity/nationality/etc).
Anyway, the last week of my nonfiction workshop is next week and I'm going to try and compile some type of master reading list over the next few days to give them all as a going away present. With that said, I'm not nearly as well read as some of y'all here and I'm wondering: what books you would include if you were making a list that adequately covers the entire spectrum of creative nonfiction?
Post your lists/ideas in the comments section or email me and I'll make a master list that I can share with anyone who's interested.
Here's an older version of a list that the nf faculty at UA made of Some Essential Nonfiction. Hardly covers it all, but what does?
ReplyDeleteEdward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
J.R. Ackerley, My Father, Myself and My Dog Tulip
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Augustine’s Confessions (I prefer the Pine-Coffin translation)
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket (collected essays)
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
John Berger, Photocopies
Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays / What Are People For?
William Blake
Bible, New Oxford translation, Revised Standard Version (RSV)
Harold Bloom, The American Religion
Charles Bowden, Any and all
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Bernard Cooper, Maps to Anywhere
Clark Blaise, I Had a Father
Boethius, Consolations of Philosophy
Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Edwin Bryant, What I Saw in California
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Evan Connell, Son of the Morning Star
John D'Agata, Halls of Fame
Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle
Guy Davenport, Geography of the Imagination
Vine Deloria, Jr., God is Red
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Cabeza de Vaca, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
Bernal Diaz, Conquest of Mexico
Joan Didion, Collected Essays
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, A Slave
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Charles Duff, A Handbook on Hanging
Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane / Myth of the Eternal Return
James Ellroy, My Dark Places
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
And part 2:
ReplyDeleteMFK Fisher, The Art of Eating, or How to Cook a Wolf
Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
The Diary of Anne Frank
James Galvin, The Meadow
John Gardner, On Moral Fiction
Atul Gawande, Complications
Geronimo: His Own Story
Albert Goldbarth, Many Circles
Ulysses Grant, Memoirs
Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa
William Hazlitt
Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation
Jeanne Watsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience
Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
William Kittredge, Hole in the Sky
Charles Lamb
Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac
Doris Lessing, Prisons We Chose to Live Inside
Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip
Primo Levi, Survival at Auschwitz / The Periodic Table
Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local
Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men
Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song
Javier Marias, Written Lives
Beryl Markham, West with the Night
Michael Martone, The Flatness and Other Landscapes
Mary McCarthy, Stones of Florence
H. L. Mencken, A Religious Orgy in Tennessee, or A Mencken Chrestomathy
Thomas Merton, Seven Storey Mountain / New Seeds of Contemplation / Asian Journals
N Scott Momaday, The Names
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
Susan Brind Morrow, The Names of Things
Gary Paul Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Maggie Nelson, Bluets
George Orwell, Selected Essays
Elaine Pagels, Gnostic Gospels
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
Lewis Powell, Voyage down the Grand Canyon . . .
Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Men Walking
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory
Arundhati Roy, War Talk
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation
David Shields, Remote and Reality Hunger
Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and A Beauty of the Spirit
Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams
Jeffrey Steingarten, The Man Who Ate Everything
Abigail Thomas, Safekeeping
Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell, or The Fragile Species
Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience
Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
Luis Urrea, The Devil’s Highway
Abraham Verghese, My Own Country
David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster, A Supposedly Fun Thing...
Eliot Weinberger, Karmic Traces
Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings and The Eye of the Story
Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder
E.B. White, Collected Essays
Walt Whitman, Specimen Days / Democratic Vistas
Joy Williams, The Florida Keys
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge
Wm. Carlos Williams, In the American Grain
E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature
Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life
Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays
Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols of India
I'd throw Frank Conroy's Stop-Time in there...
ReplyDeleteGood stuff so far, here's part of my list (I took out overlapping stuff from the UA list)
ReplyDeleteClaudia Rankine Don't Let me be Lonely
Anne Carson Nox
Joan Didion A Year of Magical Thinking
David Sedaris Me Talk Pretty One Day
Thomas Lynch The Undertaking
Tom Bissell Why Video Games Matter
Hunter S Thompson Hell's Angels
Lauren Slater Lying
James Frey A Million Little Pieces
Patricia Hampl The Florist's Daughter
Jamaica Kincaid My Brother
David Small Stitches
John Mcphee Oranges
Frank McCourt Angela's Ashes
George Orwell Some of his essays, names escaping me at the moment
F Scott Fitzgerald The Crack Up
Eula Biss Notes from No Man's Land
May Roach Stiff (I really hated this book, but it fits a genre not well represented so far so I figure it ought to be included)
The Next American Essay (although a compilation, I think reading it as a whole—getting the D'Agata commentary, etc—does inform the genre in useful ways)
As a bit of a follow-up, I'm curious as to what others see as the value of these lists. True, I'll be giving one out to my class in the next few days, but I'm still not sure whether or not this is a good idea on my part.
ReplyDeleteCan a list be too long and be more daunting than empowering? Is it wrong to submit a list when I myself haven't read all the books?
I head to the lists to find new (or new to me) books. I also enjoy tracking whoever's showing up on lists for a given year, and watching the names morph between different lists...like there's a collective at work and always changing pieces here and there.
ReplyDeleteWhen I hand out lists to classes I usually give them 15 or so book titles that are currently on my mind for a given genre...new things I like, standards I've found to be good models, etc. I try to make it as random as possible with the hope that a student will follow a lead somewhere and come up with their own wacky list someday.
As a student, I never took a list to heart or got past a couple recommendations before wandering off in another direction.
I guess I still follow that model...pick and choose, not stick to any particular list for very long.
As a student, I always resented lists. Nothing infuriated me more: not only am I am slow (but dedicated) reader, but the instructor actually has the audacity to give me a list of things to read *after* class is over. I figure that if it is truly important for me to read, it'd be taught in class. This is almost using power coercively, manipulatively. Not all students will care.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if you want an excellent list, perhaps consider the twenty-three "Ten Greatest Essays, Ever" lists on essayprize.org.
And, as far as listing goes, I think there is something here to be said for the "list essay"....
Interesting that a student would resent a list of good books.
ReplyDelete***
I know it's too late for your purposes, but I would add:
Diane Ackerman, a natural history of the senses
Ellen Meloy, anthropology of turquoise
Kristin Hersh, rat girl
and Barbara Kingsolver, animal, vegetable, miracle