This has been my answer to the question of my favorite novel since I first read it in 1992 in a college class called “Comedy and the Novel,” and held up extremely well when I re-read it in 2011, a very, very rare instance where I chose to read a novel a second time.
“The Master and Margarita” | Mikhail Bulgakov I hope you find something here to interest you and expand your reading horizons. I’ve broken down my top five recommendations in five different categories here to try to appeal to your diverse interests, whether you prefer fiction or nonfiction, genre fiction or classic literature, novels or short stories. (I did read James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” but if I’m being honest with myself, most of the puns and wordplay in there would have gone right by me had I not used two different companion books to help me understand what on earth was happening.) I read very little about sports, since reading is a leisure activity that takes me away from my day job and the mundanity of quotidian life, but reading about anything at all exposes you to all of the ways in which you can use language to tell stories, regardless of topic. Wodehouse and Jasper Fforde and Shakespeare. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about flappers and philosophers, but I learned how to describe scenes and settings from reading him and Greene and William Faulkner, how to play with words from P.G. I do not write about baseball the way that F. I don’t care what you read - OK, I care a little bit - but you must read, copiously and in variety, to develop your own writing voice. When I speak to students who want to become writers, individually or in groups, my first piece of advice is that you cannot be a great writer unless you are a great reader. Wodehouse or Graham Greene novel before, but it’s also a striver’s habit, where simply adding to the list or marking off a book on another ranking is its own reward.
It’s quite useful when I’m prowling the shelves at Strand or Changing Hands and wondering if I’ve read that particular P.G. Through it all, I’ve maintained a list, in spreadsheet form, of every book I’ve read. I read all of the titles on TIME’s 2005 list of the best English-language novels since the magazine began publishing in 1923, and everything in the Bloomsbury Publishing’s little guide to the 100 greatest “classic” novels ever written prior to 1950. I’ve read every winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and every winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel except two (by the same author, whose work I have not enjoyed). I’ve now read well over a thousand books, the vast majority of them novels, and usually hit a hundred new books read each year (dead tree editions, e-books and audio combined).
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