Friday, August 26, 2011

Check out the '100 Must Read Books: The Man's Essential Library' list

Back on June 4, I posted a cool recommended reading list compiled by Esquire magazine called “75 Books Every Man Should Read,” which reminded me of a similar list published by Playboy magazine several years ago called “The Top 20 Books Every Man Must Read.”

Earlier this week on the Web site, The Art of Manliness, I ran across another reading list in the same vein called “100 Must Read Books: The Man’s Essential Library.”

Written by Jason Lankow, Ross Crooks, Joshua Ritchie and Brett McKay, this list includes “the top 100 books that have shaped the lives of individual men while also helping define broader cultural ideas of what it means to be a man. Whether it be a book on adventure, war, or manners, there is so much to learn about life’s great questions from these gems.”

Here are the books that made the list:

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
3. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
4. 1984 by George Orwell
5. The Republic by Plato
6. Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
8. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
9. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
10. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

11. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
12. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
13. How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie
14. Call of the Wild by Jack London
15. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
16. Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss
17. Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
18. The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer
19. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
20. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

21. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
22. The Master and Margarita by by Mikhail Bulgakov
23. Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut
24. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
25. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
26. Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
27. White Noise by Don Delillo
28. Ulysses by James Joyce
29. The Young Man’s Guide by William Alcott
30. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

31. Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond by Denis Johnson
32. Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
33. Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
34. The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry by Christine De Pizan
35. The Art of Warfare by Sun Tzu
36. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
37. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
38. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
39. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
40. The Rough Riders by Theodore Roosevelt

41. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
42. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
43. The Thin Red Line by James Jones
44. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
45. The Politics by Aristotle
46. First Edition of the The Boy Scout Handbook
47. Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
48. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
49. The Crisis by Winston Churchill
50. The Naked and The Dead by Norman Mailer

51. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
52. Animal Farm by George Orwell
53. Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
54. Beyond Good and Evil by Freidrich Nietzsche
55. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
56. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
57. Essential Manners for Men by Peter Post
58. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly
59. Hamlet by Shakespeare
60. The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn

61. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
62. A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
63. The Stranger by Albert Camus
64. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe
65. The Pearl by John Steinbeck
66. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
67. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
68. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
69. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
70. The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

71. Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard
72. Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
73. Paradise Lost by John Milton
74. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
75. American Boys’ Handy Book
76. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
77. King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard
78. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
79. A River Runs Through It by Norman F. Maclean
80. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

81. The Autobiography of Malcolm X
82. Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris
83. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
84. All Quiet on The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarq
85. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
86. Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans by Plutarch
87. A Strenuous Life by Theodore Roosevelt
88. The Bible
89. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
90. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

91. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
92. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
93. The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden
94. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
95. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
96. The Histories by Herodotus
97. From Here to Eternity by James Jones
98. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner
99. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
100. Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you’d like to read the entire article, which features notes about each book on the list, visit http://artofmanliness.com/2008/05/14/100-must-read-books-the-essential-mans-library/.

If you’d like to read Esquire’s “75 Books Every Man Should Read” list, visit http://leepeacock2010.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-many-of-esquires-75-books-every-man.html.

If you’d like to check out Playboy’s “The Top 20 Books Every Man Must Read” list, visit http://leepeacock2010.blogspot.com/2010/05/top-20-books-every-man-must-read.html.

In the end, how many of the 100 books recommended by The Art of Manliness have you had a chance to read? Which did you like or dislike? Which would you recommend and why? Let us know in the comments section below.

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