From time to time, I see these lists of 100 books that everyone should read. These aren’t necessarily ones that everyone should read, but as a long-time reader with eclectic taste and a particular fondness for counterculture and other non mainstreams works, this list would constitute my 100, with one extra for good measure:
- The four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the Holy Bible
- The Acts of the Apostles in the Holy Bible
- The Book of Ecclesiastes in the King James version of the Holy Bible
- the most expansive major history of the state where you live
- slave narratives from Library of Congress’s American Memory
- Cultural Democracy by James Bau Graves
- A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
- “Culture and Anarchy” by Matthew Arnold (essay)
- Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty
- For the Time Being by Annie Dillard
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
- The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
- Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
- The Elements of Style by Will Strunk and EB White
- On Writing Well by William Zinsser
- Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Light in August by William Faulkner
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Mind of the South by WJ Cash
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
- “Sucker” by Carson McCullers (short story)
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau
- Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes (essay)
- One Big Self: An Investigation by CD Wright
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
- The Tempest by William Shakespeare
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
- A History of the African American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond by Percival Everett and James Kincaid
- The Air-Conditioned Nightmare by Henry Miller
- Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston
- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
- The Politics of Psychopharmacology by Timothy Leary
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac
- Book of the Unknown by Jonathon Keats
- The Stranger by Albert Camus
- No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre (one-act play)
- Right You Are, If You Think You Are by Luigi Pirandello
- A Walk with Love and Death by Hans Koning
- Train Whistle Guitar by Albert Murray
- The Long Haul by Myles Horton
- “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold (poem)
- “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg (poem)
- Black Boy by Richard Wright
- Forty Acres and a Goat by Will D. Campbell
- Blindness by Jose Saramago
- “Earthquake in Chile” by Heinrich von Kleist (short story)
- The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon
- Miguel Street by VS Naipaul
- For Colored Girls by Ntozake Shange
- Revolt of the Cockroach People by Oscar Zeta Acosta
- Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
- The Alchemist by Paolo Coehlo
- The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds by Paul Zindel
- The Buddha of Suburbia by Haneif Kureishi
- Blue Highways by William Least-Heat Moon
- John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead
- To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him by Tomás Rivera
- Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
- Working by Studs Terkel (interviews)
- Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
- Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick (poem)
- Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
- “Poem for the Young White Man who asked me how I, an intelligent well-read person, could believe in the War Between Races” by Lorna Dee Cervantes (poem)
- Dispatches by Michael Herr
- Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
- “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” by Audre Lorde (essay)
- “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr.
- The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
- Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson
- Fences by August Wilson
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
- A Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill
- A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
- Suddenly, Last Summer by Tennessee Williams
- The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry edited by Stephen Mitchell
- Killers of the Dream by Lillian Smith
- The Chosen by Chaim Potok
- Living Poor by Moritz Thomsen
- Road Scholar by Andrei Codrescu
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
- The Rainbow by DH Lawrence
- Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf, poems by Ryokan
- “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay (poem)
- The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry (essays)
- Sundog by Jim Harrison
- The Lives of a Poem by Richard Hague
- “Where are you going? Where have you been?” by Joyce Carol Oates (short story)