Author Photo And Bio
All comments by Tom
1. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-72). Modern novelistic consciousness, I think, begins with this book.
2. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922). Despite its longueurs - and boy does it have some - nobody has ever written more definitively about place and more seductively about consciousness.
3. Stonerby John Williams (1965). The best "quiet" book I've ever read, and the most heartbreaking.
4. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (1985). The best example of how monstrous violence can be made beautiful.
5. London Fields by Martin Amis (1990). The apocalypse as stand-up comedy as murder mystery.
6. Of a Fire on the Moon by Norman Mailer (1971). His most neglected great book.
7. The Widow's Children by Paula Fox (1976). The most intense novel I've ever read--and the best ending.
8. Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski (1982). The work that showed me how nonfiction can be as artful and beautiful as fiction.
9. Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone (1973). Has the single greatest death scene I've ever read, and I read it, probably, every couple of weeks to remind me what prose can do.
10. Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade by Robert Sabbag (1998). An impossibly stylish and gripping real-life thriller about life in the cocaine trade.
