Looking for a Book or a Booklist?

Posted by Melissa Howard Jun 18, 2007

I would guess that everyone has been confronted by a booklist at least one time in their life. I had a teacher who liked to encourage me in my intellectual growth by giving me booklists to use during the summer. I always had this idea that I wanted to read all the books on the list but never did.

Lists are funny things; they almost seem to hold a virtue of their own. They certainly develop a sense of virtue in the holder of the list. Making a list fills one with a sense of fulfillment. Write a list of all the books you’ve read, categorize it by genre, or group it according to year read. However, you handle the list; you are likely to feel superior to the person whose list is shorter than yours is or more mundane than yours. If someone hands you a list, there is always the compulsion to go through the list and mark-off everything you’ve done. It gives one the heady feeling of having done something.

Some people labor under the idea that lists motivate people or are at the very least, helpful. My teacher clearly thought a list of books suitable to my age was helpful and it did motivate me even if it did not give me the discipline it took to carry through.

Perhaps the best use for a list is simply to give one an idea of what might interest them. Browse through a list of anything and something is likely to stand out. So, with the idea that someone might have a hard time deciding what to read next, I’ve looked for lists of great American fiction. These three are the best that I found although none of them are dedicated solely to American fiction.

The Hungry Mind Review's 100 Best 20th-Century American Books of Fiction and Nonfiction is a compilation list put together by five writers: Mary Moore Easter, Heid E. Erdrich, Bill Holm, David Mura, and George Rabasa. The list was edited and directed by Bart Schneider, editor of the Hungry Mind Review, and J. Otis Powell of The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. As the title suggests, this list is not restricted to fiction but is a list of American Books.

The Book-of-the-Month club’s list The Well-stocked Bookcase this is an older list that was created in 1986 by the Book-of-the-Month club’s editorial panel. It contains only books published between 1926-1986, which gave them a fifty-year span for their recommendations. The list contains only American authors and was further limited by the restrictions that no members of the editorial board be submitted and the limitation to one book per author (with the exception of Hemingway and Faulkner).

Time published a list of All-Time 100 Novels. This list is comprised of novels that were reviewed by Time at the date of their publication. The list was put together by Time critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lecayo. This list is my favorite because it links to critical reviews made by Time at the time of their publication. The reviews are most certainly fun to read as they not only give a clue to the initial reception of the book but also give a peek into the cultural climate at that time.