Well, everyone else is doing it, so why not me?
1. The Once and Future King, T.H. White
I love the Arthur myth; it is one of my favorites, in part because it has been around so long and told so many different ways, and in a way, there are so many different stories contained within it. This is, however, my clear favorite. It draws heavily on Shakespeare's tragedies, and the tale White tells of Sir Gawaine is deserving of one.
- The Three Musketeers Saga, Alexandre Dumas
This generally is sold as five books, but to me it is best to consider it a single story. It is an epic, with enough adventure to satisfy a weekly audience (the books were originally serialized in newspapers), enough history to give you a crash course in French and British history, and the most impressive telling, that I've seen, of evolving friendship over time. Every aspiring television writer should read the series.
- Beneath the Underdog, Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus' rambling, self-serving and self-deprecating at once, largely falsified autobiography was what made jazz alive for me. Fractured and hallucinatory, it represents the highest achievement in stream of consciousness writing that I've encountered. Worth reading for his conversations at Bellvue with Bobby Fischer (they probably never met there) alone.
- Angels in America, Tony Kushner
I doubt any single piece of writing means more to me personally.
- Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett
Probably not Hammett's best work, but my favorite. The inspiration for the movies "Last Man Standing" and "A Fistfull of Dollars" and "Yojimbo", the original "Man with no name" story is the outgrowth of Hammett's Continental Op stories from "Black Mask" magazine, and the basis for such legendary characters as Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer. This first appearance in novella form of the ultimate archetype of the film noir hero is a blood-soaked masterpiece.
- A Hell of a Woman, Jim Thompson
This is not nearly the most famous of Thompson's works (The Getaway, The Grifters) that have become hits after his death. But this masterpiece of his oeuvre is my favorite, featuring his trademark unreliable narrator and surrealist elements that elevated him above the pulp genre. Like the written equivalent of a David Lynch film.
- If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester Himes
This is the book that Invisible Man wishes it was. Himes met Langston Hughes while on parole after having began writing short stories while serving seven and a half years in the Ohio Penitentiary for armed robbery. Hughes helped Himes make contacts in publishing, and a few years later Himes moved to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. He worked for a short time, until Jack Warner learned he was working there and fired him, saying "I don't want no goddamned n##gers on this lot!" In that period, Himes wrote this book, the story of a black migrant to Los Angeles working for a naval shipyard, spanning four days of his life as his promotion to crew leader begins to lead to the unraveling of his life. Himes, who lacked critical success, wrote only one other "serious" novel, the rest of his work being genre pulp and even softcore pornography. But this book alone ensures his literary legacy.
- American Tabloid, James Ellroy
While Hammett created and Thompson enriched the "hard-boiled" crime fiction genre, Ellroy pushed it to its absolute limit. In American Tabloid, he created his masterpiece, interweaving historical figures and fictional characters seamlessly to paint a picture of the sordid figures in the criminal world and the law enforcement/intelligence world and the gray area in between that climaxes in the Kennedy assassination. In it he creates one of the most powerful and capable characters in American fiction, Pete Bondurant. And breaks him. Oh, how he breaks him.
- Full House, Stephen Jay Gould
And now for something completely different. Gould's book, about as disparate of subjects as the diversity of insects and why there are no more .400 hitters in baseball, opened up so many new worlds for me. Anyone you know who doesn't care about biological diversity or the extinction of species should read this book right away.
- In Retrospect, Robert McNamara
As far as I know, no other book like this exists. History is filled with military leaders who wrote books about their ideas, from Sun-Tzu to Clausewitz. None of them ever wrote a book about how they lost the war they fought with those ideas. Reading this book helped teach me humility. There truly were a lot of the "best and brightest" in the rooms where President Kennedy and President Johnson led our nation into the agony and futility of the Vietnam War. And they tried, very hard, to see the truth about what they were doing. And they were as wrong as can be. It isn't only fools and charlatans who can lead our country to disaster. And more than that, it taught me the importance of sometimes just giving up. They knew they were losing the war, for a long time. But the correct option, to just stop trying to make it better, was never really considered. You have to know when to walk away.