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Essential Books for Men

Here are two lists I've used in the past to share great books for men to read.

Essential Books for Men
Photo by Sara / Unsplash

Literary Lists Comparison

Esquire's Top 75 Books for Men (2008) vs. Middle School Boys' Recommendations (2005-2015)

Esquire's Top 75 Books for Men (2008)

1. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
2. Collected Stories of John Cheever
3. Deliverance by James Dickey
4. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
5. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
6. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
8. The Good War by Studs Terkel
9. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
10. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor
11. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
12. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
13. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
14. Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
15. A Sense of Where You Are by John McPhee
16. Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson
17. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
18. Dubliners by James Joyce
19. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
20. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
21. Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
22. Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
23. Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison
24. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
25. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
26. The Professional by W.C. Heinz
27. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
28. Dispatches by Michael Herr
29. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
30. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
31. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
32. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
33. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
34. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
35. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
36. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
37. A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley
38. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
39. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
40. Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian
41. Plainsong by Kent Haruf
42. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
43. Affliction by Russell Banks
44. This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff
45. Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
46. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
47. Women by Charles Bukowski
48. Going Native by Stephen Wright
49. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
50. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John LeCarré
51. The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald
52. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders
53. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
54. The Shining by Stephen King
55. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
56. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
57. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
58. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
59. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
60. The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
61. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
62. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley
63. What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer
64. The Continental Op by Dashiell Hammett
65. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
66. So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
67. Native Son by Richard Wright
68. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
69. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
70. The Great Bridge by David McCullough
71. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
72. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
73. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
74. Underworld by Don DeLillo
75. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Middle School Boys' Recommendations (2005-2015)

1984 by George Orwell
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
A River Runs Through It by Norman F. Maclean
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Call of the Wild by Jack London
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
Iliad and Odyssey by Homer
Into the Wild by John Krakauer
Into Thin Air by John Krakauer
King Solomon's Mine by H. Rider Haggard
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Art of Warfare by Sun Tzu
The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Pearl by John Steinbeck
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Prince by Machiavelli
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Rough Riders by Theodore Roosevelt
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Books Appearing on Both Lists (9 total)

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain