Twelve Great Books for Reading Men

1. Russell Banks: Affliction
2. Charles Baxter: The Feast of Love
3. Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
4. Andre Dubus: Dancing After Hours
5. Sebastian Faulks: Birdsong
6. Charles Frazier: Cold Mountain
7. Alex Haley: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
8. James McBride: The Color of Water
9. Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses
10. Nasdijj: The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams
11. Richard Russo: The Risk Pool

I like Gary Wills's book about the Gettysburg speech of Lincoln. And Wills also wrote about James Madison recently, and he did a work about St. Augustine for the Penguin Lives Series (those little biographies could be a book group in itself)

And speaking of series volumes, there's the Modern Library Chronicles devoted to historical topics of many kinds …

No. Something else. Something fictional … Let's see, twelve, twelve …

Well, maybe a hardboiled hero, like some of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade or the Continental Op; or Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe; or Ross MacDonald's "garbage collector on the moral scene," Lew Archer; or the knightly hero of John D. MacDonald, Travis McGee; or the hardest of all the hardboiled, Jim Thompson (The Grifters, The Killer Inside Me) … But these guys sometimes sound dated, like clichιs – really cool clichιs, to be sure – but not really contemporary, these days.

And maybe it is time to consider one of their less orthodox (and slightly softboiled) contemporary heirs, whose books give us protagonists charged with solving awful crimes, but who are also given the deep and lasting problems of human relationships. These people are often truth-seeking, haunted, reflective detectives, troubled by duty and obligation. For example, consider any of the fine, addictive novels of these writers …

Or one of the equally fine, equally addictive British police procedurals by

Which brings me to the First World War, a theme of both Charles Todd and Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong. Maybe number twelve could be a WWI novel, like …

Or, if war is the thing, maybe another Civil War novel, following the superbly handled historical themes of Cold Mountain? There's …

Or maybe something classic should be number twelve, like Anton Chekhov's stories, which are so close to the very modern spirits of Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford …

Or Joseph Conrad, whose work is nicely paired with Robert Stone's Outerbridge Reach … And then there's Hardy, and Lawrence … No, too British, too nineteenth- century …

Speaking of "great," I might list the greatest American novelist, Herman Melville (White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Piazza Tales). Yes! -- unless I think it's William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom or Light in August), or Mark Twain (Life on the Mississippi), or Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), or John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle), but I wouldn't want to exclude Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men), William Styron (Sophie's Choice, The Confessions of Nat Turner), Richard Wright (Native Son), Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead), Philip Roth (Which one? Goodbye, Columbus? The Zuckerman Trilogy? The Counterlife? The Human Stain?), and surely the greatest of all Twentieth Century American novelists, Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita, of course) … Yes!

No! Too easy to place these great writers on the list, even though they are always worth revisiting. I need something uniquely satisfying. What about a western?

Hmmmmmmmm. A western? Or better to think of it as fiction of the American West? Something to follow the Cormac McCarthy trilogy? Okay, in alphabetical order, how about works by …

Another genre? Something of the future, perhaps? I might consider these …

Could it be that this list needs a woman writer? What a concept! Well then, how about these four unsurpassed masterpieces, a match for any male reader …

Or perhaps something by one of this formidable group:

Let's see, twelve, twelve …

Wait a minute! I think I have it. Yes, I do! Aha! Here it is …