Friday, May 27, 2011

How Many Have You Read?

Esquire magazine’s “unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of [75 of] the greatest works of literature ever published” includes half a dozen obvious crime and thriller titles:

 Deliverance, by James Dickey
 The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
 Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell
 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carré
 American Tabloid, by James Ellroy
 The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett

You can see the whole list in a slideshow here. I’m pleased to say that I have read about half of the works chosen. I guess I had better get cracking on the other half.

(Hat tip to Art Taylor via Facebook.)

8 comments:

Art Taylor said...

Thanks for the hat tip! An interesting list, yep -- and apparently provocative, given the response I got on FB! (Good to see the crime novels represented there, as you said, but I was surprised no Chandler in the bunch!)

Art Taylor said...

OH! And I should have tipped the hat in turn to Steve Weddle, who first linked to this piece on FB and prompted me to read in the first place!

Cullen Gallagher said...

Does it count that I've been meaning to read a lot of these? A new one to add to my TBR pile is Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers.

Anonymous said...

"Master and Commander" is one of the worst of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books. Obviously, someone at Esquire said, "hey, what about the O'Brian books - there's a cult around them. It would be cool to have one of those books on the list." So that someone picked one without knowing anything about them.

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MP said...

I've read 31, including all the ones you consider to be thrillers. You could easily add Stone's "Dog Soldiers" to the thriller list. I suspect "Master and Commander" was the O'Brian title chosen because it's the first of the series

Unknown said...

I had 45 of them but I added a few to my reading list. Some suprises here.

Naomi Johnson said...

Good looking list but it lost credibility when I saw MASTER & COMMANDER made the grade. There's a book that made me want to pick up a gun and shoot both O'Brian and myself.