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Andrew Solomon

Top Ten Books

A National Book Award winner and Pulitzer finalist, Solomon writes about psychology, culture, and politics, and is best known for his opus, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. He has said, “Whenever I return to reading, I feel a great relief in it, and am awakened to other possibilities of language and thoughts.” Below are Andrew Solomon’s favorite books, available to purchase as a set or individually. See the full list...

10

Middlemarch

George Eliot

This book has the virtue of being the most perfect novel ever written. It manages to blend the miniature world of an uninteresting town with a profound reckoning with the human heart in all its vagaries. Here we find courage, pettiness, self-deception, love, profundity, triviality, sadness, joy, munificence, greed, theatricality, restraint, wit, pomposity, despair, hope. It’s seductively readable, free of pretension, and written with a rare clear-eyed kindness.

9

The Complete Poems

Elizabeth Bishop

A life’s work may occupy shelf upon shelf, or all the genius may be distilled down to a concentrate of wisdom, and I would love to think that I’ve ever thought anything as clearly as Bishop has thought each of her poems. My favorite lines forever: It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

8

Random Family

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

There has been no finer nonfiction written in the last century than this penetrating examination not only of a particular family and its travails (written with the complex plot of a Tolstoy novel), but also of the ways in which our society is broken, of a system that congratulates itself as democracy and yet is intractably inequitable. This book has no agenda and makes no argument; it simply reveals the truth of the country in which we live, and allows us to formulate our own call to action.
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Glenn Ligon
$185.80
Lightning: A Novel

Jean Echenoz
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Michael Pollan
$174.80
The Odyssey

Homer
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Carrie Brownstein
$147.86
Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion
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James Dyson
$283.84
The Story of Design

Charlotte and Peter Fiell
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Cortney Burns and Nick Balla
From: $148.92
Dining with the Maharajas: A Thousand Years of Culinary Tradition

Neha Prasad
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
$180.53
The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin
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Miranda July
$300.80
Birds of America

Lorrie Moore
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Raymond Pettibon
$190.19
Dark Night of the Soul

by Saint John of the Cross
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Neil Gaiman
$161.92
The Man Who Was Thursday

G. K. Chesterton