50 Memorable Books from 50 Years of Books to Remember
A representative selection from over 1500 titles on annual lists of Books to Remember from 1956 to 2005.

Continental Drift: Traveling the globe on wings of imagination

African Stories (1965)
Lessing, Doris | Simon & Schuster, © 1981, 1965 | Fic L
Told with sensitivity and honesty by a native of Southern Rhodesia. (Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe)
Reserve This Title

The Cunning Man (1995)
Davies, Robertson | Viking, © 1995 | Fic D
A compassionate novel of a Toronto doctor's life. (Canada)
Reserve This Title

The Fall (1957)
Camus, Albert | Knopf, © 1984, 1956 | Fic C
A magnificent monologue which examines the conscience of modern man. (France)
Reserve This Title

A House for Mr. Biswas (1962)
Naipaul, V. S. | Vintage, © 2001, 1961 | Fic N
Colorful novel that fully captures the flavor of West Indian life. (Trinidad)
Reserve This Title

House of the Spirits (1985)
Allende, Isabel | Knopf, © 1985 | Fic A
An epic tale intertwining half a century of South American history with a family's material and spiritual crises. (Chile)
Reserve This Title

The Moor's Last Sigh (1996)
Rushdie, Salman | Pantheon, © 1996, 1995 | Fic R
Set against the backdrop of 20th-century India, a young man recounts the epic tale of his bizarre family. (India and Great Britain)
Reserve This Title

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970)
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel | Harper & Row, © 1970 | Fic G
The tragicomic history of a mythical town. (Colombia)
Reserve This Title

The Remains of the Day (1989)
Ishiguro, Kazuo | Knopf, © c1989 | Fic K
A thought-provoking novel of a proper English butler who must come to terms with his life as he reviews his personal attachments and years of service. (Great Britain)
Reserve This Title

The Tin Drum (1963)
Grass, Gunter | Vintage, © 1990, 1962 | Fic G
Symbolic and strange novel depicting life reduced to the absurd in prewar Germany. (Germany)
Reserve This Title

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
Kundera, Milan | Harper & Row, © 1984 | Fic K
Philosophical, social, and political themes intertwine in this tale of four people trying to exist in a world in which human choices are limited. (Italy)
Reserve This Title

A Brief History of Time: Elegant expositions of our culture and times

The American Way of Death (1963)
Mitford, Jessica | Knopf, © 1998, 1963 | 338.4761 M
Exposé of the high cost of dying in the United States. (Updated title American Way of Death Revisited published in 1998.)
Reserve This Title

And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic (1987)
Shilts, Randy | St. Martin's, © 1987 | 363.1969 S
Science, suffering, politics, and prejudice - a moving account of the deadly progress of the AIDS epidemic; its manifestations, its victims, and the world's response.
Reserve This Title

The Armies of the Night: History as Novel: The Novel as History (1968)
Mailer, Norman | New American Library, © 1968 | 818 Mailer
A novelist's intensely personal account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon.
Reserve This Title

Children of Crisis (1967)
Coles, Robert | Little, Brown, © 1967 | 301.45196 C
Revealing portraits of Black and white individuals involved in desegregation.
Reserve This Title

Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973)
Boston Women's Health Collective | Simon & Schuster, © 2005, 1973 | 613.0424 O
A pioneering work which serves as both a health guide and a feminist manifesto encouraging women to understand and control their physical selves. (35th Anniversary edition published in 2005).
Reserve This Title

Race Matters (1993)
West, Cornel | Vintage, © 1993 | 305.8009 W
Moving beyond the traditional conservative/liberal framework, philosopher-activist Cornel West presents incisive analyses of race and politics in America, and offers some solutions.
Reserve This Title

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998)
Gourevitch, Philip | Farrar, Straus & Giroux, © 1998 | 364.151 G
A journalist relates tales of an unimaginable genocide.
Reserve This Title

Why We Can't Wait (1964)
King, Martin Luther | Signet Classics, © 2000 | 305.896 K
A plea for greater urgency and common sense in the cause of civil rights, by its most eloquent spokesman.
Reserve This Title

The Great American Novel: Top-notch tellers of American tales

Another Country (1962)
Baldwin, James | Vintage, © 1990, 1962 | Fic B
Bitter, violent novel of the many faces of love and hate in a large city.
Reserve This Title

Beloved (1987)
Morrison, Toni | Knopf, © 1987 | Fic M
The story of ex-slave Sethe, haunted by the ghost of her murdered child, in a rich complex novel of slavery, love, and the triumph of the human spirit.
Reserve This Title

A Death in the Family (1957)
Agee, James | Vintage, © 1998, 1957 | Fic A
Tender and compassionate story on the universal theme of death and grief.
Reserve This Title

Lolita (1960)
Nabokov, Vladimir | Vintage, © 1997, 1955 | Fic N
Skillfully-written tale of two amoral people and the obsession that consumes them.
Reserve This Title

The Plot Against America (2004)
Roth, Philip | Houghton Mifflin, © 2004 | Fic R
The varied responses of ordinary people are portrayed in this fictional account of fascism in America.
Reserve This Title

The Poisonwood Bible (1998)
Kingsolver, Barbara | HarperFlamingo, © 1999, 1998 | Fic K
A missionary family struggles to survive amid the chaos and intrigue of postcolonial Congo.
Reserve This Title

Slaughterhouse-Five, or, the children's crusade: a duty-dance with death (1969)
Vonnegut, Kurt | Dell, © 1968 | Fic V
An imaginative novel based on the firebombing of Dresden.
Reserve This Title

The Stories of John Cheever (1978)
Cheever, John | Vintage, © 2000, 1978 | Fic C
A collection of brilliant short fiction by a major American author.
Reserve This Title

The Violent Bear It Away (1960)
O'Connor, Flannery | Farrar, Straus & Giroux, © 1960, 1988 | Fic O
Stark odyssey of a boy from the backwoods, by a talented Southern writer.
Reserve This Title

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)
Carver, Raymond | Vintage, © 1981 | Fic C
Stark, spare short stories that concentrate on the essential details of human existence.
Reserve This Title

Best Words Best Order: Poets with passion and polish

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (2000)
Heaney, Seamus | Farrar, Straus & Giroux, © 2000 | 829.3 Beowulf
A vivid translation of the classic tale of bravery and monsters, heroism and loss.
Reserve This Title

The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997)
Lorde, Audre | Norton, © 1997 | 811 Lorde
The definitive edition of the work of the great poet and activist.
Reserve This Title

The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967)
Moore, Marianne | Penguin, © 1994, 1967 | 811 Moore
Old, new, and revised work from the famed eighty-year-old poet. (Complete Poems published in 1994 by Penguin.)
Reserve This Title

For the Union Dead (1964)
Lowell, Robert | Noonday Press, © 1967, 1964 | 811 Lowell
Precise and elegant poetry about the current problems facing man in the sixties. (Two of Lowell's finest books of poetry were combined and published in 1967 with a new title - Life Studies, and For the Union Dead.)
Reserve This Title

On the Bus with Rosa Parks: Poems (1999)
Dove, Rita | Norton, © 1999 | 811 Dove
The former Poet Laureate's new collection sheds light on both history's most famous and most forgotten characters.
Reserve This Title

Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 (1975)
Rich, Adrienne | Norton, © 1974, 1975 | 811 Rich
A major American poet's own selection of her work which serves not only as a retrospective, but also as "the graph of a process still going on."
Reserve This Title

The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe Report: Intriguing investigations of function, form and matter

The Affluent Society (1958)
Galbraith, Kenneth | Houghton Mifflin, © 1998, 1958 | 330.973 G
A criticism of the economic thinking of the time.
Reserve This Title

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (1997)
Kurlansky, Mark | Walker, © 1997 | 333.9566 K
Savory account of the once-thriving North Atlantic codfish industry.
Reserve This Title

Coming of Age in the Milky Way (1988)
Ferris, Timothy | Morrow, © 1988 | 509 F
We follow a fascinating group of real people through time, watching as man tries to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos.
Reserve This Title

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968)
Watson, James | Atheneum, © 1980, 1968 | 574.8732 W
The very human behavior of the scientists who discovered the structure of DNA.
Reserve This Title

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997)
Diamond, Jared M. | Norton, © 2005 | 303.4 D
Why some societies have prospered while others have not, updated in 2005 with a chapter on Japan.
Reserve This Title

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)
Jung, Carl Gustav | Vintage, © 1989, 1963 | B Jung
The famed psychoanalyst probes the meaning of his past experiences.
Reserve This Title

The Mismeasure of Man (1981)
Gould, Stephen Jay | Norton, © 1996, 1981 | 153.9309 G
A provocative study of the basic flaws which underlie methods of measuring human intelligence.
Reserve This Title

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
Dillard, Annie | Harper's Magazine Press, © 1975 | 500.9755 D
A year's explorations of the beauty and violence of nature are reported by a sensitive observer.
Reserve This Title

Going to the Sources: Classic chronicles of our collective past.

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989)
Schama, Simon | Vintage, © 1990, 1989 | 944.04 S
This fascinating and highly readable narrative offers a startling new interpretation of the French Revolution.
Reserve This Title

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978)
Tuchman, Barbara | Knopf, © 1978 | 944.025 T
A dramatic portrayal of the disintegration of the medieval world.
Reserve This Title

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (1975)
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr | Harper & Row, © 1974 | 365.4509 S
This continuation of Solzhenitsyn's monumental work on the Soviet penal system exposes the brutalities of the hard-labor camp.
Reserve This Title

The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987)
Rhodes, Richard | Simon & Schuster, © 1986 | 623.4511 R
One of the most important events of this century is skillfully described in a work that combines scientific and historical insight with elegant literary style.
Reserve This Title

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974)
Caro, Robert | Knopf, © 1975, 1974 | B Moses C
A massive biography of the man who became the most powerful nonelected official in New York and who used that power to influence the lives of millions of people.
Reserve This Title

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1960)
Shirer, William L. | Simon & Schuster, © 1981,1960 | 943.086 S
Definitive, vivid account of the history of Nazi Germany.
Reserve This Title

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (1997)
Barry, John | Simon & Schuster, © 1997 | 977.03 B
A raging river's chaos and destruction alters the country's landscape.
Reserve This Title

This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War (1956)
Catton, Bruce | Doubleday, © 1956 | 973.7 C
Superb history of the Civil War from the Union soldier's point of view.
Reserve This Title

Back to the Branch Libraries home page

The year in parentheses following each title is the year it appeared on a Books to Remember list.

Compiled by Francie Einenkel and Susan Chute, Librarians, The New York Public Library.