Newsweek’s 50 books for Our Times:

• The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
• The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
• Prisoner of the State by Zhao Ziyang
• The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr
• The Bear by William Faulkner
• Winchell by Neal Gabler
• Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
• Night Draws Near by Anthony Shadid
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
• God: A Biography by Jack Miles
• The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry
• A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
• Underground by Haruki Murakami
• Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen
• Air Guitar by Dave Hickey
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin
• City: Rediscovering the Center by William H. Whyte
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
• Benjamin Franklin by Edmund S. Morgan
• The Mississippi Books by Mark Twain
• Among Thugs by Bill Buford
• Brooklyn by Colm Tuibin
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman
• Guests of the Ayatollah by Mark Bowden
• Whittaker Chambers by Sam Tanenhaus
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
• American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
• The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
• Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris
• Kim by Rudyard Kipling
• Walking with the Wind by John Lewis
• The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
• The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
• Underworld by Don DeLillo
• Why Evolution is True by Jerry A. Coyne
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth
• The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
• Senator Joe McCarthy by Richard H. Rovere
• Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• American Journeys by Don Watson
• Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes
• The New Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson