• Hunger Games
• Breaking Dawn
• Atonement
• History of Love
• The Power of Now(S)
• Tao Of Wu, (S)
• The Alchemist(S)
• Veronika Decides to Die(S)
• Brida(S)
• Kite Runner(S)
• For one More Day(S)
• Tuesdays with Morrie(s)
• American Psycho(S)
• Autobiography of Malcom X(s)
• Just Kids(S)
• The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster

Esquire:

• The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Freud and Einstein both hailed it as a masterpiece, and Kurt Vonnegut claimed that everything you need to know in life is smashed down into this book. It still is.
• The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien. No one else has written so beautifully about human remains hanging from tree branches.
• A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter. Remember your college buddy's girlfriend, the one you were in love with? Because of her.
• Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis. You've never seen the Holocaust from this angle and with this much ferocity. Backwards.
• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. Born in an epic fist-fight or forgotten in the sewers, no character is as clearly heard as the man who is never really seen by the world around him.
• Winter's Bone, by Daniel Woodrell. The best book by a modern-day Twain, high on meth, drousy with whiskey.
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway. A lesson in manhood: Even when you're damned, you press on.
• Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller. Dirty, grotesque. Beautiful.
• Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates. The thousands of little compromises we make every day that eventually add up to the loss of ourselves.
• As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner. Because the man's cold brilliance enabled him to make the line "My mother is a fish," into a chapter in itself.
• A Fan's Notes, by Frederick Exley. A crazy, irrational drunk who seems all too rational and familiar.
• Plainsong, by Kent Haruf. Because: "A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl's got purposes you and me can't even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can't even suppose.
• Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin. Because every sentence is impossibly beautiful.
• The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Because Fitzgerald knew Lindsay, Britney and the Olsens better than we do. (And because it was first published in Esquire.)
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley. Malcolm says it best: "People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book."
• So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell. Remember your best friend from childhood, the one who's gone? Because of him.
• The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac. Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith. This is how smart, beautiful, postracial women think. This is prose so kinetic, it seems to break-dance.
• The Quiet American. Have you ever felt as though you can't trust anyone, not your friends or your lovers, not your boss, your family, not your god, not even yourself?
• George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London. Because he is pissed off, uncompromising, and unapologetically political.
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth. He understands that at base, we're a nation of fearful poon hounds. Plus, he wrote the only great novel to end with a guy getting poked in the eye with a fork.
• Women by Charles Bukowski. Henry Chinaski, the gritty, drunken poet protagonist of Bukowski's best novel, is an irresistible bastard, cock-first and rough, more than a little mean, eternally horny, broken, beaten, isolated, needy, and somehow smarter than he used to be. In private, no honest woman would ever shrug off the raw energy of his kind of want.
• Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud.