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Roxanne's Very Opinionated Reading List

Putting this list together reminded me why I came to open R.J. Julia Booksellers- because there were so many books I wanted to recommend. If you were to ask me tomorrow, the list would probably be different. Italo Calvino in Why Read the Classics?, says, “The Classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconsciousness.” These words have guided my choices.


FICTION

In the Time of Butterflies cover image
Julia Alvarez
 
 
Herzog cover image
Saul Bellow 
Before and After cover image
Rosellen Brown 
The Stranger Camus cover image
Albert Camus
Woman in White cover image
Wilkie Collins
Rebel Angels cover image
Roberston Davies
The Rebel Angels
A Lesson Before Dying cover image
Ernest J. Gaines
Earthly Powers
Anthony Burgess 
Earthly Powers
Julie's People cover image
Nadine Gordimer
Do the Windows Open cover image
Julie Hecht 
Stones from the River cover image
Ursula Hegi 
Unbreakable Lightness of Bein
Milan Kundera
Interpreter of Maladies cover image
Jhumpa Lahiri
Photograph cover image
Penelope Lively 
Embers Cover image
Sandor Marai
Atonement
Ian McEwan
Who will run the frog hospital cover image
Lorrie Moore
Bend in the River cover image
V.S. Naipaul
The Shawl Book Cover
Cynthia Ozick
Blindness cover image
José Saramago
Frankenstein cover
Mary Shelley
Sophies Choice cover image
William Styron
Imagining Argentina cover image
Lawrence Thornton
Resurrection cover image
Leo Tolstoy 
Revolutionary Road cover image
Richard Yates
Therese Raquin Cover Image
Émile Zola

 


WOMEN'S LIVES

Elegy for Iris cover image
John Bayley
Eleanor Roosevelt cover image
Blanche Wiesen Cook
My mothers house cover image
Kim Chernin
Rosa Luxemburg cover image
Elzbieta Ettinger
Rosa Luxemburg
50 days of solitude cover image
Doris Grumbach
blackberry winter cover image
Margaret Mead
Blackberry Winter
White Blackbird
Honor Moore
 The White
Blackbird
Norton Book of Womens Lives
Phyllis Rose ed.
The Norton Book

of Women’s Lives
Catherine the Great
Henri Troyat
Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth
One Writiers Beginnings cover image
Eudora Welty
Dearest Friend cover image
Lynne Withey

 


MORE LIVES

Education of Henry Adams cover image
Henry Adams
Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet cover image
Karen Armstrong
Disraeli cover image
Sarah Bradford
Disraeli
Last Lion cover image
William Manchester
Rise of Theodore Roosevelt cover image
Edmund Morris
Under the Eye of the Clock
Christopher Nolan
Under the Eye
of the Clock
This Boy's Life cover image
Tobias Wolff 

 


BOOKS ABOUT ISSUES

Augusta Gone cover image
Martha Tod Dudman 
Unquiet Mind cover image
Kay Redfield Jamison 
Our Guys cover image
Bernard Lefkowitz 
 
 
Common Ground
J. Anthony Lukas 
Random Family
Adrian Nicole
Always running
Luis J. Rodriguez
True Notebooks
Mark Salzman

 


BOOKS I READ AND REREAD AND KEEP ALWAYS NEAR AT HAND

Man's Search for Meaning cover image
Viktor E. Frankl 
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius cover image
Marcus Aurelius 
Child's Anthology of Poetry cover image
Elizabeth Hauge Sword 
Art of Possibility
Rosamund Stone Zander
and Benjamin Zander