Katherine's Book List (the O.G.)

Anna suggested that we start the blog with a list of the thirty books that were the biggest deal. For us. In an all-time kind of way.

“Besides cookbooks and reference works,” she said.

Basically I think this is like the book blog version of the band-audition montage in ‘The Commitments,’ where Jimmy sits everyone down and says "what are your influences?"

Anyway, here they are. It was hard to resist the urge to go chronological. I left out childhood because that's a whole nother ball of wax. Anna alphabetized, so I will, too.

Austen, Jane – Emma
Bourdieu, Pierre – Distinction
Derrida, Jacques – Limited Inc.
Durkheim, Emile – The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Eliot, George – Middlemarch
Fisher, MFK – How to Cook a Wolf
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald, Penelope – The Blue Flower
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
Goodman, Paul – Growing Up Absurd
Horney, Karen – Neurosis and Human Growth
Jacobs, Jane – The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Janson, H.W. – History of Art
Kant, Immanuel – Critique of Judgment
Kerouac, Jack – The Dharma Bums
Marx, Karl – The Communist Manifesto
Nabokov, Vladimir – Lolita
Pynchon, Thomas – Gravity’s Rainbow
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques – Confessions
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Sebald, W.G. – The Rings of Saturn
Shakespeare, William – Complete Works (cheating? eh.)
Sontag, Susan – Illness and Its Metaphors
Spark, Muriel – The Girls of Slender Means
Updike, John – Rabbit, Run (& the other ‘Rabbit’ books)
Vonnegut, Kurt – Slaughterhouse-Five
Weber, Max – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
Woolf, Virginia – A Room of One’s Own
Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse