Connie's Reading List
An eclectic and superselective, subjective booklist. There’s the story and the writing and then there’s the reader’s receptivity at a particular moment in time. A book makes this list if it changed me as a human being and the idea that I might have missed reading it scares me.
KIDS' BOOKS
Jacqueline Woodson
Harbor Me
Cynthia Rylant
God Went To Beauty School
Dav Pilkey
A Friend For Dragon
ADULT BOOKS
Grace Paley
The Collected Stories: Grace Paley
Alastair Macleod
No Great Mischief
Frank Conroy
Stop-Time
Jacqueline Woodson
Another Brooklyn
Rohinton Mistry
A Fine Balance
David Grossman
To the End of the Land
Darragh McKeon
All That is Solid Melts into Air
Leah Hager Cohen
No Book But the World
Megan Mayhew Bergman
Birds of a Lesser Paradise
Ruth Ozeki
A Tale for the Time Being
Lucia Perillo
Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain
Julie Otsuka
When the Emperor Was Divine
Alice Munro
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Laura Barnett
The Versions of Us
Aminatta Forna
Happiness
Katherine Vaz
Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories
Molly McCloskey
Straying
Joyce Carol Oates
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart
Jenny Erpenbeck
Go, Went, Gone
Sally Rooney
Normal People
Sallie Tisdale
Violations: Collected Essays
Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
Kei Miller
Augustown
Edward St. Aubyn
Patrick Melrose Novels
Martha Southgate
Third Girl From the Left
Colm Toibin
The Empty Family
Elizabeth Strout
Olive Kitteridge
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah
Peter Manseau
Songs for the Butchers Daughter
Linda Grant
When I Lived in Modern Times
Larry Watson
American Boy
Justin Torres
We the Animals
Mark Slouka
The Visible World
Andre Dubus III
Townie
Elizabeth Gilbert
The Signature of All Things
Elliot Perlman
Seven Types of Ambiguity
Mia Alvar
In the Country
Kim Thúy
Ru
Lucia Berlin
A Manual for Cleaning Women
Sunil Yapa
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist
Charles Johnson
Middle Passage
Kerry Egan
On Living
Dawn Davies
Mothers of Sparta
Rebecca Lee
Bobcat and Other Stories
Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven
James Hannaham
Delicious Foods
Anne Enright
The Green Road
Masha Gessen
Brothers
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Ms. Hempl Chronicles
Marisa Silver
Alone With You
James Alan McPherson
Elbow Room
Amity Gaige
The Folded World
Charles D'Ambrosio
The Dead Fish Museum
Carson McCullers
