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