In case you missed the news, Jazz great Dave Brubeck died Wednesday morning, one day short of his 92nd birthday. Brubeck was a jazz master and was the composer of the most famous modern jazz song: “Take Five.” Here is a video of him performing it live 46 years ago. This song remains one of my all-time favorites and I’ve written many a poem to the upbeat-beat of this piece.
In honor of the calendar year coming to a close, I’ve started a list of “must-read” books. Most of them I’ve managed to sneak in already, and some are on my wish list: Please feel free to add to the list and share the books that are the most important to you.
My Top 40 (in no particular rank):
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
Drown, by Junot Diaz
Heidegger’s Glasses by Thaisa Frank
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison
The God of Small Things by Arundhuti Roy
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine
I, The Divine, by Rabih Alameddine
Runny Babbitt by Shel Silverstein
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro
The Art Lover by Carole Maso
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid
Life in Ordinary Time by Marie Howe
The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forche
The Book of Light by Lucille Clifton
The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
The Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell
Fatherland by Robert Harris
Shipping News by Annie Proulx
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
The Year of the Fog by Michelle Richmond
Smoke by Dorianne Laux
Mythology by Edith Hamilton
Waiting by Ha Jin
Still reading this but: Chris Bohaljian’s Sandcastle Girls