2021 Kelly's Top Books

Home , Ayad Akhtar, Middlesex (novel), Tracy Letts

Kelly's Top Book Recommendations Academic Fiction

The Song of Solomon Invisible Man Tess of the D’Urbervilles Toni Morrison Ralph Ellison Thomas Hardy

Beloved Native Son The Faerie Queene Toni Morrison Richard Wright Edmund Spencer

Wolf Hall Lincoln in the Bardo A Visit From the Goon Squad Hilary Mantel George Saunders Jennifer Egan

The Sun Also Rises Great Expectations The Executioner’s Song Ernest Hemingway Charles Dickens Norman Mailer

For Whom the Bell Tolls East of Eden Wide Sargasso Sea Ernest Hemingway John Steinbeck Jean Rhys

To the Lighthouse Slaughterhouse-Five Virginia Woolf Kurt Vonnegut

Orlando No Country for Old Men Virginia Woolf Cormac McCarthy

One Hundred Years of Solitude The Count of Monte Cristo Gabriel Garcia Marquez Alexandre Dumas

Love in the Time of Cholera Anna Karenina Gabriel Garcia Marquez Leo Tolstoy

Middlesex Notes from Underground Jeffrey Eugenides Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Bone Clocks The Sound and the Fury David Mitchell William Faulkner

Pride and Prejudice Revolutionary Road Jane Austen Richard Yates

Catcher in the Rye Heart of Darkness J.D. Salinger Joseph Conrad

The Orphan Master’s Son The Constant Gardener The Nickel Boys Adam Johnson John Le Carre Colson Whitehead

Where the Crawdads Sing Wonder Boys Black Buck Delia Owens Michael Chabon Mateo Askaripour

The Art of Fielding Cold Mountain Earthlings Chad Harbach Charles Frazier Sakaya Murata

The Kite Runner The Virgin Suicides Homeland Elegies Khaled Hosseini Jeffrey Eugenides Ayad Akhtar

The Shadow of the Wind The Lovely Bones The Vanishing Half Carlos Luis Zafon Alice Sebold Brit Bennet

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Gone Girl The Overstory Oscar Wao Gillian Flynn Richard Powers Junot Diaz Little Fires Everywhere Girl, Woman, Other Atonement Celeste Ng Bernandine Evaristo Ian McEwan Life of Pi Milkman The Martian Yann Martel Anna Burns Adam Weir The Help The Topeka School The Nightingale Kathryn Stockett Ben Lerner Kristin Hannah Afterlife The Truist Exercise Night Circus Julia Alvarez Susan Choi Erin Morgenstern Klara and the Sun The Curious Incident of the Dog Kazou Ishiguro in the Night-Time Mark Haddon Of Women and Salt Gabriela Garcia The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Stieg Larsson

Plays

Twelfth Night Proof William Shakespeare David Auburn

The Tempest Oedipus Rex William Shakespeare Sophocles

August: Osage County The Importance of Being Earnest Tracy Letts Oscar Wilde

Doubt: A Parable John Patrick Shanley

Poetry and Short Stories

Krik Krak Dubliners The Tradition Edwinge Danticat James Joyce Jericho Brown

Poetry 180 Interpreter of Maladies Be With Billy Collins Jhumpa Lahiri Forrest Gander

Neon Vernacular Black Swan Green Summer Snow Yusef Komunyakaa David Mitchell Robert Hass

The Wasteland and Other Poems The Iliad If I Had Two Wings T.S. Eliot Homer Randall Kenan

Milk and Honey The Odyssey A Treatise on Stars Rupi Kaur Homer Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge

On the Road The Aeneid Jack Kerouac Virgil

Where Are You Going, Where The Epic of Gilgamesh Have You Been? Anonymous Joyce Carol Oates

A Brief History of Time Will in the World DMZ Colony Steven Hawking Stephen Greenblatt Don Mee Choi

Team of Rivals: The Political The Swerve Book of Eels Genius of Abraham Lincoln Stephen Greenblatt Patrik Svensson Doris Kearns Goodwin Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Hidden Valley Road Cleopatra: A Life Emperor Robert Kolker Stacy Schiff Anthony Everitt Intimations The Witches Freakonomics Zadie Smith Stacy Schiff Steve Dubner and Steven Levitt If Then The Immortal Life of Henrietta Into Thin Air Jill Lepore Lacks John Krakauer Rebecca Skloot This Boy’s Life The Right Stuff Tobias Wolff Tom Wolfe Moneyball Dispatches Michael Lewis Michael Herr John Adams The Things They Carried David McCullough Tim O’Brien Too Big to Fail In Cold Blood Andrew Ross Sorkin Truman Capote Life Stories: Profiles from The Walden New Yorker Henry David Thoreau David Remnick

On the Origin of Species The Yellow House Charles Darwin Sarah M. Broom

The Boys in the Boat How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Daniel James Brown Bill Gates