Kester’s Top 40

No ‘Top 40’ project would be complete without Kester Smith’s two cents. Kester, probably the friendliest member of our staff, is always there with a  kind word and interesting recommendation. For more Kester-approved picks, check out his blog:  What’s Kester Reading?

1. The Bible: As a Christian, it would be impossible not to place this book at #1. Not because that’s what I’m “supposed to do,” but because this book has, quite literally, changed my life. And continues to.

2. The Brothers Karamazov –Fyodor Dostoevsky: Even if all it had in it was the famed Grand Inquisitor, it would maybe make my #2. The fact that it has so much more pretty much cinches it. Each of the brothers offers a differing perspective on life and faith, and Dostoevsky respects them enough to make them each rich and layered.

3. The Cost of Discipleship –Dietrich Bonhoeffer: This book woke me up to the fact that being a Christian isn’t just about what you believe.

4. The Great Divorce –C.S. Lewis: Blake wrote on the marriage of heaven and hell, Lewis writes of their divorce. This book asserts hell not as arbitrary punishment, but as a last, horrifying assertion of free will.

5. Everything That Rises Must Converge –Flannery O’Connor: Everything O’Connor writes is brilliant, but this is her best. If she had a greatest hits compilation, it would have to include every story in this collection.

6. Invisible Man –Ralph Ellison: Reads like epic poetry and classic jazz, Eliot’s Wasteland meets Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. Sensual and subversive and one on my short list for Great American Novel.

7. The Brothers K –David James Duncan: Here’s another one for that short list. It has baseball and Vietnam. It deals with faith and family. It’s the best book ever written about the 60’s, simply by being about so much more.

8. A Prayer For Owen Meany –John Irving: Owen Meany may be my favorite protagonist in all of fiction. He is certainly the one I would most like to meet. While I am a fan of much of Irving’s work, he has never written anything better than this.

9. Infinite Jest –David Foster Wallace: I came late to the DFW party, certain that the footnotes and such were more a sign of a hack with a gimmick than a genius at work. I was wrong. Infinite Jest is sprawling and epic, but never beyond Wallace’s control. It is broad in scope, but precise with its plot, its characters, and its ideas. This is a book as intimate as it is infinite.

10. Gilead –Marilynne Robinson: Nick Hornby wrote, of Gilead, “for the first time I understood the point of Christianity.” Robinson’s book is wry and wise and winsome. It is one of the few books that actually made me weep. A simple story and yet intensely moving.

11. Stop-Time –Frank Conroy: David Foster Wallace called Stop-Time “arguably the best literary memoir of the twentieth century.” He’ll get no argument from me.

12. The Long Loneliness –Dorothy Day: Arguably the best faith memoir of the twentieth century.

13. Cathedral –Raymond Carver: Flannery O’Connor wrote straightforward people at crooked angles. Carver writes crooked people in straight lines. Both do what they do as brilliantly as anyone does.

14. The Moviegoer –Walker Percy: For a book where, seemingly, nothing happens; Percy’s Moviegoer is completely engrossing. It deals with alienation and the inability/unwillingness to engage and yet, somehow, keeps from bogging down. A truly existentialist novel.

15. Welcome To The Monkey House –Kurt Vonnegut: O’Connor, Carver, and Vonnegut are those whose short stories I most often revisit. All of them hold up to multiple readings. All of them continue to tell me something new about myself and the world I am living in. O’Connor rebukes me, Carver reminds me, and Vonnegut rewards me, but in a way that rebukes and reminds me.

16. Franny and Zooey –J.D. Salinger: Nobody ever wrote dysfunctional family so well. Salinger’s secret is that he loves this family despite their dysfunction. It makes all the difference.

17. Mariette In Ecstasy –Ron Hansen: Deals with the mystery of miracle and the room all people of faith must leave for doubt.

18. Orthodoxy –G.K. Chesterton: Takes a subject with a reputation for being stolid and stodgy and makes it come alive.

19. The End of the Affair –Graham Greene: Wrestles with the difficult demands and serious sacrifices that faith requires.

20. Fear and Trembling –Soren Kierkegaard: Ditto.

21. Blindness –Jose Saramago: As hopeful as it is horrifying; Saramago uses an epidemic to expose what is best and worst about humanity.

22. Where The Sidewalk Ends –Shel Silverstein: Still just as fun and weird and interesting as it was when I was 6. Shel understood that you didn’t have to be shallow and sappy just because you write poetry for kids.

23. Incidences –Daniil Kharms: Undoubtedly the strangest book in this bunch and the most difficult to nail down. I’m not sure what it is that Kharms is doing or even how he’s doing it, but his work is some of the fiercest and funniest fiction that I have ever read.

24. The Grapes of Wrath –John Steinbeck: Certainly Steinbeck’s best work and one of the best novels of the twentieth century. Many novelists address the issue of poverty, but their characters are one-dimensional faces placed upon said issue. Steinbeck’s characters have many dimensions and they bring them issue to life by coming alive themselves.

25. A Personal Matter –Kenzaburo Oe: A dark and depressing tale that manages to also be rich and rewarding. Knowing this is some of Oe’s most personal and revealing work makes it even more daring.

26. Selected Stories –Andre Dubus: O’Connor rebukes, Carver reminds, Vonnegut rewards, and Dubus revisits. Reading one of his short stories is like a case of deja vu. The place and the people and the plot are all familiar. That’s because these are stories about you and me. And they teach us both about ourselves and about each other.

27. The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry –Wendell Berry: I don’t go in for much poetry, but reading Berry’s poems is like getting the best kind of advice from a wise old uncle. Both challenging and encouraging.

28. White Noise –Don DeLillo: It seems like ever since DeLillo wrote White Noise, dozens of other authors have tried to write it again. But he did it first and he did it best. Wallace did it different (and maybe better), but he couldn’t have done it without DeLillo.

29. Morte D’Urban –J.F. Powers: A deceptively simple story by an often overlooked author, Powers manages to take a comic masterpiece and turn into a deeply moving meditation on faith.

30. The Sound and The Fury –William Faulkner: Stream of consciousness can be a copout for poor writing, but Faulkner does it like it ought to be done. He places us within the minds of multiple characters and slowly unveils a family slowly unraveling.

31. Blood Meridian –Cormac McCarthy: Judge Holden may be the most vile antagonist in all of fiction, but he is also the most vital. Rarely does a story hang so solidly onto one character, but Holden is up to the challenge and McCarthy writes of him and his exploits with a terrible clarity.

32. The Great Gatsby –F. Scott Fitzgerald: Another on the shortlist of Great American Novels. What it feels like to be on the outside, looking in. What it looks like to be on the inside, feeling out. What we wish for. And how we should be careful.

33. The Optimist’s Daughter –Eudora Welty: Welty paints as clear a picture of the South as one could wish more, managing to critique and to celebrate. Like Salinger, she loves her characters enough to be honest with them.

34. The Scarlet Letter –Nathaniel Hawthorne: The best book I was ever required to read, Hawthorne’s masterpiece continues to be relevant for its philosophical and psychological depth. It is as dense as it is intense and necessarily one in order to be the other.

35. The Master and Margarita –Mikhail Bulgakov: Magical, mysterious and moving; Master and Margarita can be read as slapstick or as satire, both philosophical and political. The fact that it’s absurd and hilarious doesn’t mean it isn’t deadly serious.

36. All The King’s Men –Robert Penn Warren: If Gatsby is what it feels like to gain the whole world, King’s Men is what it feels like to lose your soul.

37. The Sun Also Rises –Ernest Hemingway: Hemingway is at his best when he’s at his most autobiographical, making this a peak performance and the pinnacle of expat fiction.

38. Where The Wild Things Are –Maurice Sendak: My son was once asked, by his teacher, what skill he was most proud of. His answer was, “I imagine.” I think Sendak would have approved.

39. The Intuitionist –Colson Whitehead: This is a short and sly little book full of big ideas and bold characters. It works as a kind of mystery, but works even better as so much more.

40. White Teeth –Zadie Smith: A novel about how we compare and contrast, of what is coming and what is going, of how we are shaped by our environment, even as we are shaping it. It’s a novel about folks. It’s a novel about us.