;One of my recurring dreams involves selling all my possessions, shutting down my cell phone and e-mail and setting off around the country — and then the world — by train with a small suitcase full of great books. If I ever did this, I'd take things I had already read. And if I had to narrow this group to a list of 25, here is what they'd be. I'm not sure they would all fit in one suitcase, but they'd be worth packing two.
;;;1001 Nights
; ;Anonymous (A.D. 850)
;;Scherezade marries the King of Persia, who until that night has executed every one of his brides the next morning. To save herself and her country, she tells him a tale that does not end — never has there been such pressure on a storyteller, and never has a yarn-spinner risen so well to the challenge.
;;;The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
; ;Haruki Murakami (1997)
;;An unemployed man loses his cat and sets off on an odyssey that takes him across the past half-century of Japanese history in this hilarious, grotesque and essential novel.
;;;The Education of Henry Adams
; ;Henry Adams (1918)
;;All the roots of the modern American memoir — not to mention all of the anxieties modernism would attempt to tackle — can be found in this searching autobiography by Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams.
;;;Jane Austen
;;Take your pick
;;Read any one of her novels, and you will realize why so many critics believe the best days of the novel were Austen's.
;;;Hamlet
;; Shakespeare (1602)
;;The best play ever written — a profound examination of melancholy and what families pass from one generation to the next.
;;;The Cairo Trilogy
;; Naguib Mahfouz (1956-1957)
;;This epic series of novels about the al-Jawad family rivals in style and grace anything written by Dickens.
;;;My Traitor's Heart
;; Rian Malan (1990)
;;The author of this miraculous, soul-searching book left South Africa to avoid the draft and returned to document the horrors apartheid had inflicted on his country. This is a powerful, essential work of testimony.
;;;Madame Bovary
;; Gustave Flaubert (1857)
;;No other novel enters the mind of a female character quite so fully or tragically.
;;;Collected Essays
;; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841)
;;Whether he is meditating on travel, nature or friendship, he is original, rigorous, a conveyance of the beauties of considered thought.
;;;Anna Karenina
;; Leo Tolstoy (1877)
;;There is a reason that so many great novelists look with reverence upon the Russians — this crushing tale about a love affair gone awry is reason No. 1.
;;;Invisible Man
;; Ralph Ellison (1952)
;;One of the angriest, saddest, most beautiful novels ever written — the story of one man's journey from the Deep South to Harlem in the '50s, when his very presence on the streets was a reminder of the "negro problem."
;;;Things Fall Apart
;; Chinua Achebe (1958)
;;Of all the great novels to emerge from Africa's independence movement — and there have been many — this story about precolonial tribal life in Nigeria is the most heart-rending, the nearest to perfect.
;;;The Dharma Bums
;; Jack Kerouac (1958)
;;The best buddy novel ever written, and a terrific record of the emergence of a Left Coast kind of consciousness.
;;;The Age of Innocence
;; Edith Wharton (1920)
;;She is a master of scene-making, of character sketching, of social commentary. But in this novel all three combine to create a portrait of America tipping out of its youth into a strapping, and dangerous, adulthood.
;;;The Complete Stories
;; Franz Kafka (1971)
;;In the past few decades, his work has been rendered into an adjective — Kafkaesque. Read the work itself and you will realize how much pain and brilliance can be stuffed into a single word.
;;;The Tale of Genji
;; Lady Murasaki (early 11th century)
;;The author of the earliest novel in history was a maid of honor of the imperial court in the Heian period. Written for aristocratic women of the time, the book follows the story of Genji, the son of an emperor whose life is filled with affairs, tortured alliances and the kind of political maneuvers that make Hamlet look like a bit of a spoiled brat.
;;;Letters
;; John Keats (1848 and 1878)
;;;The great romantic poet worked out many of his most compelling theories — like the idea of negative capability — in letters to friends and family, which are astonishingly intelligent, personal and lyrically captivating.
;;;Absalom, Absalom!
;; William Faulkner (1936)
;;As Miles Davis was to the blue note, and Walt Whitman to the American poetic line, no novelist from this country showed better the possibilities of what could be done with a single sentence than Faulkner. This difficult, furious book is his masterpiece.
;;Paradise Lost
;; John Milton (1667)
;;;The most theologically challenging and gorgeous poem written in the English language.
;;Death in Venice
;; Thomas Mann (1912)
;;The story of an older man's creepy fascination with a young boy in a rotting European city around the approach of the war is on fire with incandescent prose.
;;;Night
;;Elie Wiesel (1958)
;;;No work of testimony conjures the horrors of the Holocaust and the necessity of remembering it quite like this memoir.
;;The Master and Margarita
;; Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
;;This excruciatingly funny, brilliant novel set in 1930s Poland, the Jerusalem of Pontius Pilate and Moscow is one of the greatest satires ever written — and certainly one of the strangest.
;;;Song of Solomon
;; Toni Morrison (1977)
;;;Like Ellison's Invisible Man, this shattering novel is the story of one man's migration, in this case across time and in search of an identity that is entirely his own.
;;;The Odyssey
; ;Homer (800 to 600 B.C.)
;;;The story of a man's return home after a war, through detours that would make Harry Potter's life seem a charmed one, it is the foundational text for almost every novel or epic that came after it.
;;Dubliners
;; James Joyce (1914)
;;The portrait of a city, a country and a people in 15 exquisite stories you will never forget.
;;(John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.)
[email protected]
