LitStaff Pick: Our Favorite Top Five Must Reads

Oh, the pressure – how can one possibly narrow a list of must-reads to only five? There are so many. Today I happen to feel moved by the Southern women writers I’ve been reading recently, short stories, and books I read in high school which have stayed with me as life-long favorites or literary influences:

1. The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers

2. Don’t Look Now (short stories) and Rebecca (novel) by Daphne DuMaurier

3. 3 by Flannery O’Connor (short stories/novellas including Wise Blood and A Good Man is Hard to Find)

4. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

5. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (I know, I know. I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I loved it then, and still do.)

– Jennifer Messner

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Birthdays

On this day, June 23, in 1975, Markus Zusak was born in Sydney, Australia, the youngest child of a mother from Germany and a father from Austria. He has so far written six novels, many of which have won numerous awards, but he is best known for his 2005 work The Book Thief, set in Nazi Germany. That work became an international bestseller and was translated into 63 languages, selling over 16 million copies. It was adapted into a 2013 feature film of the same name starring Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson. Markus’ latest work is Bridge of Clay, was published in 2018. Today, he turns 46.

Birthdays

On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.