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Newsweek's What to Read Now. And Why

We know it’s insane. We know people will ask why on earth we think that an 1875 British satirical novel is the book you need to read right now—or, for that matter, why it even made the cut. The fact is, no one needs another best-of list telling you how great The Great Gatsby is. What we do need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books—new or old, fiction or nonfiction—open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways. Which is why we’d like you to sit down with Anthony Trollope, and these 49 other remarkably trenchant voices.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/204300/page/1

1.
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The Way We Live Now (Oxford World's Classics)
by Anthony Trollope
 
2. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
by Wright Lawrence
 
3. Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang
by Zhao Ziyang
 
4. The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
by Nicholas Carr
 
5.
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The Bear
by WIlliam Faulkner
 
6. Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity
by Neal Gabler
 
7. Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
 
8. Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War
by Anthony Shadid
 
9.
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Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
by Dan Ariely
 
10. God: A Biography
by Jack Miles
 
11. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
by Wendell Berry
 
12.
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A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories
by Flannery O'Conner
 
13.
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Underground (Vintage International)
by Murakami Haruki
 
14.
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Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns
by Clayton M. Christensen
 
15. Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy
by Dave Hickey
 
16. Leaves of Grass (Oxford World's Classics)
by Walt Whitman
 
17. The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next
by Lee Smolin
 
18. City: Rediscovering the Center
by William H. Whyte
 
19.
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by Philip K. Dick
 
20. Benjamin Franklin
by Edmund S. Morgan
 
21. Life on the Mississippi (Penny Books)  
22. Among the Thugs
by Bill Buford
 
23. Brooklyn: A Novel  
24. Frankenstein (Enriched Classics)
by Mary Shelley
 
25. Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace
by Ayelet Waldman
 
26. Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam
by Mark Bowden
 
27. Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (Modern Library Paperbacks)
by Sam Tanenhaus
 
28. Midnight's Children: A Novel
by Salman Rushdie
 
29. American Prometheus
by Kai Bird
 
30. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
by Daniel Mendelsohn
 
31.
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Gilead by Marilynne Robinson  
32. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood
by Mark Harris
 
33. Kim (Oxford World's Classics)
by Rudyard Kipling
 
34. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement
by John Lewis
 
35. The Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
 
36. The Dark Is Rising
by Susan Cooper
 
37.
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The Complete Persepolis: Now a Major Motion Picture
by Marjane Satrapi
 
38. Underworld
by Don DeLillo
 
39. Why Evolution Is True
by Jerry A. Coyne
 
40. American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
 
41. The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
by Michael Pollan
 
42. Regeneration Trilogy
by Pat Barker
 
43. Senator Joe McCarthy
by Richard H. Rovere
 
44. Year of Wonders
by Geraldine Brooks
 
45. The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
 
46. Gone Tomorrow (Jack Reacher, No. 13)
by Lee Child
 
47.
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Things Fall Apart (Norton Critical Editions)
by Chinua Achebe
 
48.
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American Journeys
by Don Watson
 
49. Cotton Comes to Harlem
by Chester Himes
 
50. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Expanded and Updated
by David Thomson
 
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Created by jandrewgraber on Jul 02, 2009.