Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman is a senior writer at Spin magazine and the author of Fargo Rock City and Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (Signet, $9). People who are intellectual (but not necessarily smart) constantly insist that Rand’s philosophy is simplistic and flawed, and maybe it is; no philosophy is perfect. But she makes more sense that anyone else I’ve ever experienced. If you disagree with Atlas Shrugged, it basically means you disagree with the concept of “being great.”

Animal Farm by George Orwell (Signet, $8). No one has ever written something so brilliant, so concise, so insightful, and so charming all at the same time.

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The Trial by Franz Kafka (Schocken, $14). What I like about this book is its unwritten theme—we all know we’re guilty of something, even if we don’t know what that something is.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace (Back Bay, $15). This is kind of cheating, because it’s an essay collection. But this was the best book of the 1990s, and here’s why: Wallace doesn’t tell you what to think; he shows you how to think. I remember reading some of his sentences three times in a row, simply because I could not believe a human could be so smart and so funny simultaneously.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (Picador, $15). If you ever find yourself in a conversation with someone who keeps insisting that this book is overrated, walk away—the person you are speaking with is trying to seem smarter than they actually are. These are the same people who claim that Led Zeppelin is overrated. It is difficult to fathom how someone could construct (or deliver) a more effective contemporary novel.

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler