Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum has contributed to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. Her debut novel, The Quality of Life Report (Viking, $25), was published in May.

The Human Stain by Philip Roth (Vintage, $14). A balanced yet scathing comment on liberal piety and the morass of academia. Cantankerous college professor Coleman Silk harbors a secret that’s custom-made for Rothian inquiries into class anxiety and self-loathing.

Remote by David Shields (out of print). I’ve moved several times in the last year and this is a book that stays in my immediate possession rather than boxed up with most of the others. These loosely linked and loosely autobiographical essays ponder, often with rigorous intellectualism, everything from the Boy Scout belt as fashion statement to the career of Bob Balaban.

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Walden by Henry David Thoreau (Penguin, $12). I first read this as a morose college student and vowed (as only a college student can) to live my life accordingly. I reread it as a sensory-overloaded 32-year-old and realized I’d utterly failed in that endeavor.

Ulysses by James Joyce (Vintage, $17). A book about everything that ever was, told in every way there is to tell it. If you couldn’t get through The Odyssey, try this.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (Signet, $5). Long before there were people striving to get their weddings featured in The New York Times, Lily Bart was laying the groundwork for the cruel vagaries of New York social striving. Wharton’s New York remains both exhilaratingly and unnervingly timeless.

I Am Not Jackson Pollack

Psycho,