Critic and essayist Adam Gopnik is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. In his latest book, The Real Work, he examines how artists, athletes, and others achieve mastery, and what the pursuit does for any of us who undertake it.
Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (1791)
The best and most entertaining biography ever written in English — addictive for its prescient, informal, racy prose and Johnson's epigrammatic precision and enduring decency. The dinner party at which suspicious Tory Sam meets the lefty-libertine but welcoming John Wilkes is still one of the funniest and most humane things in literature. Buy it here.
The Most of Liebling by A.J. Liebling (1963)
The best reporter on Paris, boxing, and war, with the widest range of knowledge and the slyest gift for horizontal allusion. A writer of pleasures — eating and drinking — Liebling is equally good on battles and has a moral point to make: Defending pleasure is a good enough reason to resist tyrants.
The Early Stories by John Updike (2003)
Miracles of observation, evocation, and poignant emotion. Though Updike is not a writer of happy subjects — the pains of marriage, the loss of time — he makes readers happy by the sheer perfection of his craft and his deep delight in the sensual surface of the world. He sings, and we harmonize. Buy it here.
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger (1955)
Salinger was the key influence on two generations of writers. What other New York City tales manage to be both hilarious in their detailing and profoundly, genuinely religious in their purpose? Still the most soulful comic writer we've ever had, and simultaneously the greatest comic writer of the search for soulfulness. Buy it here.
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust (1913)
A terribly conventional pick. But the Swann and Odette sections are the most beautiful thing in writing. When they mirror the Marcel and Gilberte childhood sections, they become better than writing. Buy it here.
Voltaire in Love by Nancy Mitford (1957)
The most exuberant, erotic history of the French Enlightenment. Mitford is disapproved of by sterner academics, though she has the most instinctive grasp of the crazily competitive French intellectual life. Her voice is so communicable, charming, and independent that I was able to use an imaginary version of Mitford as the heroine of my own Parisian fable, The King in the Window. Buy it here.
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