Book Shelf Recommendations: 10 Worthwhile "Off the Map" Books

At times I feel that there are only two types of book recommendations: the classics list and book reviews.

Books that make the "classics" list are automatically recommended by virtue of being "classics".

These are books like Heart of Darkness and War and Peace.

Then we have book review recommendations. The New York Times and the LA Times and Harper's and many other publications participate in the marketing of new novels every week and every month.

This is how I came across Laurie Moore, the brilliant writer who recently published A Gate at the Stairs. Finding her work has been rather enlightening. But I also was pointed to Cavalier & Clay (M. Chabon) through a book review, to my mild (500-pages-of-wasted-time) chagrin.

Recommendations from these two sources are often fruitful, but they are limited. Book reviews are almost always focused on newly released publications while the classics are focused on books that have stood the test of time - old books, in other words.

Though these are the main voices of recommendation, there are myriad ways to stumble onto books.

You can blindly buy books or check them out from the library. You can pick up books at your local thrift store and give them a chance.

However, one of my favorite ways to learn about new books is to look at a friend's bookshelf.

In hopes of helping widen the purview of readers across the country, here are ten books on my bookshelf that are too old for book reviews and that are not (yet) on the classics list:

The Deer Park - Norman Mailer

Another Country - James Baldwin

The Flood­ - Robert Penn Warren

Tropic of Cancer­ - Henry Miller

Everything That Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Connor

The Road to Los Angeles - John Fante

A Death in the Family - James Agee

A View from the Bridge - Arthur Miller

Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee

The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles