The Dream Team
by Scott Stein
It's an endless and entertaining debate in nearly every sport. The greatest NFL quarterback? Dan Marino, some say — just look at the numbers. No, no, John Elway — after all, he finally won a couple and his numbers weren't bad, either. Plus, he could run. Wait a minute, how can you put anyone above Joe Montana? Joe Cool didn't look like much or put up the biggest stats — he just won, again and again (and again and again). It isn't only football. If you could have one player on your basketball team, would you take Magic or Bird? No, you'd take Jordan or Kareem or even Wilt, if someone could've taught him to hit a free throw. Who would've won if they met in their prime — Tyson or Ali? Of course, Ali would've, but for a while — before Tyson started getting knocked out whenever an opponent actually fought back — not everyone thought so.
Conversations like these aren't limited to sports — professors and editors get in on the act, too. Some of them, like our very own Albert DiBartolomeo, even send e-mails to their colleagues asking us to pick which 15 books we would save from our library. I was never much good at following the rules, even with sports. I wanted Bird, Kareem, Magic, and Jordan all on the same team. I don't know who the fifth man would be, though it wouldn't really matter, would it? I could be the fifth man — we'd still win. "Give the ball to Michael," Magic might tell me, "and stay out of the way." Fifteen books? I couldn't do it.
I sat in front of my custom poplar bookcases typing away on my laptop. I resisted the urge to list every great book. All sorts of monumental works and writers belong on somebody's list — Don Quixote, Homer, Dante — but I wasn't reconstructing the canon here. My task was not to list the best books ever, though some on my list surely qualify. My task, as I understood it, was simply to list books that I like, am quick to recommend, or which I remember fondly. I am a fiction writer and satirist, so my list is mostly fiction. I had strict requirements: If a book grabbed me and didn't let go until I'd finished it, it made the list; if it taught me something about writing, it made the list; if, years later, looking at it on the shelf brings a smile or a vivid image, it made the list. It isn't anything more intellectual than that. Toward the end of my list, I included some nonfiction, philosophy, science, and works of social, political, and economic analysis. I probably read more nonfiction than fiction these days, but tried to limit this part of my list to a few titles I count as important or provocative.
So, here it is, in no particular order. I'll admit that it's a long list. Not that I'm apologizing. It's going to get longer. No team goes very far with only one quarterback.
| The Beast in the Jungle | Henry James |
| Portrait of a Lady | Henry James |
| The Princess Casamassima | Henry James |
| Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| Notes from Underground | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| Poor Folk | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| The Complete Stories | Franz Kafka |
| The Trial | Franz Kafka |
| The Castle | Franz Kafka |
| Gulliver's Travels | Jonathan Swift |
| Robinson Crusoe | Daniel Defoe |
| The Complete Short Stories of Maupassant | Guy de Maupassant |
| The Stories of John Cheever | John Cheever |
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams |
| Hamlet | William Shakespeare |
| Anton Chekhov's Short Stories | Anton Chekhov |
| Diary of a Madman and Other Stories | Nikolai Gogol |
| Everything That Rises Must Converge | Flannery O'Connor |
| Howards End | E.M. Forster |
| Brighton Rock | Graham Greene |
| A Burnt-Out Case | Graham Greene |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | George Orwell |
| Animal Farm | George Orwell |
| We | Yevgeny Zamyatin |
| The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger |
| Of Mice and Men | John Steinbeck |
| Complete Tales and Poems | Edgar Allan Poe |
| Blindness | Jose Saramago |
| Nausea | Jean-Paul Sartre |
| Catch-22 | Joseph Heller |
| Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
| Flowers for Algernon | Daniel Keyes |
| One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | Ken Kesey |
| To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee |
| Tales from the Irish Club | Lester Goran |
| Toward the End of Time | John Updike |
| Grendel | John Gardner |
| Frankenstein | Mary Shelley |
| Dracula | Bram Stoker |
| The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess |
| The Hobbit | J.R.R. Tolkien |
| The Collected Stories | Isaac Bashevis Singer |
| Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison |
| Native Son | Richard Wright |
| The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain |
| The Old Man and the Sea | Ernest Hemingway |
| Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories | Sholem Aleichem |
| The Maltese Falcon | Dashiell Hammett |
| The Futurological Congress | Stanislaw Lem |
| The Cyberiad | Stanislaw Lem |
| Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume I | Philip K. Dick |
| Angela's Ashes | Frank McCourt |
| Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass | Frederick Douglass |
| Dear Theo | Vincent Van Gogh |
| Twilight of the Idols | Friedrich Nietzsche |
| The Antichrist | Friedrich Nietzsche |
| Atlas Shrugged | Ayn Rand |
| The Law | Frederic Bastiat |
| The Road to Serfdom | F.A. Hayek |
| The Constitution of Liberty | F.A. Hayek |
| Capitalism and Freedom | Milton Friedman |
| The Vision of the Anointed | Thomas Sowell |
| The Future and Its Enemies | Virginia Postrel |
| Parliament of Whores | P.J. O'Rourke |
| The Discovery of Freedom | Rose Wilder Lane |
| Origin of Species | Charles Darwin |
| The Selfish Gene | Richard Dawkins |
| The Blank Slate | Steven Pinker |
| Civil Disobedience | Henry David Thoreau |
Scott Stein is the associate director of the Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing. His first novel Lost was called "wonderfully comic" and a "page-turner" by the Philadelphia Inquirer. Scott's short fiction has been published in The G.W. Review, Liberty, Drexel Online Journal, and Art Times. He teaches Fiction Writing, Writing Humor and Comedy, and Freshman Writing in the Department of English and Philosophy.