In honour of their 75th anniversary, Esquire has presented a list of “75 books every man should read.” They admit the list is “incomplete and utterly biased”, but they also claim that the list comprises “the greatest works of literature ever published.” That’s silly. Their list simply isn’t pretentious enough, or wide enough in scope, to make that claim. Rather, this is a list of 75 books pretty much guaranteed not to bore you.

The inclusion of Flannery O’Connor is incredibly strange. Not that the book isn’t worthy, but she’s the only woman on this list, so either Esquire thinks that O’Connor’s short fiction is the best stuff ever written by a women for men, or they didn’t realise that “Flannery” was a chick. There are some great books by women that would have fit in perfectly with the tone of this list (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, White Teeth, Play It As It Lays, etc.) and they should have been included to make O’Connor stand out a bit less.

The thing that really annoys me about the list though is that Esquire insists on presenting only one book per page on their website, making it a chore to get through, and making it impossible to scan the list quickly. So, as a service to you, I’ve compiled the entire list below. There are a couple books here that I’m not familiar with at all (A Sport and a Pastime, Winter’s Bone), but their inclusion is high enough praise that I’m really looking forward to reading them. Thanks, Esquire.

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver
• Collected Stories of John Cheever
• Deliverance, by James Dickey
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
• Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
• The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Known World, by Edward P. Jones
• The Good War, by Studs Terkel
• American Pastoral, by Philip Roth
• A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
• The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
• A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter
• The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
• Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis
• A Sense of Where You Are, by John McPhee
• Hell’s Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson
• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
• Dubliners, by James Joyce
• Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
• The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
• Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone
• Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell
• Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison
• Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry
• The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
• The Professional, by W.C. Heinz
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
• Dispatches, by Michael Herr
• Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
• Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates
• As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
• The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
• Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
• All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
• Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
• A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley
• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
• Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brian
• Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
• A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
• Affliction, by Russell Banks
• This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff
• Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin
• The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
• Women, by Charles Bukowski
• Going Native, by Stephen Wright
• Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John LeCarré
• The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders
• War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
• The Shining, by Stephen King
• Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
• Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
• Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
• Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
• The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe
• The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
• American Tabloid, by James Ellroy
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley
• What It Takes, by Richard Ben Cramer
• The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett
• The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
• So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell
• Native Son, by Richard Wright
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans
• Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
• The Great Bridge, by David McCullough
• The Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac
• Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
• Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
• Underworld, by Don DeLillo
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain