James Mustich's 1000 Books to Read Before You Die discussion

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Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the second of four daughters of a noted proponent of Transcendentalism, Bronson Alcott. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a friend of the family, as were Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Despite her transcendentalist pedigree, Louisa May Alcott always kept her feet on the ground, working as a seamstress, a governess, a nurse, and, eventually, an author to contribute to the household income. Her most famous work, Little Women, is drawn from her own family life; it is among the most cherished and popular children’s books of all time. Within its comfortable domestic compass, many readers first discover the import of the largest questions: Who am I, and who do I want to be? From the first line—“‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug”—Alcott taps a vein of realism and colloquial expression that was ahead of its time and that still retains its attraction. What follows is a tale of life, love, friendship, illness, and coming-of-age, one in which the “little women” prove to have more courage, resourcefulness, and character than the adults who ostensibly hold sway over them.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, set on a single June day in London, is punctuated by the tolling of Big Ben, the bell inside the clock tower at the Houses of Parliament. Its regular marking of the time—“First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable”—reminds Clarissa Dalloway of both the day’s passage and the evanescence of all things. This indelible symbol provided Woolf’s novel with its working title: The Hours. Seven decades on, Michael Cunningham, a writer of uncommon sensitivity and an unabashed Woolf lover, retrieved it for his best novel, a stunning invocation of Mrs. Dalloway and a masterful fiction in its own right. The Hours (1998) is a book that leaves the reader feeling hopeful and blessed, suffused with the ever-present, ineffable wonder of life.

The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist by Dorothy Day

The Long Loneliness, published in 1952, is the autobiography of Dorothy Day, the American political activist, pacifist, and cofounder of The Catholic Worker newspaper and movement. While Day has lately been put forth for canonization by the church, she might bridle at that idea: “Don’t call me a saint,” she once wrote, “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” In any case, like Saint Augustine, she spent her early years in the embrace of worldly pursuits—“the wisdom of the flesh is treacherous indeed” she would later reflect—before a conversion led her to focus her considerable energy on “[making] it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do.” Her personal testament is as revelatory as Augustine’s Confessions, although the difference in the two books’ perspectives is striking: Where Augustine’s autobiography is a conversation with God, Day’s narrative is a conversation with the world.

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