Here is the tail end of what we believe are the greatest books of all time. We urge you to ridicule (or praise!) both our selections and our reasoning. We need your suggestions for the showdown to come—our list will be pitted against yours in what’s sure to be an epic, illustrated death match. Come back soon for the next section and a cash prize for anyone who can guess our top four.

16. The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr.

I once had a teacher tell me that just owning this book will make you a better writer.  Hyperbole aside, this is far and away the best style guide I have ever encountered. It will drastically improve your writing and speech should you decide to read it. Yes, it is pretentiously written, but that’s part of the fun. In the book’s most entertaining section, you’ll learn that a phrase like “student body” is “needless and awkward, meaning no more than the simple word “students.” See, you’re a better writer already. –J.D.

15. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

It may not be as fully realized as Ulysses or as immediate as Dubliners, but I will always prefer the exuberance of Portrait. Reading the book is akin to being inside the mind of a nascent Joyce as he develops his style. Stephen Daedelus’s struggles with alienation are as resonant as they were when Joyce wrote the book. When we encounter Stephen “still unfallen, but about to fall” near the books climax, the delicacy of Joyce’s prose perfectly mirrors his protagonist’s character. The style, whatever its pretensions, is fully justified for the effect –J.D.

14. Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger

Maybe this place could have been filled by The Catcher in the Rye (by all means a great book) but, ultimately, the writing in Nine Stories is cleaner and more moving. It might be the best collection of short fiction by a single author to be written in the 20th century. Though, like Esmé—the title character from the book’s best story—I “prefer stories about squalor,” so I’ve got my natural biases. Many of the stories, like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” are sad, even overwhelmingly so, but despite this the book, like Catcher in the Rye, is among the most fun and the most accessible literature that America has ever seen. –J.F.

13. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy is perhaps the most successful moralist in Western literature. His God and his morality are large enough to include the despondency of human experience. In fact, the stories of Anna Karenina and Konstantin Levin weave around that same philosophy. The characters scarcely touch, and the point of view can shift rather abruptly, yet, due to the finest, subtlest care, the novel is extremely cohesive. Still, it is not the spiritual scope—the unanswered prayers, disintegrated families, failed resolutions—that place it at the forefront of literature. It’s passages like this:

“The sun was already sinking into the trees when they went, with their tin boxes rattling, into the wooded ravine of Mashkin Upland. The grass was up to their waists in the middle of the hollow, soft, tender, and broad-bladed, spotted here and there among the trees with wild pansies.”

Sweet, cool simplicity. –J.F.

Photo: Flickr by niznoz used under the Creative Commons