Thought this might be of interest to the group... quite a few on this list that I did not even realize were written by local authors. :-)

from Boston.com:

We picked the top books about New England or written by local authors.

Rate the titles, mark “want to read” to add to your reading list, and see how you stack up against other readers. What's your favorite locally grown book?

link

Message edited by its author, Jun 14, 2009, 4:49pm.

Just for fun, a touchstoned list...

1. Moby Dick
2. Little Women
3. Make Way For Ducklings
4. The Bell Jar
5. A Prayer For Owen Meany
6. Mountains Beyond Mountains
7. Housekeeping
8. The Autobiography of Malcolm X
9. Empire Falls
10. Friends of Eddie Coyle
11. Common Ground
12. Walden
13. All Souls
14. Ethan Frome
15. Charlotte's Web
16. Infinite Jest
17. Paul Revere's Ride
18. On Beauty
19. Scarlet Letter
20. Carrie
21. John Adams
22. Blues
23. Breath, Eyes, Memory
24. Affliction
25. The Rascal King
26. Olive Kitteridge
27. Boston Boy
28. She's Come Undone
29. Cod
30. The Prince of Providence
31. Three Junes
32. Self-Reliance
33. The Secret Life of Lobsters
34. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
35. Summer of '49
36. Mayflower
37. The Perfect Storm
38. Mystic River
39. Peyton Place
40. Unaccustomed Earth
41. The Education of Henry Adams
42. The Promised Land
43. The Crucible
44. Little Children
45. Boston Adventure
46. On The Road
47. One Boy's Boston
48. The House of Sand and Fog
49. Sophie's Choice
50. Waiting

51. The Last Hurrah
52. Tuesdays With Morrie
53. A Separate Peace
54. Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel
55. Our Town
56. Hackers
57. Nineteen Minutes
58. Science and Health With Key To The Scriptures
59. Practical Magic
60. Couples
61. Catcher in the Rye
62. The Call of Cthulhu
63. Profiles in Courage
64. A Civil Action
65. The Varieties of Religious Experience
66. Death at an Early Age
67. Love Story
68. Memoirs of a Geisha
69. The Good Mother
70. The Bostonians
71. Welcome to the Monkey House
72. Revere Beach Boulevard
73. A Walk In The Woods
74. The Enormous Room
75. Strong Motion
76. The Da Vinci Code
77. One L
78. The Emperor's Children
79. Two Years Before The Mast
80. Blanche Cleans Up
81. The Secret History
82. Girl, Interrupted
83. Einstein's Dreams
84. Blue Hill Avenue
85. The City Below
86. Team of Rivals
87. The Handmaid's Tail
88. Bringing Down The House
89. The Rise of Silas Lapham
90. Not Without Peril
91. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
92. Massachusetts
93. The Old Patagonian Express
94. The Weight of Water
95. Revolutionary Road
96. The Late George Apley
97. Looking Backward
98. Requiem, Mass.
99. The Wapshot Chronicle
100. The Very Hungry Caterpillar
92. The

turbosaab,
You have an impressive list.

Standout New England books for me (but not just fiction):

Howard Mansfield, In the memory house. Essays on how New Englanders really live.

RailTrails New England a manual of abandoned rail lines for the rail buff who isn't always sure about their new life. (Can't we support twice as many trains as now run in NewEngland!)

Inns of New England and the Maritimes by Peter Andrews. This book is inscribed by a former owner of the Homestead in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire.

Rhode Island Dictionary -- a funny book about the way people talk in the state I was born in.

R. A. Scotti, Sudden Sea: the great hurricane of 1938 - significant disaster that hit Rhode Island badly.

Fanny Howe, In the Middle of Nowhere - finally a novel set in RI, also Holy Smoke

I've read "Hackers" and the "Da Vinci Code". The latter is in my library, and the former should be. Also Angels and Demons, which I liked better than the Da Vinci Code and whose movie was also better.

Nice list; however, it's extremely Massachusetts-centric.

I'd add Jeffrey Lent's In the Fall
Burning Marguerite by Elizabeth Inness-Brown
Why the Devil Chose New England for his Work by Jason Brown.
They seem to have ignored Carolyn Chute's work (can't ignore Strout though now she has a Pulitzer).

I can't believe how many of those I've read.
But where's The Ice Storm?

I was wondering why the touchstone for #87 didn't work properly, and then I saw the Freudian typo. :o)

This list caused a good deal of giggling in my office when we saw first saw it, due in large part to the broadness of the criteria for inclusion: is being written by an author with a vague connection to New England really enough to call something a "New England book"? A list of books by New England authors (however you define that!) would be interesting to see, but calling Sophie's Choice or Memoirs of a Geisha or, indeed, The Da Vinci Code New England books seems pretty silly.

And of course, as with all Top {whatever} lists, the selection of particular books can be argued ad infinitum -- out of the entire King oeuvre, is Carrie really the most representative of New England? And where's Emily Dickinson?

>7 Yes, I was amused with how many entries there were from authors who only went to college in New England. Apparently their definition of "New England Books" is any successful book with even the slightest connection to NE whether it is about NE or not.

Other omissions:
* Devil and Daniel Webster
* On Golden Pond
* Dogs of March

And while poetry is almost always in the eye of the beholder, hasn't New England had a few poets laureate (Maxine Kumin, Donald Hall, and Charles Simic most recently, but also Louise Bogan, Robert Lowell, and Stanley Kunitz could be counted as they spent a part of their formative years in New England)?

>9 Were they even covering poetry? If so, they would have to include Longfellow's Evangeline which so many of us had to read in school.

Catharine Maria Sedgewick's A New England Tale and Hope Leslie...

These kinds of lists are always controversial and usually designed just to get people talking...and it worked, didn't it? :-)

Message edited by its author, Aug 6, 2009, 8:09pm.

Along with "Evangeline" is Paul Revere's Ride. I'm sure I had to read this in school. I see that David Hackett Fischer has a book by the same name (undoubtedly non-fiction). I have his Albion's Seed: four British folkways in America, which is excellent.

>11 I read the first section (i think it was the 1st) of Albion's Seed in my research last winter.

Yes, the first part of the book is entitled: EAST ANGLIA TO MASSACHUSETTS: The Exodus of the English Puritans, 1629-41.

I went ahead and put the Table of Contents listing (from LOC) on the book description section.

Message edited by its author, Aug 8, 2009, 11:16pm.

For those that are interested, this is the whole Table of Contents for Albion's Seed:

Table of Contents (LOC):
INTRODUCTION The Determinants of a Voluntary Society, 3
EAST ANGLIA TO MASSACHUSETTS: The Exodus of the English Puritans, 1629-41, 13
THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND TO VIRGINIA: Distressed Cavaliers and Indentured Servants, 1642-75, 207
NORTH MIDLANDS TO THE DELAWARE: The Friends' Migration, 1675-1725, 419
BORDERLANDS TO THE BACKCOUNTRY: The Flight from North Britain, 1717-1775, 605
CONCLUSION Four British Folkways in American History: The Origin and Persistence of Regional Cultures in the United States, 783
Acknowledgments, 899
Abbreviations, 903
Sources for Maps, 907
Index, 911