Twenty-five must read titles

Jeff Somers is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series from Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and the Ustari Cycle from Pocket/Gallery, including We Are Not Good People. At the B&N Reads blog he tagged twenty-five "books you must read, no matter who you are," including:

The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett

The modern concept of the private investigator, the rough-and-tumble guy with a gun and some questions, was born with Dashiell Hammett, and this is his best novel. It still crackles with a thoroughly modern energy, and upon publication signaled a sea-change in the stories that novels could tell, and the manner in which they could be told. That’s as important as any postmodern artistic experiment ever conducted.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Maltese Falcon appears on a list of six books that influenced sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer, Mark Billingham's six best books list, Kathryn Williams's reading list on greed, Sara Brady's top five list of books with plots propelled by the search for an object, J. Kingston Pierce's top ten list of introductions to crime fiction and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best fat men in literature and ten of the best femmes fatales in literature, and among Armistead Maupin's five best San Francisco novels and Janet Rudolph's ten favorite San Francisco-backdropped crime novels.

--Marshal Zeringue