Who among us is not often looking for an escape? Through social media, you may briefly find one. In purchasing things for yourself, you likely find a fleeting respite. Bingeing a show is always fun, and you may be able to cover a few hours checking out the best classic movies. But one truth remains: The greatest escape — and the most rewarding one — is reading and finishing a good book.

The Manual challenges you to read (or re-read) these essential books every man should know to navigate life. Get cozy and crack open one of these must-reads for men this 2022 and beyond.

I think there’s a bit of teenager Ponyboy Curtis in all of us. The boy grapples with the unfairness of tragedy and the rights and wrongs of a society he feels excluded from in this two-week glimpse into his life as a greaser. Running away with his best friend after a dangerous fight with a rival preppy gang, the Socs, Ponyboy is faced with even more heartache, while all along his hope is for peace. One of the best books we’ve ever (ever) read.

In a quote: “Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold.”

Plays absolutely count as books, and you should definitely add this one to your “Proudly Read” shelf. Annie Baker is a master of dialogue. She is in a league of her own when producing conversations that sound like real life, and while her play The Flick likely received the most publicity, The Aliens just might be her masterpiece. The whole play takes place just outside the back of a small town coffee shop, and we follow the men who hang out there and the young man who’d rather they not. The story that unfolds is tender, quiet, and powerful. 

In a quote: “Maybe you’re a genius, too.”

There, There is a book that plays by its own rules. It knocks you on the ass in a way we all need to be knocked on the ass and is simply gut-wrenching. In it, Tommy Orange shifts stories and perspectives, telling 12 narratives of life as an “urban Indian.” The momentum makes it read like a thriller and once the stories converge you find yourself blown away by violence and heartache. It’s a deep (deep) dive into the stereotypes that bind Native Americans. Expect to be educated and moved in a way that leaves you swaying.

In a quote: “This was what it sounded like to make it through these hundreds of American years, to sing through them. This was the sound of pain forgetting itself in song.”

You probably already have a copy of this from school laying around somewhere. You may have even read it in school. Either way, I would highly suggest returning to it, no matter how dog-eared your copy is. Austen was a genius for dozens of different reasons, and Pride and Prejudice shines still today because of how the story unfolds. People would have you believe 19th-century literature is proper and dry, but Austen’s work reads like delicious, juicy gossip that’s as fresh as ever.

In a quote: “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing other than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”

We’ll bet you first glimpsed the vibrant red cover of Catcher in the Rye some time in high school, but don’t let your memory fool you into thinking it’s a kids book — it’s quite possibly the best coming-of-age tale in all of literature. Salinger writes of the young and relatable protagonist Holden Caulfield and his first-person commentary on the world as he struggles between embracing adulthood and hiding in his childhood memories.

In a quote: “Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.”

“Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.”

Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right — I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.

You were probably made to read The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying in high school. While those are both classics in their own right, the Faulkner novel’s Faulkner novel is — in this writer’s humble opinion — Absalom, Absalom! There may be five different books going on in this one book (and probably more narrators). It is a fascinating — and I think ultimately more readable — study of Faulkner, Faulkner’s fiction, and Faulkner’s understanding of the American South. 

In a quote: “I was wrong. I admit it. I believed that there were things which still mattered just because they had mattered once. But I was wrong. Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive.”

Read Richard Wright. You should as often as you can, but you should at least once a year. A genius in his own time, Richard Wright was years ahead of social issues the United States still fails to grapple with, and Native Son is the place to begin and to return to.

In a quote: “Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.”

A modern classic. Beatty writes with a sense of humor and a sense of urgency unmatched by basically any of his contemporaries. While all of his books are hysterical, it’s when his absurdist humor dives so deep that it becomes social commentary that Beatty stands out, and none of his work does that more than The Sellout.

In a quote: “That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book — that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”

Let’s be honest, classic books can take a ton of time to read because the language is dated and the story isn’t plot-driven. I’m sneaking in this kinda-sorta classic novel by Alex Garland because it’s one of the best books of the early 2000s that will resurrect your passion for reading — and that’s the goal. A young guy sets out to backpack Thailand and finds an idyllic isolated beach of fellow world travelers. Like all paradises, perfection is short-lived and death, murder, and sickness follow. Garland was directly influenced by Lord of the Flies and Heart of Darkness, so if you like this semi-classic read, head to those two books next.

In a quote: “If I’d learned one thing from traveling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don’t talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.”

Tayari Jones’ 2018 novel was one of the most notable from the last decade. Hailing from Atlanta, Jones’ beautiful, tender, crushing novel takes place in the same city and shows a full portrait of relationships, race, and how these things can coexist in a society such as ours. An American Marriage was a finalist for the National Book Award, the winner of the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the winner of the 2019 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Fiction.

In a quote: “But home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch. You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.”

Need something less daunting than a novel? Try letters. Dig into “Letters to a Young Poet”– a collection of 10 prophetic letters penned by the profound and gifted German-language poet, Rainer Marie Rilke. These letters were reprinted after a student sent Rilke a selection of poems to be reviewed. The response was a series of insightful, true, creative, and wise revelations by the brilliant poet on solitude, nature, sadness, and love.

In a quote: “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart … live in the question.”

Much of what can be said about Ishiguro has already been said. One of the most decorated living authors, Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. The prize committee says it much better than I could: “In novels of great emotional force, [he] has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”

In a quote: “You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.”

Don’t read Nicholas Sparks to learn about love. Instead, take your notes from Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist Zen master who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. In his small and short book, True Love, Hanh outlines simple yet profound principles on love, kindness, joy, compassion, and freedom. His approach is clear and unadorned, which is a breath of air for a book about the big L-word. Offering unassuming techniques from the Buddhist tradition, this book is a fast, easy read that will change you forever.

In a quote: “… be there is the first step, and recognizing the presence of the other is the second step.”

Sci-fi meets antiwar fiction meets psychological and sociological ruminations combust across the page in Vonnegut’s classic. Billy Pilgrim travels back and forth through time after being kidnapped by aliens. Past clashes into present and rips back to past in a disorderly timeline that stitches together Pilgrim’s life, including his time as a World War II prisoner of war. There’s more, of course, but we don’t want to ruin anything.

In a quote: “So it goes.”

Do yourself a favor and get seven books in one collection. Each play more devastating and enthralling than the last, Sam Shepard’s voice as an American playwright is seminal, and his work is as funny as it is daunting, as challenging as it is compelling. Reading a play can feel as rewarding as reading a series of novels, and more often than not you’ll want to finish reading these plays in one sitting. 

In a quote: “When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook cover. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.”

There’s nothing wrong with having some American classics on your shelf. Don’t let people tell you the entire canon has to go, and don’t ever let someone tell you to get rid of your Capote classic. In Cold Blood changed American understanding of reportage, of what a novel can be, what a novel can do. There are a dozen new takeaways every time you read this book, and it never gets less compelling.

Lucy Ellman has created a (post)modern tome. An experimental, long, loud, unbelievable work of fiction, Ducks is unlike anything you’ve ever read and simultaneously a definitive document of what it felt like to be alive in Tr*mp’s America. Bursting off the page with neuroses and rage, Ducks is unlike anything you’ve ever read. 

In a quote: “the fact that it’s unbelievable but every single thing alive has its own center of being, and looks out on the world from that point of view, even a worm, or a jellyfish, hamsters, owls, the fact that even a leaf has feelings, the fact that you know the leaves are enjoying this warm sun going right through them,”

Teju Cole is one of the most important writers on the planet. Very few writers, especially since the turn of the century, have been able to capture the spirit of the flaneur in the way that Cole can. So much of Cole’s work is about traveling and about how to look at the world, and his novel, Open City, is the best place to start.

In a quote: “Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.”