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50 Books Every Man Should Read Before Turning 50

If you take anything from this list, it is simply to read—whatever you want and as much as you can.

Headshot of Molly McArdleBy Molly McArdle
books for men
MH Illustration

No one should read any one book, but—books should be read. They educate you, move you, change you, stay with you. Across time and space and language and identity, they provide uncanny access into the minds of others, despite sometimes radical changes to text and context. Books can tell you a story you already know, a story you’ve never heard before, a story you didn’t know how to tell. The throughline here is that books are worth it, your time and effort and curiosity. If you take anything from this list, it is simply to read—whatever you want and as much as you can.

But lists are designed for—let’s call it discussion. It is one of the darkest of editorial arts, in part because it always works on everyone. Even I, a professional listmaker who dwelleth in the darkest and most cynical pits of ye olde content mines, will find my hackles raised by a regular degular VH1 countdown.

Lists reveal blindspots. They show your ass. And authoritative lists of “man books” still have a powerful whiskey-soda, baseball-mitt, Eames-chair whiff about them. We all want to surround ourselves with handsome mid-century furniture every now and again. But taking the prompt at face value: Which books will, in the year of our lord 2022, furnish you with what you need to know? Which will help you? Which will delight and surprise you? Which will impress people? Which will humble you? Which should you, a man under 50, read?

Well, if you ask me—

No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder

<em>No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us</em> by Rachel Louise Snyder

No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder

$17 at Bookshop

Look, I know I’m coming out of the gate strong with this one. But this list is arranged from newest to oldest, and anyway—trust me. One in three women and one in 10 men experience what Snyder calls “intimate partner terrorism” in this award-winning work of journalism. Marshaling all the narrative tools available to her, she makes an urgent case for common sense solutions.

How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones

<em>How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir</em> by Saeed Jones

How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones

When poets write prose—*chef’s kiss.* Jones found the germ of this memoir in an essay about a violent sexual encounter, when “the most beautiful man you have ever kissed tries to kill you.” But the core here is Jones’s relationship to his late mother, and how he came to insist upon his life and its intrinsic worth.

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight

<em>Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom</em> by David W. Blight

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight

In this empathetic, deeply researched, and fluently told biography, Blight tells the story of one of our greatest Americans. An unstinting thinker, an irresistible performer (what I would pay for a video recording of one of his early lectures), and a writer of incredible power, Douglass might have been a Milton or a Shakespeare if he had lived in another time and place. But, born into mortal danger and a world gripped by moral crisis, he became greater than either.

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Claudia Rankine Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

<em>Citizen: An American Lyric</em> by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Hard to believe that it’s been almost a decade since Rankine’s blockbuster work of poetry was first published. Easy—too easy—to see it’s as relevant as ever. As the poems move between Rankine’s own life, Serena Williams, and those murdered by America’s police state, the pressure builds: “Feel good. Feel better. Move forward. Let it go. Come on. Come on. Come on.”

Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man

<em>Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man</em>

Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man

Who better than McBee, who’d go on to become the first trans man to box in Madison Square Garden, to answer the question: what makes a man? No one has a keener eye for the subtleties—and blunt force—of American masculinity.

Glock: The Rise of America's Gun

<em>Glock: The Rise of America's Gun</em>

Glock: The Rise of America's Gun

A clear-eyed if often seamy history of the brand whose name has become a synecdoche for gun. One Austrian engineer's innovation, a cheaper and more reliable product, was a best seller: first to police departments, then to pop culture writ large, and finally Americans—to our great and enduring cost.

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imusti Red or Dead by David Peace

<em>Red or Dead</em> by David Peace

imusti Red or Dead by David Peace

Sports! This hagiographic and heavily stylized fictional biography follows Liverpool Football Club’s legendary manager, Bill Shankly, who reigned from 1959 to 1974. The first half of this doorstop novel is all underdog triumph, the second a meditation on age and obsolescence. Nothing is forever, least of all for athletes.

Scribner Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon

<em>Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity</em> by Andrew Solomon

Scribner Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon

A book for anyone who has ever been in a family: Solomon uses the framework of horizontal identities (difference between generations) to examine parent and child relationships in families living with rape, prodigy, autism, Deafness, dwarfism, and more. The book isn’t perfect, but its successes—searching, humble, deeply humane—make it essential.

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed

<em>Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar</em> by Cheryl Strayed

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed

You know when you are in your twenties and you need to break up with someone? Or your friend needs to break up with someone? This is a book for then—or whenever you need it. The Wild author and Oprah friend wrote this collection of columns while still struggling to make ends meet. Just because a lesson is basic doesn’t mean you don’t need to learn (or relearn) it: “You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind.”

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The Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante

The Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante

The Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante

Like many books on this list, this is—despite its many literary bonafides—a “girl book.” But allow me to tempt you with the pleasures of girl bookdom: There’s sex. There’s gross sex. There’s mafia. There’s guilt. There’s beach. There’s Italy. There’s shoes. There’s computer. There’s dolls. There’s communists. There’s salami. There’s murder. There’s you, wondering what would have happened if Lila, one of its two protagonists, had continued school; if Lenù, the other, hadn’t.

John Jeremiah Sullivan Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

<em>Pulphead</em> by John Jeremiah Sullivan

John Jeremiah Sullivan Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Sullivan started his magazine career in the twilight years of lush budgets and expansive mandates, and Pulphead—a reference to the paper magazines are printed on—is an unintentional relic of that time’s highs and lows. But Sullivan’s abiding curiosity and his willingness both to wade into the footnotes and to acknowledge structural realities that too often go unmentioned in this genre—class, race, gender—makes this collection worth the read.

Vintage Books The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

<em>The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration</em> by Isabel Wilkerson

Vintage Books The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

This masterful work of history and storytelling from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson tells the story of the Great Migration, the mass movement of Black Americans from dehumanizing treatment in the Jim Crow South to points north and west offering their own complicated tradeoffs. Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,200 people over the course of 15 years, channeling this collective history through the lives of three unforgettable individuals.

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Anderson, M. T. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party by M. T. Anderson

<em>The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party</em> by M. T. Anderson

Anderson, M. T. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party by M. T. Anderson

Yes, this is a young adult novel. It’s also a book (and series) readers of all ages can enjoy. Octavian is at the start a young enslaved man in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts living inside a horrific science experiment. By the end, he will have you rooting for the British. The British!

Vintage 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

<em>1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus</em> by Charles C. Mann

Vintage 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

Now 26% Off

History stays the same, but the way we tell it keeps changing. Many excellent new histories of the Americas have come out in recent years—see Pekka Hämäläinen’s Lakota America and The Comanche Empire and Lisa Brooks’s Our Beloved Kin:A New History of King Philip’s War—but this paradigm-shifting take on the Americans before Columbus remains one of the first, most popular, and most sweeping.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

<em>Gilead</em> by Marilynne Robinson

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Reverend John Ames, 76-years-old, writes a letter to his seven-year-old son in 1956 Gilead, Iowa, an all-white sundown town founded by his abolitionist grandfather. Has this man ever changed a diaper? Probably not. But this meditation on fatherhood goes hard on softness: a bittersweet tribute to the lives of men and what they believe.

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King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild

<em>King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa</em>  by Adam Hochschild

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild

A classic of the genre, this searing history of the Belgium monarch’s brutal seizure of the Congo Basin will make you angry and sad, whether its story is old news or fresh horror. Leopold’s monstrous regime of forced labor to maximize rubber production murdered an estimated 10 million and left many more maimed.

Target.com Use Only The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer

<em>The Savage Detectives</em> by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer

Target.com Use Only The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer

A novel of poets that begins in 1970s Mexico City, Bolaño’s breakout success in English is a little bit sci-fi, a little bit buddy comedy. a little bit road trip, a little bit scene diary. Like all of Bolaño’s writing, it is wonderfully alive, rude, hopeful—and fun. You can read Bret Easton Ellis and Jack Kerouac later.

Scribner How To Talk So Kids Will Listen by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

<em>How To Talk So Kids Will Listen</em> by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

Scribner How To Talk So Kids Will Listen by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

Now 39% Off

For all the kids in your life—and all the adults too—take a moment, be humble, and read this parenting book that is also filled with goofy-looking cartoons. You might find that you are a better talker (and listener) in all your conversations regardless of the age of your interlocutors.

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The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

<em>The Sparrow</em> by Mary Doria Russell

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

A standout example of the classic sci-fi subgenre: Jesuits in space. Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory picks up a beautiful song from beyond our solar system, and the Catholic Church decides to send a ship in secret to find its source. Like so much of the Catholic Church’s real-life history, in this imagined future everything that can go wrong does.

William Morrow & Company Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler

<em>Taking Charge of Your Fertility</em> by Toni Weschler

William Morrow & Company Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler

Now 34% Off

For men who menstruate and for men who know and love people who menstruate, this manual offers practical guidance for the two most common fertility-related goals: getting pregnant and not getting pregnant. While this advice is 100% useful (especially in a time of invasive—and potentially lethal—government control over bodies that can become pregnant), what makes the text truly essential is its easy, clear explanations of how bodies that menstruate work. All will likely learn something from this book, and all should know it.

Headshot of Molly McArdle
Molly McArdle

Molly McArdle is a writer and editor in New York City. She thinks a lot about work, culture, and place. She's written for GQ, Esquire, Travel + Leisure, Oxford American, The Believer, Bookforum, and many magazines that no longer exist. She was once Brooklyn Magazine's books editor and, even before that, a book review editor at Library Journal

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