Thursday’s Tome

As I was pondering what to write about this week, I spied a “reading plan” list of books at my desk.  While that particular list is not legal, I decided to see if Google could provide me with a list of legal novels.  I ran a search, and here’s an article from the ABA Journal on the “25 greatest law novels…ever!”

“The ABA Journal has been exploring a fascinating romance between lawyers and popular culture. We’ve traced this connection through films and plays and television, and the conclusion is inescapable: Not only do lawyers seem to love pop culture; pop culture seems to love lawyers back.

But this year we’re raising the bar. We’ve attempted to survey the world of literature to find the best portrayals of lawyers and the law. Our panel picked their personal favorites. Their choices defined for us the top 25 legal novels (actually 26, as you’ll see—there was a tie!).

These are stories that have endured for years or decades, or even generations. Many of them are familiar; some of them, less so. Among them are stories of life and death, courage and betrayal, loyalty and honor, revenge and redemption—in other words, human existence.”

And here’s the list:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
4. The Trial by Franz Kafka
5. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
6. Billy Budd by Herman Melville
7. Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow
8. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
9. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
10. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
11. The Paper Chase by John Jay Osborn Jr.
12. Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville
13. Native Son by Richard Wright
14. The Stranger by Albert Camus
15. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
16. A Time to Kill by John Grisham
17. The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
18. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
19. QB VII by Leon Uris
20. The Firm by John Grisham
21. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
22. The Handmaid’s Talei by Margaret Atwood
23. Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver
24. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
25. Old Filth by Jane Gardam
26. The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark