doree:

• Renata Adler, Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker
• Kurt Andersen, et al, Spy: The Funny Years
• Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop 
• Bill Clegg, Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man
• Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem*
• Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
• Emily Gould, And the Heart Says Whatever
• Jay-Z, Decoded
• Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family
• Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life
• Charlie LeDuff, Work and Other Sins: Life in New York City and Thereabouts
• Philip Lopate, Writing New York
• Jonathan Mahler, Ladies and Gentlemen the Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City
• Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel
• New York Magazine, Landmark Writing from Four Decades of New York Magazine
• The New York Observer, The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots
• Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker
• David Remnick, Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker
• Liz Smith, Natural Blonde 
• Patti Smith, Just Kids
• Gay Talese, Honor Thy Father
• Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power 
• Barbara Walters, Audition 
• E.B. White, Writings from The New Yorker, 1927-1976
• Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers 
• Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation 
• Toby Young, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People 

*This is mostly a book about California. But I had to include it because of “Goodbye to All That.”

Books I Have Been Meaning to Read for Ages That Would Probably Be on This List If I Had:

• Christopher Buckley, Losing Mum and Pup
• Charlotte Curtis, The Rich and Other Atrocities
• Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
• Michael Gross, 740 Park
• David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña 

So. A couple things about these lists. I have not included more sort of straight-up histories of New York City, like Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace’s Gotham, or academic books, because I envisioned this list as the story of New York as told through memoir and personal narrative and magazine-style writing, stories that bring to life the characters and stories that make up the city. That is why I put a few anthologies on here and besides, those are the books I like to read best.

But – because I am sure I am forgetting many books anyway – what else would you put on here?