When Parade asked me to compile a list of the best 75 books to celebrate the magazine's 75th anniversary, my first answer was, "Not a chance!" I could picture the mountains of furious letters complaining about all the great works of literature I'd left off. But when I asked the staff at Parnassus Books, the Nashville store I co-own with Karen Hayes, to take it on as a group project, they were game.
What we discovered in the process is how wildly we disagree about everything, except how much we love books. We wanted novels, sure, but we also wanted picture books, science
books, histories and young adult novels. We wanted things that were old, like The Old Man
and the Sea, but also things that were hot off the press, like When Breath Becomes Air.
