On and off throughout 2011, I compiled a Top 50 list of books that geographers, especially graduate students, should read before entering professional geography. I put most of this list together myself, so it is skewed toward human, cultural, and critical geography, but I tried to balance it out by asking some of my fellow geographers at UT for input. Here is the final list of what we came up with. If you have additional suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments section! Keeping the list at 50 51 is just an arbitrary choice, so feel free to add more.
Updated 10 January 2013: Added Dwyer and Alderman 2008
| Book Title | Author (Last) | Author (First) |
| State of Exception | Agamben | Giorgio |
| Human Geography: An Essential Anthology | Agnew | John |
| Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects | Agrawal | Arun |
| The Age of Migration | Castles and Millar | |
| The Point is to Change It: Geographies of Hope and Survival in an Age of Crisis | Castree | Noel |
| The Crisis | Churchill | Winston |
| Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West | Cronon | William |
| Guns, Germs, and Steel | Diamond | Jared |
| Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory | Dwyer, Owen | & Alderman, Derek |
| The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 | Fagan | Brian |
| Shadowed Ground | Foote | Kenneth |
| Discipline and Punish | Foucault | Michel |
| The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language | Foucault | Michel |
| Hot, Flat, and Crowded | Friedman | Thomas |
| Constitution of Society | Giddens | Anthony |
| Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California | Gilmore | Ruth |
| The Prison Notebooks | Gramsci | Antonio |
| The Dictionary of Human Geography | Gregory et al | |
| Limits to Capital | Harvey | David |
| A Brief History of Neoliberalism | Harvey | David |
| Social Justice and the City | Harvey | David |
| Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography | Hay | Iain |
| The Death and Life of Great American Cities | Jacobs | Jane |
| On Becoming a Professional Geographer | Kenzer | Martin |
| On the Road | Kerouac | Jack |
| Thinking Geographically | Kitchin | Rob |
| Into the Wild | Krakauer | Jon |
| Times of Feast, Times of Famine | Ladurie | Emmanuel |
| Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Elusive Metropolis | Lang | Robert |
| The Production of Space | Lefebvre | Henri |
| Custodians of Place | Lewis | Paul |
| Call of the Wild | London | Jack |
| The Past is a Foreign Country | Lowenthal | David |
| The Prince | Machiavelli | Niccolo |
| Capital Vol. 1 | Marx | Karl |
| The Communist Manifesto | Marx | & Engels |
| Space, Place, and Gender | Massey | Doreen |
| For Space | Massey | Doreen |
| The Lie of the Land | Mitchell | Don |
| The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space | Mitchell | Don |
| Dance of the Dialectic | Ollman | Bertell |
| All Quiet on the Western Front | Remarque | Erich Maria |
| Geographies of Exclusion | Sibley | David |
| The Wealth of Nations | Smith | Adam |
| The Grapes of Wrath | Steinbeck | John |
| The Dictionary of Physical Geography | Thomas and Goudie | |
| Space and Place | Tuan | Yi-Fu |
| The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism | Weber | Max |
| The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces | Whyte | William |
| The Mapmakers | Wilford | John Noble |
| The Post American World | Zakaria | Fareed |
A PDF of this list is available here, for those interested in downloading it. (Thanks to Peggy Jackson for the suggestion.)
Map This! 
Noticed that you have ‘The Mapmakers’ on your list. Did you know that the author is a cousin of Karen? I have an autographed copy sitting on my bookshelf!
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Pretty cool! I did not know that, and apparently neither did she. I haven’t read that one, but it was recommended by a fellow grad student to help fill out the list.
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