Favorite Books
I am not given to making lists. I’m not that organized, and my library is a jumble of randomly shelved volumes on several double-stacked bookcases, with annexes in the bedroom closet and the attic of my in-laws’ home. Still, it sometimes happens that I’m asked for a top-ten or “desert island” list of favorite books. I can mumble out a few names or titles, but it all seems so arbitrary. In order to avoid embarrassment in future, I have compiled the following.
The Holy Trinity - the three authors whose works I value more than any others. If it were necessary (thankfully it’s not), I could live on their books alone:
Shakespeare
Montaigne
Cervantes
Fifty-ish Necessary Works of Fiction, Expository Writing or Biography, in No Particular Order - a list of other books that I have thoroughly enjoyed or which have meant a lot to me one way or another:
- A Sportsman’s Notebook, Ivan Turgenev
- A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor
- At Swim Two Birds, Flann O’Brien
- Chronicles of Wasted Time, Malcolm Muggeridge
- Collected Stories 1939-1976, Paul Bowles
- Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Dialogues, Paul Valery
- Dubliners, James Joyce
- Essays, George Orwell
- Fancies and Goodnights, John Collier
- Father and Son, Edmund Gosse
- Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
- God Bless You Mr Rosewater and Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
- Herzog, Saul Bellow
- Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
- Journal of Jules Renard
- Kidnapped and Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
- Life of Johnson, James Boswell
- Moby Dick, Typee, Pierre and Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville
- Mr Pye and Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake
- Notebooks, Joseph Joubert
- Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg
- Rabbit Run, Pigeon Feathers and Due Considerations, John Updike
- Religio Medici Etc, Thomas Browne
- Solaris and The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem
- Stoner, John Williams
- Stories and Tales, Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Collected Short Stories, Anton Chekhov
- Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
- The Arabian Nights, Burton trans.
- The Baron in the Trees and Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
- The Blood of the Lamb, Peter De Vries
- The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, G.B. Edwards
- The Fountain Overflows and Black Lamb Grey Falcon, Rebecca West
- The Goshawk and The Once and Future King, T.H. White
- The History of Mr Polly, H.G. Wells
- The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
- The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
- The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
- The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence
- The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell
- The Sound and the Fury and Absalom! Absalom!, William Faulkner
- The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz
- The Sword of Honor Trilogy, Evelyn Waugh
- The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay
- Three Tales and Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
- Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
- War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
- Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor
Poets in No Particular Order - a slim selection, I know:
Richard Wilbur
L.E. Sissman
Emily Dickinson
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Frank O’Hara
John Milton
Philip Larkin
Anthony Hecht
Robert Lowell
T.S. Eliot
W.B. Yeats
W.H. Auden
Wallace Stevens
Walt Whitman
William Blake
William Wordsworth (The Prelude)
