A few weeks ago, a friend asked me to list my top 100 books. It's hard, and it's taken some time, but I've finally done it. I would recommend this for everyone else too.
Disclaimers:
Some of the books probably have a significance for me that has nothing to do with the book itself. I have a feeling that if I reread some of them I would like them less. I bet there are books I've read and not liked that I would love now, and vice versa. However, I think that one of two things is still true about each of these books: either I would gladly reread it, or it has made a difference in how I view my life.
Many of these are books I love but wouldn't necessarily recommend for everyone. I like to call them "best friends." You don't necessarily even want to share them. You fear other people not appreciating them, or making weird judgments about you based on them. So be nice to me.
The decisive standard is that each book is a book I love. Sometimes I had to choose between (1) a book that I thought was well-written or that I learned something from, and (2) a book that gave me a pleasant feeling. If I had the latter book on hand I would want to stroke it and look at it and think about it and, most important of all, reread it. These books (2) beat the admirable but not beloved ones (1). Of course there are still some of those that made it through, I think.
Where there is one book by an obviously amazing author, it is my favorite one and it doesn't mean that the other books by that author weren't better than some of the other books I put on the list. I just didn't want Shakespeare to take up a tenth of the list, for example.
Of course The Secret Garden should be on any self-respecting list of favorite books, but I didn't want to put two Burnett books, and I liked A Little Princess better. But, on the other hand, I didn't dig My Name Is Asher Lev as much as everyone else seems to, so you can't always assume that another famous book by a listed author is also a favorite book of mine. I guess you will always just have to ask, which is good, because reading is so lonely and one of the purposes of a list like this is to incite conversation and arguments and sharing of experiences.
In some cases I just gave up on picking a favorite book and mentioned a whole series.
I started out listing only novels and thought I might make separate lists for other genres, but I just haven't read enough great books, so I've mixed them all together. It's mostly novels.
Some of these books aren't even that great. I need to read more.
Of course it's inconsistent to put two books by Roald Dahl and not by other people. I have no defense. At some point you just have to stop floundering and post.
And I'm too lazy to put them all in italics.
Enough disclaimers. Here you go:
Agee, A Death in the Family
Alcott, Little Women
Andersen, Fairy Tales
Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Angier, How to Stay Alive in the Woods
Asimov, Foundation
Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal
Cleary, Ramona books
Blyton, Adventure books
Bronte, Jane Eyre
Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself
Burnett, A Little Princess
Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Cather, My Antonia
Caudill, A Certain Small Shepherd
Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
Colette, La vagabonde
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Dahl, The Twits
Dahl, The Witches
Dinesen, Out of Africa
Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Duncan, The Brothers K
Edgerton, Walking Across Egypt
Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Eliot, Middlemarch
Enright, Gone-Away Lake
Erdrich, The Master Butchers Singing Club
Faulkner, Go Down, Moses
Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Flaubert, Salammbô
Forster, A Room with a View
Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Grimm, Fairy Tales
Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet
Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
Heller, Catch-22
Herbert, Dune
Herriott, All Creatures Great and Small
Higgins, The Eagle Has Landed
Jeffrey, People of the Book
Joyce, Ulysses
Kelly, The Trumpeter of Krakow
Lansing, Endurance
Latham, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch
Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Levine, The Mercy
Lewis, The Silver Chair
Lewis, Till We Have Faces
Lischer, Open Secrets
Lowry, Number the Stars
MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblins
Maclean, The Lonely Sea
Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel
Mauriac, Le noeud de vipères
McCourt, Angela's Ashes
Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Montgomery, Emily of New Moon
Morgan, The Truest Pleasure
Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Nabokov, Pale Fire
Paterson, The Master Puppeteer
Perkins, Haffertee Hamster Diamond
Potok, The Book of Lights
Potok, The Chosen
Qiu, Death of a Red Heroine
Robinson, Housekeeping
Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory
Rouaud, Les champs d'honneur
Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Saint-Exupéry, Le petit prince
Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Schlink, The Reader
Schultz, Peanuts
Shakespeare, King Lear
Sharp, The Turret
Smith, Fair and Tender Ladies
Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
Speare, The Witch of Blackbird Pond
Stevenson, Treasure Island
Stewart, Ordeal by Hunger
Stoppard, Arcadia
Streatfeild, Dancing Shoes
Sutcliff, The Shining Company
Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Voigt, Izzy, Willy-Nilly
Warren, All the King's Men
Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
White, The Once and Future King
White, The Trumpet of the Swan
Wilder, The Little House on the Prairie
Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters
Zolotow, Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present
4 comments:
Hello Tree of Valor:
I could not see how to e-mail you. I wanted to learn what you thought of my book that you were reading on Dec 22, 2005. Why wasn't it absolutely fascinating?
Alex
Bravo, Tree. A very thoughtful list, and it has many of my own favorites on it, too. Makes me want to look up the ones you list that I haven't read. Thank you!
Great job, Tree. Thanks for all that work. I think I might try this. How long did it take you?
Scharnhorst, I never answered your question. Compiling this list has taken years, actually, because I first tried to do it with a friend after college when the MLA's list of top 100 books came out and we decided to do one of our own. We never finished, but as we worked on that list I decided it would be good to have a list of all the books I had ever read in my life. This was done by looking through all the books on my bookshelf and my parents' bookshelves, digging out my college course syllabi, and even occasionally visiting the online catalogs of the public libraries I used as a child. Those are the hardest books to track down: the ones you've checked out of the library. Anyway, once you have a list of all the books you've read (however incomplete) it becomes much easier to make a list of your top 100. I'm not sure this was an ideal use of my time, but I think it was better than gambling or prostitution, which no doubt would have naturally occurred otherwise.
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