My Favorite Things
Over the weekend, I was asked for my top five favorite books of all time. This is the equivalent of giving a starving man a menu. Nonetheless, once the day’s writing is done and the basketball or running or lifting are complete, I don’t really want to work in the yard anyway. So I sat down and started scrawling a list of potential top five books—ignoring nonfiction and story collections for the sake of simplicity (which I changed my mind about later)—and quickly had it narrowed down to twenty three “top five” books.
I’ve tried to list my favorite books below. Loosely, they are in some sort of chronological order, but just barely. I forced myself to choose only one book per writer so that you don’t have to read me listing F. Scott Fitzgerald over and over again. I’m sure I’m forgetting something really obvious.
Without additional winding up:
AN INCOMPLETE AND ALWAYS GROWING LIST OF MY FAVORITE BOOKS
Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Washington Square by Henry James
1984 by George Orwell
Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
Desperate Characters by Paula Fox
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
Brief Interviews with Hideous Man by David Foster Wallace
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter
The Millionaires by Inman Majors
A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The Privileges by Jonathan Dee
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