My 50 Favorite Books

I had some friends over last weekend and a few had never seen my library, where I have around 750 books. Most were stunned that (1) I had so many books that take up an entire room and (2) That I even read anything at all that isn’t online. As we started to talk about books, something I could do for hours and hours I had a thought. If I could only have 50 books which 50 would I choose?

Really no rules to how I choose, other than I stayed away from business books and autobiographies. I also could only include one book from each author (which made things both easier and harder). These are in no specific order, just how I wrote them down:

1. Hamlet, William Shakespeare.
2. Republic, Plato
3. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
4. Running With Scissors, Augusten Burroughs.
5. Ulysses, James Joyce.
6. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury.
7. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut.
8. Neuromancer, William Gibson.
9. The Metamorphosis, Frank Kafka.
10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams.
11. The Stand, Stephen King.
12. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole.
13. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkein.
14. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera.
15. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
16. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger.
17. Creation, Gore Vidal.
18. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee.
19. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck.
20. Watership Down, Richard Adams.
21. Lolita, Vladamir Nobokov.
22. Life of Pi, Yann Martel.
23. Don Quixote, Miguel De Cervantes.
24. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
25. Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins.
26. In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead, James Lee Burke.
27. Founding Brothers, Joseph J. Ellis.
28. Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy.
29. Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman.
30. The Hot Zone, Richard Preston.
31. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer.
32. Mody Dick, Herman Melville.
33. The Call of the Wild, Jack London.
34. Walden, Henry David Thoreau.
35. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley.
36. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos Castaneda.
37. Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick.
38. Snow Falling On Cedars, David Guterson.
39. The Infinite Plan, Isabel Allende.
40. The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass.
41. The Art of War, Sun Tzu.
42. The Old Man And The Sea, Ernest Hemingway.
43. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius.
44. The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien.
45. My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor.
46. The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe.
47. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig.
48. Lamb, Christopher Moore.
49. Next Man Up, John Feinstein.
50. Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose.

Some other lists of books I’ve enjoyed recently:

• 100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library
• 30 Books Everyone Should Read Before Their 30th Birthday
• TIME magazine’s All-Time Greatest 100 Novel

So what did I miss? Share in the comments!