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