“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
You can trace my life's journey through the books I’ve held. Like footprints, the lightest and darkest moments of my life can be traced along the inked impressions and faded curvatures of lines under select passages in volumes that line my library walls. Like the poet Stephen Dunn, I, too, “was burned by books early and kept sidling up to the flame.”
I am an avid reader and book collector but more as a form of artistic neurosis, perhaps the same derangement that drove Umberto Eco’s collection of over 30,000+ volumes in his library:
‘He separates visitors into two categories: those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of those books have you read?’ and the others -a very small minority- who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.’ [2]
Unread books are tantamount to a foreign path forking into a strange wood, or an untried exotic dish, or evocative images of a distant country one has yet to visit. Read books are conversations with contemporaries (if you are reading any author, regardless of era, it is an intimate, contemporary conversation). Regarding these read books, I, like many voracious readers who experience a book or poem that ‘takes the top of your head off’ (Emily Dickinson), I want to share, I want my friends to experience the journey. Below you will find a growing collection of my most treasured reads, be they poems, short stories, novels, food writing, essays, or art books. Unlike Art Garfunkel, who has kept track of every book he has ever read, I have not kept record and, though many books are seared in my mind, for some I must find recourse in the tramontane territory of memory, but I hope to keep slowly adding to the list.
One important note: for a bibliophile, book lists are polarizing. Read any ‘Top 100′ booklist (100 Best Novels, Books of the Century, Best Fiction of the Millennium) and you’ll likely respond as I do: ‘How dare they not include [insert title]?’ or ‘How could they rate [insert title] first?’. Favorite books or stories are as polymorphous as the human race, splintering into multiple branches of genres, tastes, predilections, and personal appetite. ‘Favorite books’ are as particular as ‘favorite food': what I love you might hate, what you might be in the mood for now is not what you’ll be in the mood for later, but what we will both find is adventure in the attempt tried for ‘every reader is either a pausing wanderer or a traveler returned’ (Alberto Manguel).
'Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.' [3]
This list also represents a failed attempt at compiling my favorite one hundred books. Failed, because my brain short-circuited over the deliberation. What if, upon finishing the book I am currently reading (All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren), I decide it belongs on my list? Due to the constraints of only one hundred, I must constantly compare Tolstoy against Dostoevsky, Frost versus Eliot, Vidal against Buckley, or Stegner versus Faulkner. The constant addition and subtraction led to endless bickering in my head; instead, I chose an indolent escape: a booklist in perpetuity.
Book lists and personal libraries illuminate subterranean characteristics. David Bowie is clearly a lover of language and eccentricity (no surprise). Art Garfunkel is voracious and versatile; Neil Peart, cerebral and curious. More than once I have been at an estate sale, purchasing books from a previous owner’s library and as I peruse their shelves, I begin to know them: some collect medieval literature or books on Catholicism, most have a penchant for particular authors or specific genres. Book passions are as revealing as DNA. If you were to suddenly inherit my library, you would possess classic lit, well written modern lit, food books, art and photography books, scads of compilations of short stories, essays, and memoirs, many books on poetry, creativity/writing and history, philosophy and spirituality.
Ultimately, a favorite book discussion is a medium of exchange, a quid pro quo transacted in private conversation, so please consider this my part of the verbal exchange: ‘Have you read … ?’ or ‘You must read … !’ (I hope you let me know if I tipped you off to an exotic locale or a sublime dish you’ve never tasted and also, in return, tell me of the books I should read as well).
And bear in mind Francis Bacon’s counsel: ‘Some books are meant to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and digested with diligence and attention’.
Books I recommend (in random order):
Collected Poems, Jack Gilbert
At the Center of All Beauty, Fenton Johnson
Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert
The Red and the Black, Stendhal
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry
Silence, Shusaku Endo
House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday
Godric, Frederick Buechner
Holy The Firm, Annie Dillard
The Writing Life, Annie Dillard
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Selected Poems, Cszelaw Milosz
The Creative Process, Brewster Ghiselin
The Art of Eating, MFK Fisher
The Spectator Bird, Wallace Stegner
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
Dalva, Jim Harrison
Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, John Donne
Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard
The Diary of a Country Priest, Georges Bernanos
The Professor’s House, Willa Cather
Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson
Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck
Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon
Suttree, Cormac McCarthy
I, Claudius, Robert Graves
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
All the Live Little Things, Wallace Stegner
Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
The River Swimmer, Jim Harrison
Blood, Bones, and Butter, Gabrielle Hamilton
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain
Kafka on the Shore, Huraki Murakami
Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Don Quixote, Cervantes
The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesteron
Father Brown Stories, G. K. Chesterton
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Collected Fictions, Borges
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
The Raw and the Cooked, Jim Harrison
Our Story Begins, Tobias Wolff
Night, Elie Wiesel
Descent Into Hell, Charles Williams
The Collected Stories, Eudora Welty
The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
Darkness Visible, William Styron
The Complete Stories, Flannery O’Connor
Cancer Ward, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Tortilla Flat, John Steinbeck
Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
Arguably, Christopher Hitchens
Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, Christopher Hitchens
A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis
Stories of Three Decades, Thomas Mann
Perelandra, C. S. Lewis
Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis
That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis
The Moon and the Sixpence, M. Somerset Maugham
Collected Stories, M. Somerset Maugham
Dubliners, James Joyce
The War of Art, Steven Pressfield
Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
Remembering, Wendell Berry
Winter Tales, Isak Dinesen
The Collected Tales, Nikolai Gogol
A Moveable Feast, Ernst Hemingway
New Collected Poems, Wendell Berry
Peripheral Light, John Kinsella
The Intellectual Life, A. G. Sertillanges
A Treatise On Poetry, Czselaw Milosz
Slabs of the Sunburnt West, Carl Sandburg
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
The Half-Finished Heaven, Tomas Transtromer
Repair, C. K. Williams
The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate (Editor)
Against Joie De Vivre, Phillip Lopate
Windrose, Brewster Gheslin
The Complete Poems of Cavafy, C. P. Cavafy
The Bars of Atlantis, Durs Grunbein
In the Presence of the Sun, N. Scott Momaday
Collected Poems, Frederico Garcia Lorca
J. B., Archibald Macleish
The Penal Colony, Franz Kafka
The World in a Frame, Emily Dickinson/Will Barnet
Burning the Days, James Salter
United States Essays (Vol. 1), Gore Vidal
On Writing Well, William Zinsser
The Spirit of Writing, Mark Robert Waldman
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
Secret Ingredients, David Remnick
Breathing On Your Own, Richard Kehl
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The Invention of Morrel, Adolfo Bioy Casares
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby
Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee
On the Move, Oliver Sacks
M Train, Patti Smith
Narcissus and Goldmund, Herman Hesse
Steppenwolf: A Novel, Herman Hesse
The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), Herman Hesse
Barbarian Days, William Finnegan
Ham on Rye, Charles Bukowski
The Ancient Minstrel, Jim Harrison
Jupiter's Travels, Ted Simon
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, Cormac McCarthy
Stoner, John Williams
Suspended Sentences, Patrick Modiano
The Flame Throwers, Rachel Kushner
Essays - One, Lydia Davis
M Train, Patti Smith
[1] The Living, Annie Dillard | [2] Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb | [3] "Why Read The Classics" Italo Calvino
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