David Bowie (RIP) 100 favourite books are making the round of the internet and when I read it my first thought (after admiration for a fellow voracious reader with excellent taste) was that I wasn’t sure I could name 100 of my favourites, at least not without help. I adore books and reading and completely agree with Bowie when he says that his library “is his one treasured possession he would take to a deserted island” but ‘favourite’ is tricky. Favourite right now? Or favourite when I read it? Does it include excellent, important books that I’m glad exist and that I enjoyed reading for their quality of prose and thinking or just books I love? Does it include my favourite reference books? My most loved cookbooks?
Anyways, this is what I came up with:
1. The Passion, Jeanette Winterson
2. Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter
3. Like, Ali Smith
4. On the Road, Kerouac
5. Euphoria, Lily King
6. The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer
7. Ulysses, Joyce
8. The Waves, Woolf
9. Missed Connections, Sophie Blackall
10. Orlando, Woolf
11. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
12. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
13. The Lacuna, Kingsolver
14. The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver
15. The Waste Land, T.S.Eliot
16. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
17. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein
18. Fall on your Knees, Anne Marie MacDonald
19. Hotel World, Ali Smith
20. Alligator, Lisa Moore
21. Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman
22. Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy
23. Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut
24. The Time Traveller’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
25. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
26. Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King
27. The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley
28. Poetry of Blake
29. Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
30. The Way the Crow Flies, Anne Marie MacDonald
31. Picasso, Gertrude Stein
32. Everything and Nothing, Borges
33. Atlas of Remote Islands, Judith Schalansky
34. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Mark Haddon
35. The Odyssey, Homer
36. Island, Huxley (yes, I liked it better than Brave New World)
37. The Enchantress of Florence, Rushdie
38. The Hours, Michael Cunningham
39. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
40. The Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde
41. the Poetry of Neruda
42. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
43. Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson
44. Gut Symmetries, Jeannette Winterson
45. The Accidental, Ali Smith (this is my dream book – the one I wish I had written)
46. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
47. Waiting for the Man, Arjun Basu
48. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
49. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
50. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin
51. The Sandman Series, Neil Gaiman
52. Howl, Ginsberg
53. Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam
54. Daring Greatly, Brene Brown
55. Three Views of Crystal Water, Katherine Govier
56. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
57. Catch 22, Joseph Heller
58. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullogh (this was one of the first ‘adult’ books I read)
59. Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
60. Emperor Mollusk vs. The Sinister Brain, A. Lee Martinez
61. Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
62. Othello, Shakespeare
63. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell
64. Wild, Cheryl Strayed
65. The Apothecary, Maile Malloy
66. The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh
67. Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein
68. The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein
69. A Softer World, Joey Comeau
70. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
71. Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
72. Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
73. The World According to Garp, John Irving
74. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
75. My Favorite Things, Maira Kalman
76. Dream of a Common Language, Adrienne Rich
77. Poetry of Maya Angelou
78. The Sound of the Waves, Yukio Mishima
79. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
80. The Tempest, Shakespeare
81. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbary
82. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Kingsolver
83. The Minotaur Takes s Cigarette Break, Steven Sherill
84. Original Bliss, A.L. Kennedy
85. Clouded Leopard, Wade Davis
86. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
87. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Johnathan Safran Foer
Now it’s getting hard…
88. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
89. Poetry of Basho
90. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
91. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote
92. Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
93. The Man who Planted Trees, Jean Giono
94. Paradise, A.L. Kennedy
95. The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran
96. The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare
97. Love in the Time of the Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
98. The House of Spirits, Isabelle Allende
99. Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
100. A Moveable Feast, Hemmingway
In a lot of ways the list is skewed because I love some authors so much that everything they’ve written I like better than most books but I didn’t want the list to be comprised only of Vonnegut, Meg Wolitzer, Ali Smith, Neil Gaiman, Ann Patchett, Virginia Woolf and Barbara Kingsolver, so there you go.
Books I haven’t read yet that I think will probably make it:
- The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julien Jaynes
- The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell
- The White Bone, Barbara Gowdy
- A Story as Sharp as a Knife, Robert Bringhurst
Books I would have added at other points in my life:
- Johnathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach
- Interview with a Vampire, Anne Rice
- Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean Auel
- A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
- Tales of Ordinary Madness, Charles Bukowski
- Caprice, George Bowering
- A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
- The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
- Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins
- The Alchemist, Paulo Coehlo
- Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky
And a few that I just can’t stand:
- Moby Dick
- Heart of Darkness
- DaVinci Code
- Blindness
- Infinite Jest
- A Confederacy of Dunces
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius