Recently, a herniated disc in my back forced me to lay down on the couch for extended periods of time. With not much to do, I reach over to my bookshelf and pick up one of my favorite works of fiction. Pawing over the cover, I cast my mind back over the years and make a mental list of my top ten favorite novels. For most of these novels, my last reading is many years ago. Would the book that made my motor hum when I was twenty do the same as when I am fifty? Or is my assessment age correlated? Ideally, we presuppose classics transcend time and culture. Would that hold for my top ten?
Thus I commit, lying here on my couch, to re-read my top ten and report back my findings. In no particular order, these are:
Plus three short story collections:
And now that I've allowed short works of fiction, why can't I also add two philosophical works?
May as well throw in a few memoirs:
As the door is now wide open, let's add another top ten:
Okay! I was considering two other books, one set in Key West and another in New Orleans, but as I cannot recollect their names (and I don't want to resort to google), never mind. I got enough here to keep me busy anyway, way past the time I'll be getting up off this couch.
Thus I commit, lying here on my couch, to re-read my top ten and report back my findings. In no particular order, these are:
- Mickelsson's Ghosts, by John Gardener
- Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
- War and Peace, by Tolstoy
- Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky
- A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
- Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
- City on Fire, by Garth Risk Hallberg
- The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis
- Neuromancer, by William Gibson
- The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell
Plus three short story collections:
- The Jaguar Hunter, by Lucius Sheperd
- Easy in the Islands, by Bob Shacochis
- Dubliners, by James Joyce
And now that I've allowed short works of fiction, why can't I also add two philosophical works?
- Ecclisiastes, The Bible
- The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus
May as well throw in a few memoirs:
- Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin
- Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt
- Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey
- The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls
As the door is now wide open, let's add another top ten:
- Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis
- Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
- The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling
- Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurty
- Don Quixote, by Cervantes
- Light in August, by Faulkner
- On The Road, by Jack Kerouac
- IQ84, by Haruki Murakami
- The MacGuffin, by Stanley Elkin
- World's End, by T.C. Boyle
Okay! I was considering two other books, one set in Key West and another in New Orleans, but as I cannot recollect their names (and I don't want to resort to google), never mind. I got enough here to keep me busy anyway, way past the time I'll be getting up off this couch.
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