My Favorite Books

It seems appropriate to begin by spending a few minutes on some of my very favorite books.

Necessarily, this list is broken down into categories. People often talk about their favorite books, but whenever someone can identify one singular book as their “most” favorite, I am always suspicious.

I am able to compare a modern, literary fiction book against another. But how do I compare something like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (a sparse, dreary, post-apocalyptic journey novel) to, say, Winnie-the-Pooh (a light-hearted, adorable children’s fantasy)? Is one of these definitively better than the other? – not that I can see. They’re completely incomparable. “Apples and oranges” and all that.

That said, I’ve broken this down into five categories:

• Modern Fiction (basically, anything fictitious from approximately the 1950’s or so onward)
• Non-Modern Fiction (what we call “classics” fit here, as well as any book that’s older than roughly the 50’s).
• Children’s Books (note that Young Adult books do NOT go here—those go in “Modern Fiction”)
• Narrative Non-Fiction (true stories, such as memoirs and biographies; the narration of certain events or time periods, etc.)
• Non-Narrative Non-Fiction (books that aren’t really meant to be stories, such as essays, spirituality, etc.)

Of course any one of these can be subdivided in a thousand other ways; I’m mostly looking at broad strokes here.

Also, please keep in mind:

This list does NOT go into the “most influential books ever” or anything of the sort. It strictly sticks to the books I enjoy the most. For example: yes, I know that Homer’s Odyssey is absolutely indispensable to literature as we know it. I don’t contest this fact at all. Surely it is one of the most important books we have. I don’t really enjoy it, though—ergo, you won’t see it on this list.

And, finally, I've included links for all of the books to where you can buy them from BarnesandNoble.com - that way you can partake of the same joy in them as I have. :)

Tell me, friends: What are some of your favorites, and why?

So then. Here we go…

Modern Fiction

1. Paper Towns by John Green
2. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer
3. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
5. Looking for Alaska by John Green
6. Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
7. The Giver by Lois Lowry
8. Asylum for Nightface by Bruce Brooks
9. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
10. Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Non-Modern Fiction

1. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
2. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
3. Dracula by Bram Stoker*
4. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley*
5. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
6. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson*

*(If you'd like to pick up all three of these in one cheap, fell swoop, Signet made that really easy for you here.)

Children’s Books

1. Momo by Michael Ende
2. Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
3. The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne
4. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
5. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
6. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
7. The Little Prince by Antoine de St. Exupery
8. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Narrative Non-Fiction

1. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
2. The Bhagavad Gita (I mostly read the Prabhavananda/Isherwood translation)
3. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
4. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
5. Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer

Non-Narrative Non-Fiction

1. the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson*
2. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (I mostly read the Charles Muller translation)*
3. Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell
4. Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller
5. Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather

*(Considering that these two books are #’s 1 and 2 on this list, The Tao of Emerson – compiled by Richard Grossman – is an absolute gem of a book, though it should not be considered a replacement for the two books themselves.)