My Favorite Books

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Sine qua non

• Richard Adams, Watership Down
• Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
• Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

The top 25, either favorite or most influential, from my first pages. No fighting, no biting.

1. Æ, The Avatars
2. Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride, Lady Oracle
3. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion
4. Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth
5. A.S. Byatt, Possession
6. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
7. Tom Carson, Gilligan's Wake
8. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
9. Tracey Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring
10. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
11. Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
12. John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
13. Crockett Johnson, Harold and the Purple Crayon
14. Norton Juster, The Phanton Tollbooth
15. Madeleine L'Engle, The Crosswicks Journals
16. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
17. A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner
18. Toni Morrison, Beloved and Song of Solomon
19. Rosamund Pilcher, The Shell Seekers
20. Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials
21. Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
22. Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool
23. José Saramago, Blindness and The Cave
24. Catherine Schine, The Evolution of Jane
25. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Demoted

• Jean Auel, The Clan of the Cave Bear
• Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
• Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
• William Kennedy, Ironweed

Lonely Girl Finds Her Spot

• Julie Edwards, Mandy
• Barbara Foster, Claudia
• Katherine Patterson, Jacob Have I Loved
• Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Changeling
• and
• Corinne Gerson, Tread Softly
• Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

Would I have learned to read without these? Would reading have meant anything without them?

• Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny
• Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
• Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, and The Sneetches and Other Stories, and so on.
  (Perhaps I don't read these again and again (as yes, I could Harold and the Purple Crayon), but their influence cannot be underestimated.)

Could I have been a proper teenager without these?

• Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
• Albert Camus, The Stranger and The Fall
• William Golding, The Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors
• J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, and Frannie and Zooey
• J.R.R.T. Tolkien, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings

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Last modified 24 January 2006

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