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Top 10 Favorite Books of All-Time
If you read this on Margie Clayman’s blog, it won’t be new to you so you can either skip to the comments or go on about your day. But if you didn’t, I throw down the challenge to you, as well.
Last summer I challenged Margie Clayman to write a blog post of her 10 favorite books.
She did. And she cheated.
Instead of her 10 favorite books, she wrote her favorite genres: Books about Abraham Lincoln, books about the civil war, guilty pleasure books, etc. Sure, there were only 10 categories and it was a really good list, but it was cheating none-the-less.
When I teased her about it, she challenged me to write my own top 10 list. It’s taken me 10 months to accept her challenge, but here I am!
It’s a good thing I waited, too. Because when she challenged me, I hadn’t read Fifty Shades of Grey yet and you would have missed out on three of my favorite books.
I kid. That was a terrible series. I’m mad at myself for reading all three of them. I have this really bad habit of having to finish everything I start. And that includes terrible trilogies.
Following is my real list of my 10 most favorite books of all time (in no particular order).
- My Name is Asher Lev. My mom gave this book to me many years ago. She wrote inside, “Read this book. It will make you happy.” And it did. Many times over. It’s a book about a boy deeply ingrained in Judaism who feels the need to render the world he knows and the pain he feels through painting and drawing. It’s full of Yiddish, which made me love it twice as much. I picked up certain phrases I use all the time from reading that book (oy vey).
- The Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath led a very distraught and sad life before she stuck her head in an oven and committed suicide, but was extremely talented. I sometimes wonder if you have to be that troubled (cough, Hemingway, in order to be a great writer). In this story, you’re drawn into the life of Esther Greenwood and watch as she has a complete breakdown. Some say this was written as Plath was doing the same in her own life.
- A Prayer for Owen Meany. I am a big, big John Irving fan, but I contend this is his very best book. In the summer of 1953, two boys are playing baseball when Owen Meany hits a foul ball, slamming it into the head of his friend’s mother, killing her instantly. What happens throughout the rest of Owen’s life is extraordinary, as he grapples with killing a his friend’s mom.
- The Fountainhead. I read this for the first time in high school. In fact, during parent teacher conferences that year, my AP English teacher said to my mom, “Is she always this motivated?” I’ve re-read it several times since then and it continues to hit my all-time favorite books. This was Ayn Rand’s first book and her best (IMO). It was my first introduction to how the business world treats women and what we can/should do about it.
- The Bluest Eye. I love Toni Morrison (just downloaded her newest book last night), but this will always be my favorite of her books. It’s about a very pretty young girl who no one notices. She really believes if she were special, perhaps if she had blue eyes, things would be different. Her parents would stop fighting, her brother would stop running away, and her dad would stop drinking. And then her dad does notice her…and rapes her.
- Under the Banner of Heaven. Growing up in Utah and being raised Mormon, I read this book in order to dispel any myths and rumors my friends have about the religion. What I found, instead, was an incredibly researched story about polygamy and brothers who killed a woman and her baby, claiming they had a commandment from God to do so. It’s the only non-fiction on my list, but the story seems so unreal it feels like you’re reading fiction.
- The Lovely Bones. Some of you may have seen this movie, but it’s nothing like the book. The book is always better though, right? This is a story about Susie Salmon, who is kidnapped, raped, and killed…and she spends many years stuck between earth and heaven, watching her family cope with their grief and loss. I know it doesn’t sound very enlightening, but the story will capture you from page one.
- An Object of Beauty. My dear friend and colleague, Martin Waxman, sent this book to me a couple of years ago for my birthday. Being a bit of a literature snob, I was reticent to read it because it’s by Steve Martin. Yes, the comedian. But what I discovered inside is the man has a talent for storytelling. It’s about Lacey Yeager, a young woman who begins her art career at Sotheby’s and soon finds herself climbing through the ranks with a lot of power and a lot of money. It’s not what you expect from Funny Man Martin.
- The Red Tent. This may seem like it’s a religious book, but it’s not. I say that because Dinah, who is only hinted at in the Book of Genesis in the Bible, is the main character. It tells a story, from her point-of-view, of what it was like to live as a woman back then. It’s compelling, interesting, and really well told.
- Me Talk Pretty One Day. I’ll never forget what I was doing when I read this book. I was working on The Catfish Institute account and we were doing a lot of work with media in New York City so I was back and forth nearly every week. A colleague recommended I read the book so I picked it up in an airport bookstore. It is so funny, I was laughing out loud while I read on the plane. In fact, I was laughing so hard (tears streaming down my face), I had to sit on it so I’d stop reading and embarrassing myself. No one quites comes as close to hilarity as David Sedaris.
So there you have. I’ve put my stake in the ground and these are my 10 most favorite books. What are yours?
I CANNOT believe I missed this blog post. I sucketh. But I love your list... and ya know wha? I think you're my new book buddy. I'm like you; I don't trust most people's recommendations in literature but if you're a fan of "The Bell Jar," you have taste IMO. :) I can only think of 5 right now, and let this serve as an IOU for the remaining:
1) "The English Patient" by Michael Ondaatje: The movie can't be compared to the book; I have never read a vivid story with such a soft use of the language. It almost makes you think you're reading something in Spanish or Italian because he writes in a more "romance English." I went to a book reading of his once, and it was the first and only time I ever cried listening to someone read their work. I also liked "Divisadero" a lot.
2) "Hopscotch" by Julio Cortazar: He's my favorite author because he has an amazing command of the (Spanish) language yet loves to break the rules--and does it so damn well. One thing about Hopscotch: you can read the book a million different ways, jumping around the chapters, and it still works, telling the same story in different ways. So creative. I emulate a lot of his writing style.
3) "Blow Up and Other Stories" also by Julio Cortazar: I recommend people unfamiliar with Cortazar to "test" him out by starting with this short story collection. His writing is fantastical but weaves it so well with reality you just have to believe. For example, in "Letters to a Young Lady in Paris" is a series of short letters written in first person by a guy renting out an apartment while the girl is gone. The thing is he realizes he's coughing up bunnies (yes the animals). Then it becomes a problem, but you go through it all with him--how he hides them in drawers, how they're chewing up her furniture (and he's apologizing profusely in the letters). It's hilarious but the way he describes it, makes it so realistic! I love it.
4) "The Genius of Hunger" by Diane Goodman: She was a professor of mine in college (and the only professor whose writing I liked) and this book was just so well done. She's a chef/caterer, so the way she describes food makes you hungry whether you ate or not. I'm including her because she's one of the few modern-day writers I like.
5) "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoyevsky: 'nuff said.
In writing this I realized there are more books/authors out there that I don't like. :\
@benSchmidt1 @SpinSucks @Upworthy Thx so much my fellow Canadian/Ontarian. Happy Canada Day Sunday!
@nittyGriddyBlog @spinsucks great list. Will be checking out A Prayer for Owen Meany. thanks for sharing!
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Hmmmmm...and here I thought I loved to read! I've only read two of these :(.
For some reason - some of my favorite books are from my childhood.
I loved The Scarlet Letter.
Lolita
I admit to liking the occasional John Grisham's when I'm in no mood to think to much.
Crime and Punishment
Any Coelho
Love Alexandre Dumas - especially The Count of Monte Cristo
Was a huge fan of poetry...Poe, Shakespeare and so many others.
Of Mice and Men
My stepfather's novel...but it's in French - La Belle Sunamite
Is it bad if I saw that I like Brown's Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons
2 books that I started reading a while back but got lazy and have yet to finish (although I enjoyed them thus far) are Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman and The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson.
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Steinback's Grapes of Wrath
Okay that's enough lol ;).
Hey Gin! Miss you!
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@Griddy I loved The Scarlet Letter, too. Did you see Easy A? If not, get a copy. Hilarious, modern day story with strong underpinings of that book.
I miss you!
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@Griddy Count of Monte Cristo is awesome! I was reading a book every 7-10 days, picked that one up, took me a month and then it was REALLY HARD to find a good book to read after. +1 for Count of Monte Cristo.
@econwriter5 I love that book too :)! I even liked the movie although needless to say that the book is almost always better.
I tend to be categorical in my likes. If I like an author, I read everything they have produced.
1. All Hemingway, especially the short stories. He suits my hyper-macho, Hank Moody alterego perfectly.
2. All Chris Tilghman, for his amazing character development, evocative location-beauty, and local flavor. His newe one is coming out and I'm beside myself.
3. Lovely Bones was a beautiful and compelling read. Help with with some other titles by Alice Sebold.
4. Cormac McCarthy, for his Hemingway-esque, manly simplicity and amazing story ideas.
5. Anything Nora Ephron--she will be sorely missed by the witty and witty-wannabes among us.
6. Anything Jack London. Pure adventure that taps my childhood aspirations of heroism.
7. Anything Jon Krakauer. Love his shit.
8. Jon Hart. The new, more literary John Grisham. Good drama without the need for a post-read justfication, e.g. "it's a good beach read, jeez!"
9. All Malcolm Gladwell. So insightful, yet has dramatic, page turning energy.
10. Marketing in the Round. :)
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@rustyspeidel See. That's cheating. The categories. That's what got Margie in trouble with last summer. Also, I have to edit your comment for swearing. #somepeoplewillneverlearn
But I have to say, with so many Hemingway fans, I try so hard. WHYYYYYYYY can't I read him? At least enjoyably?
@ginidietrich Point taken. But that's how I roll! I get on jags where I read everything someone wrote, then move on to the next.
@ginidietrich Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close. :-) I love that post. A gift that keeps giving. :-)
Gini, you SERIOUSLY GAVE ME A HEART ATTACK because that JOKE appeared before the break and I was like "no. NO. Gini cannot be publicly declaring her love for that mess. She was an English major for goodness' sake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I honestly exhaled in relief when I clicked into this. I was ready to get to "brakeing up with you" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTKI9OUGVGU
1. It, Stephen King
2. Master & Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
3. 1984, George Orwell
4. Anything by Edgar Allan Poe
5. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
6. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
8. The Golden Pot, E.T.A. Hoffman
9. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
10. The Devil and the White City, Erik Larson
@lainlalaland AWESOME list!! You liked Atlas Shrugged better than The Fountainhead?
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@ginidietrich Thanks, Gini! Haven't read The Fountainhead yet, though I'm assuming I'll like it. :) It's on my "to read," shelf, but then so are many other books!
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1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows (sorry, I'm young, they all made an impression!)
2. The Year of Magical thinking by Joan Didion
3. Just Kids by Patti Smith
4. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
5. Freakonomics by Levitt & Dubner
6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (I loved them all but this one in particular) by Stieg Larsson
8. Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close
9. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
10. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
I've gotten ideas from other lists!
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@kbmciver The Great Gatsby is one of my all time favorite books :)! Great choice! Cheers.
@ginidietrich @Griddy @kbmciver Forgot about him! I'm gonna pull that out of the attic!
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Yay! I have made notes off everyone's lists! I would add...
1) Shipping News by Annie Proulx
2) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
3) Giliead by Marilynne Robinson
4) Home also by Marilynne Robinson--read them in this order :)
5) The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
6) Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn (please, please...everyone...read this book!)
7) Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
8) English Creek by Ivan Doig
9) Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
10) Blindness by Jose Saramago tied with Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese and Little Bee by Chris Cleve.
That was kind of cheating. But can I give a shout out to Let the Great World Spin, too? Anyone who lives in New York or remembers the news story of the guy who walked the tight rope between the two towers of the world trade center in the early seventies should REALLY read Let The Great World Spin.
Ah, Gin, this was fun!
Oh...and for @bdorman264 ...I too, loved Cold Mountain and The Help. I just love books.
And Gini...I also confess that I read two of the Shades of Grey trilogy and couldn't read one more reference to lip biting...so I stopped. Love you!
@MimiMeredith You're the fourth person to recommend Blindness. I'm going to have to pick it up. I also loved Little Bee, but I was so disappointed in its ending. Is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close better than the movie? That was terrible. I couldn't even watch it all.
I hate that I have to finish books. I envy the fact that you were able to stop after the second book.
@ginidietrich @AbbieF might warn you that her book group called Blindness the book that kills book clubs. Either you love it; or you hate it. It is not a light read. I found so tremendously well written...just as @econwriter5 said, there's no punctuation. No quotation marks or paragraphs. It just wraps the story around you. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is spectacular. But I thought the movie was one of the best I've seen in years. For a perky person, I think I'm surprisingly open to a heartbreaking tale told well.
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@MimiMeredith @bdorman264 Blindness is a fantastic read. It took a few pages to get used to his lack of punctuation, but it made it all the more interesting.
@SarahRobinson I didn't love Atlas Shrugged as much, but I did relate back to it the past couple of years
Some of these are being added to my summer reading list RT @ginidietrich: It's here. My top 10 favorite fiction http://t.co/od0qveEM
This was tough. Have to wrack my brain over all the books I've read, so tried to cover a variety of areas. I've read them all more than once.
1. The Neon Bible
2. Winesburg, Ohio
3. The Mother Tongue
4. The Outlaw Sea
5. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (by @johnbattelle)
6. Hot Property: The Stealing of Ideas in the Age of Globalization
7. Where the Sidewalk Ends & A Light in the Attic
8. The Phantom Tollbooth
9. Where the Red Fern Grows
10. Millennium Trilogy
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Additions:
11. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
12. Born to Run
13. Island of Lost Maps
14. Delivered from Evil
15. Nightmares & Dreamscapes
16. The Alienist
17. Devil in a White City (mentioned by others and a very good read)
18. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means
19. Water for Elephants
20. Snow Crash
21. REAMDE
22. The Wrecking Crew
23. Time Won't Let Me
24. A Fraction of the Whole
25. Ghost Rider
26. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
27. Prince of Tides
28. South of Broad
29. Moneyball
30. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0
31. The Outlaw Sea
32. Goodbye, Darkness
33. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
34. I Was Told There'd Be Cake
35. Rule of the Bone
36. The Last Convertible
37. In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington
38. No Ordinary Time
39. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
40. Into Thin Air
OK. OK. I'll stop now. Until I think of more. ;)
@econwriter5 I also loved the Millennium trilogy! I hated the first American movie, but loved the Swedish versions. They were more to what I imagined while I read.
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@ginidietrich I saw the whole Swedish trilogy, uncut, on Netflix. Far better than the first American film. Actually, the first film in the Swedish series was OK. The first novel is kind of sluggish as it sets up the rest of the series. The rest of the Swedish films were good, though. It will be really interesting to see how the American adaption goes. I'm really curious how they'll work out some scenes, or cut entirely.
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - HST
Naked Lunch - William S Burroughs (junkie was great too)
Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
Conan - Robert E Howard
Foundation trilogy - Asimov
Art of War - Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching
Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung - Lester Bangs
Dune - Frank Herbert
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