Mark and I were in the bookstore the other day and we ended up with twelve books that we wanted to buy. We didn't go in there with any book in particular that we wanted to buy, but we just went around the store, picking up book after book that we "had to have." This is what we came up with:
1. The Top Ten: Writers Pick their Favorite Books (J. Peder Zane)
2. How to Read Literature like a Professor (Thomas Foster)
3. Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (Harold Bloom)
4. The Western Canon (Harold Bloom)
5. The Idiot (F. Dostoevsky)
6. Anna Karenina (L. Tolstoy)
7. The Interpretation of Dreams (S. Freud)
8. A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)
9. Traveling Mercies (Anne Lamott)
10. A History of God (K. Armstrong)
11. The Samurai (R. Samuel)
12.The Everything Baby Names Book: Pick the Perfect Name for Your Baby (June Rifkin)
The baby book is so we can choose correct names for our characters, not because we are having babies. The reason I put this list up is because Mark and I only want to take a limited number of our books to LA, and we want to know what everybody else's top book list would be. Feel free to put more or less, just tell us books we can't live without reading.
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6 comments:
I love lists. I also love walking around bookstores.
Here's my list in no particular order:
1. Destiny (Sally Beauman)
2. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
3. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
4. Washington Square (Henry James)
5. The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
6. Alias Grace (Margaret Atwood)
7. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
I'm sure there are others. I'd have to go home and look at my bookshelf though. Of all of them though, other than Destiny, I would recommend East of Eden. It was just a darn good read.
The House of Mirth is the next book on my list. I have it on my bedside table. Mark would love to work at a bookstore. We walked around Barnes and Noble for hours the other day. I wish the library here would be opened longer than two hours a day. Who can learn if the library is only open for two hours a day? Ridiculous.
There's also a film version of The House of Mirth that's a pretty good adaptation.
I love the smell of books. Especially if they're used and old.
Here are a few of my favorites:
1. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Joyce
2. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Betty Smith
3. Catcher in the Rye: Salinger
4. Mao II: DeLillo
5. Collected Short Stories of Saul Bellow
6. Anything by Dave Eggers
7. Anything by Hemingway (specifically In Our Time)
8. Crime and Punishment: Dostoevsky (if you want to feel like you're going insane, and so you can say you read it)
9. Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor
10. Best American Short Stories of the Century: ed. Updike (This is a pretty hefty book to carry to LA, though.)
I actually liked Age of Innocence better than House of Mirth, but that's just me. Liked 'em both a lot.
I also love lists! Here is mine:
1. As I Lay Dying - Faulkner
2. Light in August - Faulkner
3. East of Eden - Steinbeck
4. The Brothers Karamozov- Dostoevsky
5. Age of Innocence - Wharton
6. Washington Square - Wharton
7. Portrait of a Lady - James
8. Jane Eyre - Bronte
9. The Waves - Virginia Woolf
10. anything by David Sedaris
11. anything by Alice Munro
I could go on and on. I just read The Road by Cormac Macarthy and really liked it
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