Wednesday, January 23, 2013

My Top 100 Favorite Books - In No Particular Order

In the fifteen places I have lived in the last nineteen years of my life these are the books I have lovingly packed from house to house.  They have been read facing the very mountain range Steinbeck was describing in the town where he grew up, on the floor of a completely empty Atlanta airport at 3am, on a depressing roadtrip using Sedaris to combat an otherwise miserable drive with miserable people, in times of love Neruda and in times of heartbreak Ovid or Cohen.  

While I have read the majority of what most consider classics this is not that list, though there are a few in here. They are not in order of importance or genre, or alphabetical. Maybe you will enjoy some of them as well. They are all linked to their Goodread's Information Page. If you would like to follow me on Goodread's my page is here: Susan Geissler On Goodreads
    Susan Geissler
  1. The Night Circus - Erin Morganstern
  2. Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins
  3. Stranger Music: Selected Poems & Songs - Leonard Cohen
  4. Winter's Tale - Mark Helprin
  5. The Book of Illusions - Paul Auster
  6. The Secret History - Donna Tartt 
  7. The Natural - Bernard Malamud
  8. Prozac Nation - Elizabeth Wurtzel
  9. Birds of America - Lorrie Moore
  10. The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
  11. Bust: The Guide To the New Girl Order - Debbie Stoller
  12. The Ground Beneath Her Feet - Salman Rushdie
  13. The Collected Poems - W.B. Yeats 
  14. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
  15. High Fidelity - Nick Hornby 
  16. Less Than Zero - Bret Easton Ellis
  17. East of Eden - John Steinbeck 
  18. The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood
  19. An American Journey - Colin Powell 
  20. Catcher in the Wry - Bob Uecker 
  21. The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
  22. Empire Falls - Richard Russo
  23. Bel Canto - Ann Patchett 
  24. The World According To Garp - John Irving
  25. Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Laroux
  26. The Risk Pool - Richard Russo
  27. Lady Chatterly's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
  28. Ball Four - Jim Bouton 
  29. This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald
  30. Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood
  31. The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury 
  32. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
  33. The Sociopath Next Door - Martha Stout, ph.d.
  34. Drinking, Smoking & Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times - Various Authors
  35. Blonde - Joyce Carol Oates
  36. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail - Cheryl Strayed
  37. The Pacific and Other Stories - Mark Helprin
  38. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
  39. The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
  40. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
  41. The Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein
  42. 11/22/63 - Stephen King
  43. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
  44. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
  45. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
  46. Lullaby - Chuck Palaniuk 
  47. Harry Potter - J.K. Rowling
  48. The Hitchkiders Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
  49. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 
  50. Glamourama - Bret Easton Ellis
  51. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
  52. Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen
  53. Friday Night Lights - H.G. Bissinger
  54. The Tender Bar - J.R. Moehringer
  55. Selected Poems - Pablo Neruda 
  56. The Ice Storm - Rick Moody
  57. V for Vendetta - Alan Moore
  58. Dry - Augusten Burroughs
  59. American Gods - Neil Gaiman
  60. The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
  61. Wicked - Gregory Maguire
  62. 1 Dead in Attic - Chris Rose
  63. Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris
  64. Carter Beats the Devil - Glen David Gold
  65. Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
  66. Choke - Chuck Palaniuk 
  67. House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
  68. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
  69. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt
  70. Persuasion - Jane Austen
  71. The Girl's Guide to Hunting & Fishing - Melissa Bank
  72. Dracula - Bram Stoker 
  73. Blankets - Craig Thompson
  74. A Place of Execution - Val McDermid
  75. The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M. Cain
  76. The Hours - Michael Cunningham
  77. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
  78. The Curious Incidence of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon
  79. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
  80. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
  81. Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood
  82. Delta of Venus - Anais Nin
  83. The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
  84. Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn
  85. The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success - Deepak Chopra
  86. The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
  87. Where the Sidewalk Ends - Shel Silverstein
  88. The Devil In the White City - Erik Larson
  89. One Day - David Nicolls
  90. Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert
  91. Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche
  92. The Virgin Suicides - Jeffery Eugenides 
  93. A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
  94. The Color Purple - Alice Walker 
  95. It - Stephen King
  96. Happy Birthday To You! - Dr. Seuss
  97. Generation X - Douglas Coupland
  98. Love Poems, Letters, and Remedies of OVID - Ovid
  99. The Night Listener - Armistead Maupin
  100. Why Architecture Matters: Lessons in Chicago - Blair Kamin



2 comments:

  1. Wow. I've only read 16 of them. I liked Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed better than Eat, Pray, Love, though. Most of them are on my "To Read" list on Goodreads so there's that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm surprised only 16. I think I like Eat, Pray, Love slightly better because I related to that post-divorce apocalypse more than I can to the getting happy and settling down again part...since it hasn't happened yet. :-) I'm sure we have read a lot more of the same books since we both have been through a large amount of the classics. This is the list of what I keep around and want to read again and a again. Some I think I like as much for the writing as I do for the time and place I read them.

    ReplyDelete