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
- The Night Circus - Erin Morganstern
- Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins
- Stranger Music: Selected Poems & Songs - Leonard Cohen
- Winter's Tale - Mark Helprin
- The Book of Illusions - Paul Auster
- The Secret History - Donna Tartt
- The Natural - Bernard Malamud
- Prozac Nation - Elizabeth Wurtzel
- Birds of America - Lorrie Moore
- The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
- Bust: The Guide To the New Girl Order - Debbie Stoller
- The Ground Beneath Her Feet - Salman Rushdie
- The Collected Poems - W.B. Yeats
- The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
- High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
- Less Than Zero - Bret Easton Ellis
- East of Eden - John Steinbeck
- The Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood
- An American Journey - Colin Powell
- Catcher in the Wry - Bob Uecker
- The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
- Empire Falls - Richard Russo
- Bel Canto - Ann Patchett
- The World According To Garp - John Irving
- Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Laroux
- The Risk Pool - Richard Russo
- Lady Chatterly's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
- Ball Four - Jim Bouton
- This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood
- The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
- On the Road - Jack Kerouac
- The Sociopath Next Door - Martha Stout, ph.d.
- Drinking, Smoking & Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times - Various Authors
- Blonde - Joyce Carol Oates
- Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail - Cheryl Strayed
- The Pacific and Other Stories - Mark Helprin
- The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
- The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
- The Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein
- 11/22/63 - Stephen King
- A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
- Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
- The Road - Cormac McCarthy
- Lullaby - Chuck Palaniuk
- Harry Potter - J.K. Rowling
- The Hitchkiders Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
- Glamourama - Bret Easton Ellis
- Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
- Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen
- Friday Night Lights - H.G. Bissinger
- The Tender Bar - J.R. Moehringer
- Selected Poems - Pablo Neruda
- The Ice Storm - Rick Moody
- V for Vendetta - Alan Moore
- Dry - Augusten Burroughs
- American Gods - Neil Gaiman
- The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
- Wicked - Gregory Maguire
- 1 Dead in Attic - Chris Rose
- Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris
- Carter Beats the Devil - Glen David Gold
- Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
- Choke - Chuck Palaniuk
- House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
- Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
- Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt
- Persuasion - Jane Austen
- The Girl's Guide to Hunting & Fishing - Melissa Bank
- Dracula - Bram Stoker
- Blankets - Craig Thompson
- A Place of Execution - Val McDermid
- The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M. Cain
- The Hours - Michael Cunningham
- Life of Pi - Yann Martel
- The Curious Incidence of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon
- The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
- Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
- Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood
- Delta of Venus - Anais Nin
- The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
- Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn
- The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success - Deepak Chopra
- The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
- Where the Sidewalk Ends - Shel Silverstein
- The Devil In the White City - Erik Larson
- One Day - David Nicolls
- Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche
- The Virgin Suicides - Jeffery Eugenides
- A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
- The Color Purple - Alice Walker
- It - Stephen King
- Happy Birthday To You! - Dr. Seuss
- Generation X - Douglas Coupland
- Love Poems, Letters, and Remedies of OVID - Ovid
- The Night Listener - Armistead Maupin
- Why Architecture Matters: Lessons in Chicago - Blair Kamin
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.
ReplyDeleteI'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.
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