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

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

Reading Books Adored By People I Adore

Breakfast of Champions III - January 2013 | Susan Geissler

One of my New Year's Resolutions for 2013 was to Read Books Adored By People I Adore. I talked in a previous blog post (Crowdsourcing Your Friends About Books) how this list evolved. The full list is included in the post and I removed all the works I previously read except for two that need revisiting (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes). 

Thank you to all my friends who helped put this list together for me via Facebook, text message, phone call, slips of paper, napkins, the back of your business card, mailing me the book, slipping the book into my home undetected, physically hitting me in the forehead with the book after you had too many cocktails, informing me that the main character is a total disaster and you suspected I wrote the book under a pseudonym, or that this may be the book to help me make sense of senseless things that have happened in life thus far.

I will think of each of you as I read all 52 of them, one for each week of 2013. And if you are looking for inspiration from me, here are my 100 favorite books ever: Susie's Top 100

1. Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut*
2. A Thousand Splendid Suns - Kahled Hosseini 
3. The Devil of Nanking - Mo Hayder
4. Armed to the Teeth With Lipstick - Blag Dalia
5. The End of Your Life Bookclub - Will Schwalbe*
6. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
7. John Dies At the End - David Wong*
8. Assholes (a theory) - James Aaron
9. Kiss Me Judas - Will Christopher Baer
10. Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis
11. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*
12. Life on Planet Rock: From Guns n' Roses to Nirvana, a Backstage Journey Through Rocks Most Debauched Decade - Lonn Friend
13. Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist's Quest To Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, Or Why Pie Is Not the Answer - Jen Lancaster
14. The Contortionist's Handbook - Craig Clevenger 
15. Redeeming Love - Francine Rivers 
16. Same Kind of Different As Me - Ron Hall
17. 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
18. You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death and Other Humiliations - Michael Ian Black
19. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't - Nate Silver
20. Guilty Pleasures - Laurell K. Hamilton*
21. The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower #1) - Stephen King*
22. Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness
23. The Color of Magic - Terry Pratchett*
24. The Memoirs of Cleopatra - Margaret George
25. Triggerfish Twist - Tim Dorsey
26. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller*
27. Assassination Nation - Sarah Vowell
28. Cheat: A Man's Guide To Infidelity - Bill Burr, Robert Kelly, Joe DeRosa
29. Traveling Mercies - Anne Lamott
30. A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin*
31. The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester*
32. Definitive H.P. Lovecraft - H.P. Lovecraft*
33. The Prince of Tides - Pat Conroy
34. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Woolf
35. Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman*
36. A Perfect Day for Bananafish - J.D. Salinger
37. Women - Charles Bukowski
38. World War Z - Max Brooks*
39. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man - John Perkins 
40. Amazing Things Will Happen - C.C. Chapman
41. Lit: A Memoir - Mary Karr
42. The Lightning Thief - Rick Riorden*
43. Middlesex - Jeffery Eugenides*
44. Outlander (Outlander #1) - Diana Gabaldon
45. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver*
46. We Were Soldiers Once...and Young - Harold Moore
47. Storm Front - Jim Butcher*
48. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho*
49. Ellen Foster - Kaye Gibbons
50. Towing Jehovah - James K. Morrow  
51. The Places In Between - Rory Stewart
52. The Art of Happiness - The Dalai Lama XIV*

* Denotes books I already own. 

Breakfast of Champions I - January 2013