I do not participate in any of the Facebook games. I will
not copy and paste a status statement. I don’t spend days listing things. I am
not going to use the list to the left to identify characters from Doctor Who,
and I have been giving to ALS for many years.
But the challenge to list ten books is very interesting to me. I love hearing about people’s favorite
books. I love talking about what I am reading. My kids are embarrassed when, on
vacation at a resort, I look at what people around the pool are
reading.
Recently a former student and a former colleague invited me
to list my ten books. Several other friends have done the same. I loved reading
their lists, but I could not make a single list of ten
titles. Even when I made smaller lists, they were too long - and they were
constantly changing. Each time I looked at this post, I have added or removed a
title – or a list.
I made lots of lists! I made lists of young adult novels. I
made lists of books written by women. I made lists of books I have taught. I
made lists of guilty pleasures. Some were ten titles. Some were four titles,
and some were thirty-seven titles.
I settled on four lists. These were my most universal
categories. I chose the books based on a simple criteria: which books stick
with me. Which do I keep coming back to over and over? Whether I am teaching
them, talking about them, or connecting them to my current reading, which have
become my “classics” because of their staying power?
Here is my answer as of the moment I pressed the “publish”
button. It will change later, and I do not promise not to return to this post
and edit again – and again.
The lists are not in any particular order. I knew that if I
tried to actually do a first, second, third ranking, I would most likely create
a rupture in the time-space-book continuum.
So here are four lists of ten works that are important to
me:
Ten science fiction books:
Stranger
in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
Welcome
to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The
Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guinn
Speaker
for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
Calculating
God
by Robert Sawyer
Hyperion by
Dan Simmons
A
Canticle for Lebowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
1984 by
George Orwell
Brave
New World by Aldous Huxley
I
Sing the Body Electric by Ray Bradbury
Ten plays:
Hamlet by
William Shakespeare
Macbeth by
William Shakespeare
The
Good Person of Szechwan by Bertold Brecht
It is
So, If You Think So by Luigi Pirandello
No
Exit by Jean Paul Sartre
Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
‘Night
Mother by Marsha Norman
All
My Sons by Arthur Miller
Major
Barbara by George Bernard Shaw
The Madwomen on Challiot by Jean Giraudoux
Ten books that are not science fiction or plays:
Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer
The
Casebook of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Mountains
Beyond Mountains by Tracey Kidder
Lord
of the Flies by William Golding
A
Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The
Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
The
Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
The
Trial by Franz Kafka
On
Writing by Stephen King
The
Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris
Ten books I have read in the last few years that could
likely become my new classics in time:
Ancillary
Justice by Ann Leckie
Redshirts by John Scalzi
Bridge
of Birds by Barry Hughhart
Outliers by
Malcolm Gladwell
WWW.Watch by
Robert Sawyer
Little
Brother by Corey Doctorow
The
Namesake by Jhumpa Lahari
Crazy
U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting his Kid into College by
Andrew Ferguson
American
Gods by Neil Gaiman
The
Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
I could continue, but I will stop here. I will make more
lists, and I will keep reading. My to-read stack is tall and getting taller. A
reader’s list is never done!
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