Friday, April 15, 2011

Favorite Ten Books?

Anybody want to play?

Collected Stories -- Flannery O'Connor

Jayber Crow -- Wendell Berry

Infinite Jest -- David Foster Wallace

Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens

The Brothers Karamazov -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler

The Lord of the Rings -- J.R.R. Tolkien

The Heart of the Matter -- Graham Greene

Silas Marner -- George Eliot

The Moviegoer -- Walker Percy

9 comments:

cnb said...

Sure, I'll play.

Leaving aside plays and poems (perhaps for no good reason), my favourites are:

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Till We Have Faces - C.S. Lewis
Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

Half of your list I have not read.

Someone Said said...

In no particular order.

Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri

Prince of Tides - Pat Conroy

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle

The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammitt

The Water Method Man - John Irving

Mother, Night - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The Winter of Our Discontent - John Steinbeck

Nine Stories - J.D. Salinger

High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

David S. said...

These are some great recommendations Andy. I am going to check out of the library and try to read the Graham Greene soon (to my shame the only book he has written that I've read was the Wind in the Willows).

Mark Moring said...

Andy, nothing by Clives Staples?

Off the top of my head:

CSL: Narnia, Great Divorce, Mere Christianity

JRRT: LOTR

JKR: Harry Potter

Lee: some novel about the death of a mockingbird

Smith: some novel about some tree growing somewhere in brooklyn

Wodehouse: ANYTHING Jeeves & Wooster (and the BBC series, starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, is to die for)

Arends: Wrestling with Angels

Yancey: What's So Amazing About Grace?

cnb said...

David, The Wind in the Willows was written by Kenneth Grahame, not by Graham Greene. It's a great book in any case. So is Andy's recommended The Heart of the Matter. They're awfully different though.

tamarahillmurphy.com said...

hmmmm...
An American Childhood - Annie Dillard
A Ring of Endless Light - Madeleine L'Engle
The Violent Bear It Away - Flannery O'Connor
Silence - Shusaku Endo
Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale - Frederick Buechner
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith
The Hidden Art of Homemaking - Edith Schaeffer
The Last Battle - C.S. Lewis
Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Peace Like A River - Leif Enger
Tender At the Bone - Ruth Reichl
The Cricket in Times Square - George Selden

(I like reading; not counting)

Joe Koch said...

7 Fiction:
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Suttree - Cormac McCarthy
Lancelot - Walker Percy
Geronimo Rex - Barry Hannah
If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem - William Faulkner
Collected Stories - Flannery O'Connor
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy

3 Non-fiction:
Mere Christianity - CS Lewis
The Cost of Discipleship - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Radical - David Platt

Rew said...

Off the top of my head....

Holy the Firm - Annie Dillard
Surprised by Joy - C.S. Lewis
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Confessions - St. Augustine
The Silmarillion - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Maytrees - Annie Dillard
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson

And I would probably round things out with additional works by Dillard, Lewis, or Tolkien; perhaps: For the Time Being, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Till We Have Faces, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia (especially "A Horse & His Boy"), The Lord of the Rings.

But it seems I have surpassed my limit.

Grant Wentzel said...

Great to see Greene on your list. He deserves some of my re-reading time. Ever notice Morrissey's references to Brighton Rock in "Now My Heart Is Full" off of Vauxhall & I?

I'm getting obscure, but I do love it when the wavelengths overlap. Like a Jungian thing.