The Breakdown
I read my whole list. Plus one Doug Wilson novel. And now I’ve started 1066 and all that.
Fiction: 165
Poetry: 13
Non – Fiction: 22
Longest Book: Orwell’s Essays. 1424 pages.
Shortest book: The Stranger by Albert Camus. 117 pages.
Average Book Length: 425 pages
Ten Best/Favorite/You Have to Read Books (in no particular order):
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. It is hilarious, interesting, fascinating, insightful and quotable.
The Joseph books by Thomas Mann. Which actually should have counted for four books but only counted as one on my list. They were delightful and engaging. I couldn’t wait to find out what would happen next…although I already *knew* the story.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler… by Italo Calvino. One word: amazing!
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I was a bit scared of this one but shouldn’t have been. Just go with it, it works in the end.
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. A biography structured around the periodic table. Cool, and historically interesting too.
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. So good, and the kind of multi-cultural stuff that’s actually interesting and uplifting rather than smooshy and emotional.
The Aeneid by Virgil. Just fantastic! Sturdy, strong and powerful. Latin here I come!
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Very intriguing and mysterious while resting on the most interesting of history.
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. I just picked it because it is a stand-alone book, all of Evelyn Waugh is great stuff.
The Confessions by St. Augustine. Just read it already!
But, but, where is Austen you ask! Where is Dante? What about Homer!!! Well, my top ten only includes books I hadn’t read before so even though I laughed aloud in the middle of a coffeehouse while finishing The Odyssey, even though I can’t live without Jane Eyre they didn’t make that list. So, in honor of the old favorites…
Top Ten Books I Re-Read:
All six Jane Austen novels. What? You expected me to pick one?
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. I’ve read it over 50 times. I’m not crazy, it’s that good.
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer. Read the Fitzgerald translations. So readable, so smooth, so amazing.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Everyone should have to read this before entering into a romantic relationship. What you take away from it will be colored by what you went in with, but the lessons are important nonetheless.
The Divine Comedy by Dante Allighieri. Yes Ted, I mean it.
The Scarlett Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy. The most satisfying denoument in the history of literature.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitzyn.
Animal Farm by George Orwell. Better than 1984 and highly recommended by C.S. Lewis.
The Republic by Plato. He is much easier to read than any philosophers that come after and he is clearer than any commentators.
Honorable Mentions:
Cormac McCarthy, Daddy Long-Legs by Jean Webster, Roald Dahl, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Charles Dickens, Raymond Chandler, W. Somerset Maugham, and Moby Dick.
The Worst:
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I’m not for censorship but if I was, this would be one of the first to go. What a waste of talent Vladimir!
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. I get it, this is the first novel in the history of the world! It was written by a woman! In Japan! In the eleventh century! But seriously, it drags while Genji sleeps with every single woman in Japan.
The Collected Works of Kahlil Gibran. Seriously, pot is the only thing that would have made this palatable. As in “Dude! that was so profound!”
The Everyman Anthology of Poetry for Children. I’m seriously going to hide this book from my children. I don’t want them trying to crawl back in the womb as one poem advocates. It hurt bad enough getting them out the first time.
Coming soon a post on the good and bad of reading this much.