Tuesday, September 14, 2021

My Top 61 Books -- Giving me delight is all they have in common.

 


As a member of several book groups, I occasionally see a list of the top 10, 25, 50, 100 books of all time or some time or recent time.  On nearly every list are books I love and books I loathe. 

So I decided to make my own list. It was supposed to be a top 25, but it got longer.  I stopped at 61.  This list presumes no expertise other than that of an avid reader who found these books especially delightful and therefore memorable.  

What's Your list?

My Top 61 
1. Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro 
2. Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro 
3. Master and Commander (21 novels), Patrick O’Brian 
4. Game of Thrones (5 novels), George RR Martin 
5. The Lord of the Rings (3 volumes), JRR Tolkien 
6. Prince, Machiavelli 
7. Divine Comedy, Dante 
8. Decameron, Boccaccio 
9. August 1914, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 
10. Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman 
11. Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy 
12. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy 
13. Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas 
14. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo 
15. Great Divorce, CS Lewis 
16. Till We Have Faces, CS Lewis 
17. Four Loves, CS Lewis 
18. Aeneid, Virgil 
19. Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt 
20. On Revolution, Hannah Arendt 
21. Human Condition, Hannah Arendt 
22. Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch 
23. Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Than Nguyen 
24. Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari 
25. Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond 
26. Winters Tale, Mark Helprin 
27. Paris in the Present Tense, Mark Helprin 
28. Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer 29.
These Truths, Jill Lepore 
30. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder 
31. Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi 
32. Identity, Milan Kundera 
33. Genius of Judaism, Bernard Henri-Levy 
34. Not in God’s Name, Jonathan Sacks 
35. A Canticle for Liebowitz, Arthur Miller Jr. 
36. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut 
37. Spacetime in Special Relativity, N. David Mermin 
38. Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville 
39. Stuff, Ivan Amato 
40. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 
41. Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy 
42. Time and the Art of Being, Robert Grudin 
43. Hamlet, William Shakespeare 
44. Richard III, William Shakespeare 
45. Laurus, Eugene Vodolazkin 
46. Six Days of War, Michael Oren 
47. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (4 novels) Douglas Adams 
48. Essays, George Orwell 
49. Animal Farm, George Orwell 
50. Iliad, Homer 
51. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman 
52. Free Will, Mark Balaguer 
53. Marlborough: His Life and Times, Winston Churchill 
54. Dune, Frank Herbert 
55. Noble Gases, Isaac Asimov 
56. Arthurian Romances, Chretien de Troyes 
57. Song of Roland 58. Intelligencer, Leslie Silbert 
59. Plot Against America, Philip Roth
60. Medea, Euripedes
61. Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius


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