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 611. 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
