My Top Books

Here's yet another book Meme from your favorite Obsessive reader.  If you want to play along, list your own favorites, or paste this to your blog and tell everyone that I'm as wrong as I can possibly be.

I added all my new books to my library this holiday season and in the process I took a look at my entire collection.  I set aside my favorites in groups.  Here they are:

Tied for Number One:

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Those four are the top books I've ever read.  I can't choose a favorite from among them.  They all have made me cry and over the years I've read each of them multiple times.  It's no coincidence that they're all bittersweet tragedies and the hero doesn't win in the end, because in the end there are no real winners in life.  Reading those four books taught me how to look at the human condition and what weaknesses in our society need to be repaired.

The Second Group of Favorites:

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
1984 by George Orwell

I read some great books, don't I?  I hear The Time Traveler's Wife is going to be made into a movie this coming year.  Prepare to be disappointed.  There's just no way they're going to be able to do justice to the beauty and brilliance of two people in love moving in different directions in time.  But, I'll see it anyway.  Niffenegger is also a wonderful artist.  Orwell scares me.  He was right about it all, that's what scares me.  And Heller's cynical wit, his ability to point out the absurdity of strict regulation, was so brilliant that they made an entire movie and television series (M*A*S*H) just trying to capture the mood of his greatest book.

More after the Jump 

The Third Group of Favorites:

The Master Butcher's Singing Club by Louise Erdrich
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

A diverse group to say the least.  I felt like Ms. Erdrich was writing about my own family in her masterpiece.  It's like reading about people I know as if they were being described by a beautiful poetess.  She gave them spirit that in life I only suspected.  Hosseini pulls your heart through a war-torn abusive nation as he tells the saddest story he can imagine.  What would you do to avoid lobotomy?  Compared to the book, the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a shell of the true story.  And Fight Club . . . Fight Club.  They shouldn't have even made a movie if they were going to miss the point so completely like they did.  The book is the descent into madness told of both the main character and the society he inhabits.

And now a break from the Favorite Groups for:

My Favorite Series of All Time:

The Dark Tower by Stephen King

Oh yes.  Oh yes.  A journey through the author's mind.  How did he come up with all those ideas, all those stories over the years.  How did he manage to stay sane, if indeed he is.  This series is Fantasy, Science Fiction, and thriller and in it he links the hub of his creative process to all of his fictional works over time.  He talks to himself and in this series you find out that the self he talks to, talks back, and isn't very nice.  I was captured by the story and carried along helplessly to the end.  Amazing. 

The Fourth and Last Group of Favorites:

Finn by Jon Clinch
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Perfume by Patrick Suskind
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

What I've noticed is that despite my love for Science Fiction, there aren't that many on my list.  Flowers for Algernon, Slaughterhouse Five, The Time Traveler's Wife, The Dark Tower, and Doomsday Book are it.  And only one of those is openly sold in the Science Fiction section of the bookstore - Doomsday Book.  I do love sci-fi, but it has to be so good that it transcends the genre and gives me a great character to go with a great story. 

Anyway, those last eight books would certainly make a good reading list.  Go to it.

- rick, reader.

Comments

[a rose is a rose]

i have to give steven king another go round. i have tried to like him. i like his stories and his ideas. i just never much cared for his writing (style i guess). i did like the stand a great deal. the only book of his i read all of the way through.

the kite runner is next after i finish mistress of the art of death by ariana franklin. (about a 12th century woman doctor/csi)

oh, and my friend mark gave me 1/2 of the book he's writing -to read. it's non-fiction. it's about the horrible accident he was in (on avon mountain in ct). it's amazing (so far).

[Jane]

I've read (and loved) a whole bunch of these, and therefore am going to put the rest of them on my to-read list. Well, not all. I started and discarded The Kite Runner. Yuck.

[jane]

I just went to the bookstore in Block-e (closing! 25% off everything!) to buy Finn, and the guy looked it up and said it hasn't been released yet. I saw his screen, he had the right book. I knew that was weird and wrong, but I just walked away sadly.

:(

[CV Rick]

NO WAY!!

Here. It was released in 2006, reviewed by the NYT then. It's on Amazon, Powell's, Barnes and Noble. I saw it on the table in Barnes and Noble during the Holiday season.

[jane]

Hey, I started reading Finn yesterday. Oh, MAN is that a good book! The writing is so great, and the story, and the chronology... I am pysched.