I love reading lists of favorite books. But I need to break my list into two categories because there are my “all time favorites” and my current enthusiasms. Check my blog for my ongoing list of current favorites.
All Time Favorites:
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder, though Wilder’s The Eighth Day runs a close second. And Our Town is a masterpiece. Why is Wilder so little appreciated? If I was taught Wilder in school at all, he was presented as kind of an old fuddy-duddy, a little school-marmish, definitely old-fashioned. Thank heavens I stumbled on his correspondence with Gertrude Stein and their life-long friendship; two of the great “modernists,” reveling in each other’s company and artistic concerns.. This lead me to re-read all of his plays and introduced me to his novels.
King Lear. Shakespeare’s shortest, deepest, and for me, most devastating play. Line for line it is perfection.
Angels in America, Tony Kushner, currently being revived on Broadway. So if you missed it the first time around, now’s your chance.
Daniel Deronda, George Eliot. Eliot took on so many issues in this book and was terribly criticized. I think it’s her best.
Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf. I return to these two over and over for inspiration and am always asking, how does she do what she does so seamlessly?
Lost Illusions, Honore de Balzac. Published in 1837, it is so contemporary it will make your head spin. I love this book so much I went out and read everything else in Balzac’s The Human Comedy, but Lost Illusions is, for me, his masterpiece.
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett. Try reading this book out loud.
Anna Karenina, Tolstoy. I’m looking forward to reading this yet again in the new translation.
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel. A tour de force She deserves every prize she has won and will win. Extraordinary.
The Visible World, Mark Slouka. A feat of imagining. A beautiful, beautiful book.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz. Oscar Wao shook me up, broke my heart and dazzled me.
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton. Very hard to choose just one Wharton, but this is my favorite.
Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips. The world of this book was so compelling it took me days, not minutes, to leave it behind.
Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White. Not only a favorite book and a favorite author, but on the list for favorite last lines.