Saturday, March 1, 2014

What Is Your Favorite Book?

I have trouble with the question.

The book that gave me the greatest pleasure on first reading was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and maybe that’s the one I should choose. It is also the book, along with Pride and Prejudice, The Odyssey, and Hamlet, that I’ve most often reread. Going back to a book again and again might qualify it as a favorite, though in these cases, except for the Sherlock Holmes, the rereading was for my teaching of these books. Another way to choose a favorite might be the desert island choice: if I could take only one book it would be the works of Shakespeare. If I could take two, the second one might be Don Quixote.

Okay, there are six favorites. Here are forty-four more, in no particular order. Tomorrow's list might be different.

Moby-Dick
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Six Easy Pieces
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Alice in Wonderland
Swann’s Way
Civilization and Its Discontents
Archy and Mehitabel
Richard Wilbur’s Poems
Endangered Pleasures
The World of Mr. Mulliner
The Killer Angels
How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time
Montaigne’s Essays
The Screwtape Letters
Drink to Yesterday and
A Toast to Tomorrow
Middlemarch
The Maltese Falcon
A Moveable Feast
Falling Through Space
A High Wind in Jamaica
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Treasure Island
Cry the Beloved Country
Gulliver’s Travels
Master and Commander
Ada
A Shropshire Lad
Pogo, volume 1
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form
The Moonstone
South Wind
The Importance of Being Earnest
Flannery O’Connor’s Stories
The Chronicles of Clovis
The Odes of Keats
Fathers and Sons
Catch-22
The Bookshop
The Origin of Species
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
The Oresteia
Tristram Shandy
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2 comments:

  1. UnknownMarch 7, 2014 at 6:18 PM

    Michael, here are a dozen of my favorite books. They tend toward science and science fiction but, not surprisingly, we have a couple in common.

    Lord of the Rings Trilogy
    Dune
    2001
    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    The Da Vinci Code
    Ringworld
    Cosmos
    Seeing in the Dark
    Burnham's Celestial Handbook
    Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
    The Annotated Alice (edited by Martin Gardner)
    A Short History of Nearly Everything

    Okay, so it's a bakers dozen. Some that are on your list are also on my list to read.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michael CohenMarch 8, 2014 at 9:21 PM

    Very interesting, Bob. I'm looking forward to the new Cosmos starting tomorrow night.

    ReplyDelete

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