Favorite Books 1-100

It's 300th post on this blog! Whooo!!

I've made a sort of tradition for doing big lists to commemorate milestones in factors of one hundred. For the 100th post, I did my favorite movies of all time. For the 200th post, I did my favorite albums. Now I'm doing my 100 favorite books for good ol' 300.

I do mean books, too, not just novels. What you'll find in this list is mostly novels, but I've also sprinkled in short story collections, religious texts, memoirs, plays, picture books, and a bunch of of other random stuff, too. I took the idea of a "book" pretty broadly; some of these entries may have been published elsewhere under a different format first, but as long as it was published in book form and it's that book form in which I primarily interacted with the work, I counted it. So I hope there are some off-beat surprises here.

All that said, I did still have a brief moment of trepidation at seeing just how many canonical Great Novels this list includes. Would anyone be interested in reading a list full of the books that show up when you google "greatest books of all time?" But then I realized that the presence of so much of the canon on here is a reflection of my history as a student of English literature in both my graduate and undergraduate degrees. Another part of me felt self-conscious that I made so much room for weird corners, like the three Bloom County collections I included, until I realized that again, this is a reflection of an era in my early teens when I was a pretty dedicated Bloom County fan (and, moreover, a fan in general of newspaper comics). The same goes for pretty much every part of this list.

More so than my films and albums lists, this book list is a catalog of my life; I've only been seriously consuming movies and albums since my teens, but I've been devouring books since I was like three or four years old, when my parents would read them to me as I fell asleep at night. Within this list, you will find the books that shook me hard enough at the ages of four, ten, seventeen and so on that now, years later at almost twenty-nine, I can still remember my teeth rattling decades ago. Some of these I haven't revisited in years; others, I only have read within the past twenty-four months. But all of them meant something very important to me at one point or another, enough so that I remembered to put it on this list now. As bland and canonical and dead-white-guy-ish as this list gets, I look over it and see something personal in each of these books; the failures of this list are my own limitations as a reader, and the weird little cul-de-sacs this list takes are my own pet obsessions, either present or past. The strengths of this list are what nudge me toward becoming a better version of myself. Ask me tomorrow what my favorite books are, and the list will be a little different, because I change each day along with everyone else.

Enough blather. You came for a list. Here it is. I hope this encourages some of you to share your own memories with these books in the comments! Or just share your own favorite books. I'd love to check them out.

P.S. If I love a whole series of books, I cheated and listed the whole series as a single entry. If there are only one or two books I wanted to single out, I just included those specific book titles.

The List
Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Lloyd Alexander - The Chronicles of Prydain (1964-68)
Isabel Allende - The House of the Spirits (1982)
M. T. Anderson - Feed (2002)
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Beowulf (c. 975-1010 CE, Seamus Heaney translation: 1999)
The Bible (c. 745 BCE - 110 CE)
Jorge Luis Borges - Fictions (1944)
Ray Bradbury - The Illustrated Man (1951)
Berkeley Breathed - Billy and the Boingers Bootleg (1987)
Berkeley Breathed - Loose Tails (1983)
Berkeley Breathed - The Night of the Mary Kay Commandos (1989)
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights (1847)
Truman Capote - In Cold Blood (1966)
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game (1985)
Raymond Carver - Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories (1989)
Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
Arthur C. Clarke - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Arthur C. Clarke - Childhood's End (1953)
Beverly Cleary - Ramona the Pest (1968)
Beverly Cleary - Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (1981)
Ta-Nehisi Coates - We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017)
Susan Cooper - The Dark Is Rising Sequence (1965, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1977)
Robert Cormier - The Chocolate War (1974)
Robert Cormier - Eight Plus One (1980)
Rusel DeMaria and Johnny Lee Wilson - High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games (2002)
Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations (1861)
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment (1866)
P. D. Eastman - Go, Dog. Go! (1961)
Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BCE)
Rachel Held Evans - Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church (2015)
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying (1930)
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury (1929)
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)
Charles Earle Funke - Heavens to Betsy!: And Other Curious Sayings (1955)
Charles Earle Funke - Thereby Hangs a Tale: Stories of Curious Word Origins (1950)
Julie Glass - The Fly on the Ceiling: A Math Myth (1998)
William Golding - Lord of the Flies (1954)
Brian Greene - The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (1999)
Lorraine Hansberry - A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
Pete Hautman - Godless (2004)
Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time (1988)
Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Crockett Johnson - Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955)
James Joyce - Dubliners (1914)
Han Kang - The Vegetarian (2007)
Nikos Kazantzakis - The Last Temptation of Christ (1955)
Stephen King - Different Seasons (1982)
Stephen King - Dolores Claiborne (1992)
Stephen King - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000)
E. L. Konigsburg - From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967)
Anne Lamott - Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)
Gary Larson - The Far Side Gallery 2 (1986)
Gary Larson - The Far Side Gallery 3 (1988)
Gary Larson - The Prehistory of The Far Side: A 10th Anniversary Exhibit (1989)
Madeleine L'Engle - A Wind in the Door (1973)
Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
Philip Levine - What Work Is (1991)
C. S. Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)
Alan Lightman - Einstein's Dreams (1992)
Kelly Link - Magic for Beginners (2005)
Arnold Lobel - Frog and Toad Are Friends (1970)
Arnold Lobel - Frog and Toad Together (1972)
Robert McCloskey - Centerburg Tales (1951)
Robert McCloskey - Homer Price (1943)
Ian McEwan - Atonement (2001)
Lucy Maud Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables (1908)
Toni Morrison - Beloved (1987)
Randall Munroe - What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (2014)
Paul Murray - Skippy Dies (2010)
Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955)
Edward Packard - Choose Your Own Adventure #97: Through the Black Hole (1990)
Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials Trilogy (1995, 1997, 2000)
Marilynne Robinson - Gilead (2004)
J. K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005)
Karen Russell - Swamplandia! (2011)
J. D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis (2000, 2004)
Jon Scieszka - Math Curse (1995)
Jon Scieszka - The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1992)
Brian Selznick - The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007)
Dr. Seuss - The Sneetches and Other Stories (1961)
William Shakespeare - Twelfth Night, or What You Will (c. 1601-2)
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
William Sleator - Singularity (1985)
Lemony Snicket - A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999-2006)
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men (1937)
Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Hobbit (1937)
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
Natasha Trethewey - Native Guard (2006)
Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade (1969)
David Foster Wallace - Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005)
Bill Watterson - The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (2005)
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth (1905)
Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Malcolm X with Alex Haley - The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)