I've been working on a list my favorite books, but it's taking me a lot longer than I thought ... partly to decide what books should be on the list, and partly to describe the books and do them justice.
So here is Part 1 of my favorite books, with more to come at a later date.
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters
My blog is named in tribute to this wonderful book. See previous post here.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Like Spoon River, Life of Pi uses beautiful writing to tackle the most important issues: What is life and why does it matter? The philosophy is carefully cloaked in an adventure story: A young boy is shipwrecked and must share his life boat with a tiger. A real tiger. I found an excerpt you can read here.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
The book's characters include teenaged tennis prodigies, recovering alcoholics in South Boston, Quebecois wheelchair assassins and the Prettiest Girl of All Time. Infinite Jest is very long, very difficult, very funny, and very profound. Wallace's writing has a very kind, compassionate quality here that I don't see as much in some of his more recent work.
Collected Poems by T.S. Eliot
I read The Waste Land when I was 16, and it still startles me whenever I go back to it. It's so full of longing and sadness, but it also has a very dignified kind of hope. I've read that Eliot wanted to call this poem "He Do The Police in Different Voices" but Ezra Pound talked him out of it. Thank goodness for friends.
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