Recently a friend challenged me to post 7 favorite books on Facebook. Being an inveterate list maker, I liked this task. But it is surprisingly hard to narrow a lifetime of books down to seven favorites. Here is a list of nine – I posted the first seven.
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Jane Kenyon, Collected Poems
Lee Smith, Oral History
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man
It occurred to me that my list is lily-white, though it does include books by 2 Brits and 2 southerners. For poetry I would add books by Richard Hugo, Audre Lord, Derek Walcott, Nikki Giovanni, Tony Hoagland, William Stafford………..I could go on, but I won’t. (I’m not including any of the fine poetry books published by Moon Pie Press, but there are a lot to choose from.) I’m always interested in lists like “The 50 best novels ever written”, or “The 25 best movies you’ve never seen” or “100 books to read before you die”, etc. Sometimes the lists seem too arbitrary and even lame, but often I get good ideas. My personal reading challenge for 2018 is 125 books, and I’m at 90 right now on August 20. I wish you all happy reading.
