David Bowie's death hit me much harder than I could have anticipated. I was still basking in the amazingness of Blackstar, telling everyone I knew that they needed to go buy it, that I thought it was the best Bowie album yet. I certainly didn't expect it to be his last. I could write a whole post on how much he has impacted my life but I think everyone is starting to weary of the collective mourning that Bowie fans are going through. Instead, I wanted to share another place where he inspired me. A few years ago, he shared a list of his 100 favorite books, and of course, it's going around again. It was another poignant reminder of why I admired him so much. It got me to thinking about my own voracious reading habit. If I had to list my 100 favorites, what would they be? I found that it was a hard list to come up with--I have read SO many books. In recent years my reading time has dwindled but I bet on average, over the years, I have read 75-100 books a year. So which of those has really stayed with me?
These aren't in any particular order, except maybe the top five. It's a mix of literary, classics, fantasy, poetry, writing and food books. I know this list will continue to change in years to come, but for now, these are the books I would say are my very favorite:
- House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
- The Autobiography of Benevenuto Cellini by Benevenuto Cellini
- The Art of Eating by MFK Fisher
- The Histories by Herodotus
- Andy Warhol Diaries by ed. Pat Hackett
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt
- New and Collected Poems 1931-2001 by Czeslaw Milosz
- A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
- Faint Promise of Rain by Anjali Mitter Duva
- A Kiss for Maddelena by Christopher Castellani
- The Aeneid by Virgil
- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
- Inferno by Dante
- Journal of a Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
- The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm
- East O' The Sun and West O' The Moon
- The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde
- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Delta of Venus by Anais Nin
- The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
- The Collected Poems by Octavio Paz
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- The Greater Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov
- Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
- Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
- The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
- The Flounder by Gunter Grass
- The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula K. LeGuin
- Posession by A.S. Byatt
- The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Oryx & Crake series by Margaret Atwood
- I Claudius by Robert Graves
- On Writing by Stephen King
- The Stand by Stephen King
- Kakfa by the Shore by Haruki Marukami
- Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
- Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
- Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
- Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
- The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
- The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers
- The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
- Achilles by Madeleine Miller
- Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
- The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
- SPQR by Mary Beard
- Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- The Orphan's Tale (both books) by Catherynne Valente
- The Satyricon by Petronius
- The Odyssey by Homer
- The Iliad by Homer
- Metamorphosis by Ovid
- Naturalis Historae by Pliny the Elder
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein
- The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Georgio Vasari
- Collected Works by William Shakespeare
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
- Poems by Lord George Gordon Byron
- Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley
- The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
- Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
- Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (series) by Tad Williams
- The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson
- Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
- Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
- The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
- Complete Poems by e.e. cummings
- I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick
- The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho
- Vox by Nicholson Baker
- All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
- Choclat by Joanne Harris
- Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquival
- Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
- The Decameron by Bocaccio
- The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
- The Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman
- The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
- Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone
- Lolita by Nabokov
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
- Annals and Histories by Tacitus
- In the Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
- Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry by Various
- Herself by Madeleine L'Engle
How many of these are favorites of yours?