My 100 Favorite Books

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 and when I used to have time, I could easily finish a book a day.  Alas, writing books cuts into the reading time these days. But out of those several thousands of books that I've read, 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:

1. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini
2. The Art of Eating by MFK Fisher
3. The Histories by Herodotus
4. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
5. Andy Warhol Diaries by ed. Pat Hackett
6. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
7. The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
8. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
9. New and Collected Poems 1931-2001 by Czeslaw Milosz
10. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
11. Faint Promise of Rain by Anjali Mitter Duva
12. A Kiss for Maddelena by Christopher Castellani
13. The Aeneid by Virgil
14. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
15. Inferno by Dante
16. Journal of a Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
17. The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm
18. East O' The Sun and West O' The Moon
19. The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde
20. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
21. 1984 by George Orwell
22. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
23. Delta of Venus by Anais Nin
24. The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
25. The Collected Poems by Octavio Paz
26. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
27. The Greater Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov
28. Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
29. The Flounder by Gunter Grass
30. The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula K. LeGuin
31. Posession by A.S. Byatt
32. I Claudius by Robert Graves
33. On Writing by Stephen King
34. The Stand by Stephen King
35. Kakfa by the Shore by Haruki Marukami
36. Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
37. Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
38. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
39. The Flounder by Günter Grass
40. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
41. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
42. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
43. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
44. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
45. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers
46. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
47. The Song of Achilles by Madeleine Miller
48. The Library Book by Susan Orlean
49. The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
50. SPQR by Mary Beard
51. Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell
52. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
53. The Orphan's Tale (both books) by Catherynne Valente
54. The Satyricon by Petronius
55. The Odyssey by Homer (the Emily Wilson translation)
56. The Iliad by Homer
57. Metamorphosis by Ovid
58. Naturalis Historae by Pliny the Elder
59. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein
60. The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Georgio Vasari
61. Collected Works by William Shakespeare
62. Paradise Lost by John Milton
63. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
64. Poems by Lord George Gordon Byron
65. Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley
66. The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne
67. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
68. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
69. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
70. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
71. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
72. Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
73. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
74. Oryx & Crake series by Margaret Atwood
75. Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (series) by Tad Williams
76. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson
77. Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
78. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
79. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
80. The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
81. Complete Poems by e.e. cummings
82. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
83. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick
84. The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho
85. Vox by Nicholson Baker
86. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
87. Chocolat by Joanne Harris
88. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquival
89. House of Names by Colm Tóibín
90. The Decameron by Bocaccio
91. The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
92. The Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman
93. The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
94. Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone
95. Lolita by Nabokov
96. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
97. Annals and Histories by Tacitus
98. In the Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
99. Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry by Various
100. Herself by Madeleine L'Engle

How many of these are favorites of yours?