The Lists: Top 5 Books

In writing about Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, I realized that I've read some of the best books I've ever read just in this past year. Just for kicks, I thought I'd write up a quick list of my favorite books - books that I haven't just enjoyed reading, but that have inspired me to try something a little different with my own writing. This is by no means a definitive list - things'll likely shuffle around quite a bit, even in the next year.

So, in no particular order, here are Braddy's Favorite Books (for Right Now):

FAVORITE NOVELS:

1. Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev
2. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
3. Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
4. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
5. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

There's value even in the snootiest of literature.

FAVORITE POETRY COLLECTIONS:

1. Billy Collins, The Trouble with Poetry
2. Louise Glück, The Wild Iris
3. William Stafford, Even in Quiet Places
4. E.E. Cummings, E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962
5. Langston Hughes, Selected Poems of Langston Hughes

Just because poetry's obsolete, that doesn't make it not awesome.

FAVORITE YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE:

1. Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
2. Walter Dean Myers, Monster
3. Nancy Farmer, The House of the Scorpion
4. Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
5. Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451

Twenty-seven counts as young adult, right?

FAVORITE CHILDREN'S LITERATURE:

1. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
2. Jerry Spinelli, Maniac Magee
3. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
4. Neil Gaiman, Coraline
5. Sharon Creech, Love That Dog

How do I distinguish between children's lit and YA lit? Poorly.

FAVORITE GRAPHIC NOVELS:

1. David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp
2. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale
3. Grant Morrison, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth
4. Jonathan Hickman, The Nightly News
5. Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo v. 22: Tomoe's Story

Every list is better if Batman is on it at least once.

MISCELLANEOUS FAVORITES:

1. Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (memoir)
2. Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers (textbook)
3. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (play)
4. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia (nonfiction)
5. Shaun Tan, Tales from Outer Suburbia (picture book)

Some things can't be defined. For everything else, there's MasterCard.