Rather than bore you to tears with tales of packing and racing around trying to pretend that all the loose ends of a life can be tied up neatly in a couple of days, I will share something completely different. Browsing through some blogs, I came across one by a person who lives in Sunnyside: Reading Is My Superpower. I love that name. Anyway, she listed her top twenty all-time favorite books of fiction. While I liked her list, I think I have some differing ideas, although I also realized that I have a very hard time coming up with twenty books. So, here is my list of my ten all-time favorites:
1. Middlemarch by George Eliot. There simply is no better book ever written. Sorry, but it's true.
After this they are in no particular order of favourite-ness.
2. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (I also recommend the BBC dramatization of this book)
3. Stuart Little by E.B. White (actually, just about anything by E.B. White)
4. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki (not really fiction but a very good book)
5. Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
6. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
7. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
8. The Grey Islands by John Steffler
9 and 10. The whole series of books by Ngaio Marsh, P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Sayers
I never realized I was such a literary Anglophile until just now.
And there is a whole category of books that are only eluded to in that list and this is, novels written for ages 9-12: The Melendy stories, The Wheel on the School, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I could go on.
What's your list? Patti? Shawn? I would ask Helen but I know she doesn't like that.
5 comments:
Hmmmm. I'm gonna have to give that some thought. Great list, Robyn!
me too robyn. it's 11:00 at night and i'm afraid to get my brain working becasue it won't turn off enough to get to sleep... xxx
i've always said my #1 is ondaatje's coming through slaughter. now - only 9 more
Do you read the Tsock Tsarina's blog? she's a fan of dorothy Sayers too, and she is doing a "nine tailors" set.. (sock and sweater)
she can tell you more than you need to know about ring changing.. (she's knit it up!)
And i'll think about my favorite books.. (it tends to be the last on i read...) but there are some histories out there that i keep rereading..
(Right now, Reading Lolita in Terhan would make my list...)
Yes, you mentioned her Nine Tailor's sock. I have to look that up - I do love that book. And I finally read "Reading Lolita..." last summer. A wonderful book that made me love all those other books she talks about. Hey - I forgot Jane Eyre! Maybe there are 20 books after all...
I don't see any Greg and Kara books on this list. Not to mention Old Gregg--Bailey's--it's creamy!
Biiny
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