My Top Ten Books
by Susan Russo Anderson
Lists are mini biographies, but like fireflies, they are flashy and ephemeral. I have a “Ten Favorite Books” list on Pinterest and sometimes it sports eleven or twelve book covers. It’s not that I can’t count, it’s that my favorites keep changing and I have a habit of hedging my bets or is it that I forget to delete erstwhile favorites?
That said, I like to make lists. Even more, I like to read the ones that others have made, like the recent article in The Guardian listing the fifty key moments in English Literature from Marlowe to JK Rowling.
Not that I agree with their summing up of English lit, but it got me thinking 1) about how lists reflect their author, not the quality or importance of the items on the list and, 2) about the key anythings in my life—key teachers, my ten milestones, ten things I learned about life by moving to Sheboygan, ten favorite foods or concerts or sailboats, it goes on and on.
There are a bunch of books, mostly novels, that have shaped my mind. Culled from all, these are my top ten books for today:
1. Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One’s Own
2. Jane Austen, Emma
3. Marcel Proust, In Search Of Lost Time
4. James Joyce, Ulysses
5. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
6. Anne Tyler, Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant
7. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
8. Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
9. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
10. Ann Beattie, Chilly Scenes of Winter
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Genre - Historical Mystery (PG13)
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