My Favourite Books

This is an even more personal selection than those of movies or music, since the question of what makes a book worthwhile seems the most subjective to each individual. Anyone who reads can see the vast gaps in my own reading; know that I’m open to any kinds of suggestions.

Anonymous

The Book of Job

Isaiah 

Ecclesiastes

Song of Solomon 

Margaret Atwood

The Blind Assassin (2000)

Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility (1811)

Pride and Prejudice (1813) 

Mansfield Park (1814) 

Emma (1815)

Persuasion (1817) 

James Baldwin

The Fire Next Time (1963)

Harold Bloom

The Book of J (1990)

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998)

The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible (2011)

Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights (1847)

Lewis Carroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Through the Looking Glass (1871)

Anton Chekhov

Stories

Joseph Conrad

Youth (1898)

Roald Dahl

Stories

Charles Dickens

Great Expecations (1861)

Emily Dickinson

Poems

T.S. Eliot

Preludes (1911)

Nora Ephron

Heartburn (1983)

Euripides

Medea (431 B.C.)

Hecabe (424 B.C.)

Electra (420 B.C.)

Heracles (416 B.C.)

Iphigenia in Tauris (414 B.C.)

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby (1925)

Stories

E.M. Forster

A Room With a View (1908)

Howards End (1910)

A Passage to India (1924)

Maurice (1971)

Viktor Frankl

Man's Search for Meaning (1946)

Stephen Fry

Mythos (2017)

Heroes (2018)

Troy (2020) 

Jean-Luc Godard

Godard on Godard (1968)

Nadine Gordimer

Essays and Reporting 

Stories

Thomas Hardy

Poems

Ernest Hemingway

Stories

Lee Israel

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2008)

Carl Jung

Answer to Job (1952)

John Keats

Poems

Rudyard Kipling

Stories

N.P. Van Wyk Louw

Gedigte (in Afrikaans)

Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall (2008)

Bring Up the Bodies (2012)

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (2014) 

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations

Cormac McCarthy

The Road (2006)

Jack Miles

God: A Biography (1995)

Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (2001) 

A.A. Milne

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)

The House at Pooh Corner (1928)

George Orwell

Essays

Dorothy Parker

Stories

Alex Ross

Listen to This (2010) 

Bertrand Russell

In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935)

George Saunders

Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)

Olive Schreiner

The Story of an African Farm (1883)

Seneca

Letters

William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet (1595)

The Merchant of Venice (1597)

Henry IV, Part I (1597)

Henry IV, Part II (1598)

Twelfth Night (1601)

Othello (1604)

Macbeth (1606)

The Tempest (1611) 

Sonnets 

George Bernard Shaw

Man and Superman (1903)

Pygmalion (1913)

Saint Joan (1923) 

Lionel Shriver

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003)

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

Leo Tolstoy

Stories

François Truffaut

The Films in My Life (1975)

Oscar Wilde

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

The Importance of Being Earnest (1898) 

John Williams

Stoner (1965)

Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway (1925)