My Top 10 Favorite Books
I’ve avoided writing a favorite-books post for as long as I’ve been blogging. I usually don’t have favorites. How can I choose a favorite song, for example, from the many great songs I’ve heard over the years? The same applies to books. Now, I am writing a top-10 post because I’ve decided it might be fun.
I started by defining criteria for my top 10. I first thought that to make my top 10, a book would have to be one I’ve read at least twice. That didn’t work. I considered using only books that I’ve rated with five stars, but I’ve given five stars to too many books. The best criterion I’ve come up with is subjective: a book must be one I remember.
After selecting my top 10, I saw that none had been written recently. So, an ex-post-facto criterion is that a book must be one that I’ve had time to appreciate and that has held up for me over the decades.
I was left with a completely subjective approach. Here are my top 10 favorite books that I remember, and that I had fun reading. After the list of my top 10, there is a list of honorable mentions; those books other than the top 10 to which I gave a five-star rating.
Lonesome Dove Larry McMurtry
Lonesome Dove is my favorite book and, in my opinion, the greatest of all Westerns. It was published in 1985 and won the next year’s Pulitzer Prize. It was the basis for a fine TV mini-series with Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall. McMurtry later wrote two prequels and a sequel to Lonesome Dove.
The Lord Of the Rings J.R. Tolkien
This is a trilogy. I’m not going to select one of the three as “best.” They are all equally excellent. The best fantasy I’ve read.
The Path To Power Robert Caro
This is the first volume of Caro’s five-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. The Path To Power was published in 1982. Since then, Caro has written three more volumes with the fifth yet to come.
I consider Caro the best biographer of the last half-century; certainly the best I have read. In 1974, he published The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses, an urban planner for New York City. The Modern Library selected it as one of the 100 greatest nonfiction books of the 20th Century.
Devil In a Blue Dress Walter Mosley
The above three are books in series, trilogies, or multi-volume works. Devil In a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley follows this pattern. It’s the first in a series of mystery novels with Easy Rawlins as an amateur detective in southern California. The series starts shortly after World War Two. The latest in the series was published in 2021 and takes Easy Rawlins’s story up to 1969. The series is not just a mystery series; it’s a portrait of African-American life in the Los Angeles area in the mid-20th Century.
Mosley has won critical acclaim outside the mystery genre. He is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, the group responsible for the Edgar Awards.
Master and Commander Patrick O’Brian
Following my pattern, this is the first book in a series that relates the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey and his physician-friend Stephen Maturin in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. This series and the Horatio Hornblower series by C. S. Forester are the best of this type of naval series
The Stand Stephen King
I could have selected other King novels. The Stand rose to the top in my memory. It’s a post-apocalyptic, fantasy road-trip thriller.
The Hound Of the Baskervilles A. Conan Doyle
Not necessarily one of my top 10 favorite books, but I felt I had to include a Sherlock Holmes story. I first read the entire Sherlock Holmes canon in high school. My dad had a two-volume set of the complete Sherlock Holmes. He and I read the short stories and novels at the same time.
The Pickwick Papers Charles Dickens
I had to include a Dickens book. I spent many hours checking out Dickens’s novels from the library of the University Of Wisconsin and reading them when I probably should have been studying. I’ve never regretted any of those hours. I was torn between David Copperfield and Pickwick Papers; or perhaps Nicholas Nickoby or Oliver Twist—hard to choose. I went with Pickwick Papers. The book begins as an episodic series of humorous vignettes in which Mr. Pickwick is portrayed as a buffon. As the novel progresses, it becomes plot- and character-driven, and Pickwick emerges as a gentleman of courage and integrity; a person one can use as a role model.
Tom Sawyer Mark Twain
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn gets all the attention. I’ve always preferred Tom Sawyer. Huckleberry Finn has too many glaring shortcomings; Tom Sawyer does not.
The Glory and the Dream William Manchester
One of Manchester’s many fine works of history. It is a history of America from 1932 to 1972. I read it when it was published. It was one of the books that got me into my love of history.
Honorable Mention
I was going to list all books I rated with five stars. There were too many, and I’m too lazy to list them all. This is just a sample.
Oates, Joyce Carol, We Were the Mulvaneys, also Bellefleur.
William Manchester, A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait Of an Age. Also any other book by Manchester, especially his biography of Winston Churchill.
Mann, Charles C., 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Also check out 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
Shelby, Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Volumes 1-3
Ballard, J.G., Empire Of the Sun
Carl, Sandburg, Edward Steichen (Editor), The Family of Man. This is the book that inspired me to take up photography. It is a photo essay illustrated by all the photographs from an exhibit in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Parks, Gordon, A Choice of Weapons, An autobiography. Parks’s weapon of choice was the camera
Taylor, Robert Gordon, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters An excellent novel that no longer gets much attention
Schaefer, Jack, Monte Walsh, My second favorite Western, only bettered by Lonesome Dove
Proulx, Annie, The Shipping News
Halberstam, David, The Best and the Brightest, about the main characters that took America into the Vietnam War.
Cather, Willa, O Pioneers! I could also list My Ántonia and Death Comes To the Archbishop
Figes, Orlando, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 This fine book is also about the Russian Civil War and how the Bolsheviks seized total control of Russia.
Irving, John, Last Night In Twisted River
Verghese, Abraham, The Covenant Of Water, also Cutting For Stone
Toole, John Kennedy, A Confederacy Of Dunces, a humorous gem
Malone Michael, Handling Sin, another humorous gem
