I made this list, or group of lists, about a year ago quite spontaneously lying in bed one night. The category titles were just as spontaneous, which is why some have two names. I have added a few books to each category over recent months in thinking about posting this. As in any taxonomy the categories are relatively artificial and some books are in more than one category. The goal was to catalog the books that have been most important to me in my life so far, for one reason or another. Most likely I am leaving out some obvious books that I have always loved and are essential, but this is the fun of spontaneity, which is at least a basic parameter (many of these are sentimental choices). Several times I have been asked what my favorite book is and have been taken aback; it is a pretty impossible question to answer. In a way this is my answer. Maybe one day I will do a “desert island” top five. For now you get this:
Language/Imagination
—Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll; Finnegan’s Wake – James Joyce; The Collected Edgar Allan Poe; The Tanakh; The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins; The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri; Fizzles – Samuel Beckett.
Guilt
—Resurrection – Leo Tolstoy; The Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne; A Burnt Out Case – Graham Greene; The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene; The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene; Scandal – Shusako Endo; Sonnets for Orpheus – Rainer Maria Rilke; Barabbas – Par Lagerkvist.
The World is Dense and Connected/The World is Wide and Reachable
— Cities of the Red Night – William S. Burroughs; Moby Dick – Herman Melville; Fragments – Heraclitus; The Atlas – William T. Vollmann; A Tomb for Boris Davidovitch – Danilo Kis; The Illuminatus Trilogy – Robert Anton Wilson; Process and Reality – Alfred North Whitehead.
Life is Real and Serious Things Matter
—War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy; The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky; God’s Bits of Wood – Ousmane Sembene; East of Eden – John Steinbeck; These Dreams of You – Steve Erickson; Rising Up and Rising Down – William T. Vollmann.
Artistic Inspiration
—Nothing Like The Sun – Anthony Burgess; Martin Eden – Jack London; Purgatorio – Dante Alighieri; The Diaries of Paul Klee; Noa Noa – Paul Gauguin; A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemmingway; The Post-Human Dada Guide – Andrei Codrescu; The Intimate Journals of Charles Baudelaire.
The Rational Hero
—A Wild Sheep Chase/Dance, Dance, Dance – Haruki Murakami; The Complete Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle; The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler; Playback – Raymond Chandler; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce; Faust – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; The Book of Job.
Deities, Heroes, and Litanies
—The Mahabharata; The Western Lands – William S. Burroughs; The Theogony – Hesiod; The Metamorphoses – Ovid; Labyrinths – Jorge Luis Borges; The Poetic Edda – Snorri Sturluson; The Encyclopedia of the Dead – Danilo Kis; Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams – Sylvia Plath.
Art/Illusion/Tragedy
—Zeroville – Steve Erickson; King Lear – William Shakespeare; A Midsummer’s Night Dream – William Shakespeare; Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes; The Complete Short Works of Kafka.
Courage/Duty
—For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway; Islands in the Stream – Ernest Hemingway; Martin Eden – Jack London; The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler; The Samurai – Shusako Endo; The Bhagavad-Gita; The Rifles – William T. Vollmann; The Crossing – Cormac McCarthy; Siddhartha – Herman Hesse; The Aeneid – Virgil.
Love/Ladies
—The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera; Tropic of Cancer/Capricorn – Henry Miller; The Atlas – William T. Vollmann; Twenty Love Poems and One Song of Despair – Pablo Neruda; Either/Or – Soren Kierkegaard; A Midsummer Night’s Dream – William Shakespeare; Nothing Like the Sun – Anthony Burgess; The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal; Nana – Emile Zola; The Stories of Anton Chekhov.
Darkness is Alluring
—The Dwarf – Par Lagerkvist; The Oresteia – Aeschylus; The Complete Edgar Allan Poe; Le Fleur du Mal – Charles Baudelaire; Tristessa – Jack Kerouac; A Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad; Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs; Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy.
I Gotta Go! or Restless Soul
—Vertigo – W.G. Sebald; Ulysses (poem) – Alfred Tennyson; The Atlas – William T. Vollmann; Riding Toward Everywhere – William T. Vollmann; Histories – Herodotus; Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer; The Complete Stories of Paul Bowles (Library of America); Travels with Herodotus – Ryszard Kapuscinski; Leo Africanus – Amin Maalouf;
I Want to Throw a Bomb/Thought Bomb
—The Illuminatus Trilogy – Robert Anton Wilson; Temporary Autonomous Zone – Hakim Bey; The Verso Book of Dissent; The Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fanon; The Autobiography of Malcolm X; The Post-Human Dada Guide – Andrei Codrescu; Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee – Dee Brown; Beyond Good and Evil – Friedrich Nietzsche.