Best Books I’ve Ever Read

People tend to ask me what my favorite book is a lot. it’s one of those standard questions – what’s your favorite color, what music  do you listen to, etc., etc. It’s really hard for me to pick one specific book as my favorite, since my favorites tend to change every month. But here are the best books I’ve ever read, books I read over and over again  and recommend to my friends and give to people as gifts. In no particular order:

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Ariel is the book that originally turned me onto poetry. For most of my life, having been force fed lots of crappy children’s poems and Robert Frost (oh, how I despise him), I found poetry to be a useless genre. But, the summer before my junior year, I read Ariel for a class assignment, and it was nothing like any poetry I’ve read before. Sylvia Plath’s poetry is beautiful, dark, and (most importantly) brief, never overstaying its welcome, and this is undoubtably her finest work, and my favorite book of poetry.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I love this book so much, I can’t even tell you. Oh, it’s about books and the magic of books and it’s about Germany during World War II, and it’s about unlikely friendships.  Really, anything by Markus Zusak is effortlessly wonderful, but this book really takes the cake. Oh, and it’s narrated by Death.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Two of my favorite authors combine their powers to produce the funniest book about the apocalypse you’ll ever read.  If you like Discworld, or the Sandman comics, or anything else by these two, you’ll love this book. I love how their two different styles effortlessly combine, the irreverence with which they treat Armageddon, and the characters. The characters really make this book shine.

The Odyssey by Homer

I read an expurgated copy of this in high school, and didn’t think much of it. But if you’ve read The Odyssey before and didn’t like it much, it’s because you were reading the wrong translation – try the one by Robert Fagles. This book has something for everyone

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

A wonderful book about World War II and the early comic book industry. A story of two cousins struggling to make it big in the funny papers business. This book is an especially delightful read if you’re a big comic book fan, as there’s tons of references to familiar characters and creators. Superman comes out looking like kind of a dick, though.

The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Woolf

I don’t know how popular or famous this book is, but I love it. I stumbled across it when I was in middle school on a trop to visit some family friends in Kentucky. I’ve never seen anyone else read it or talk about it (I can’t even convince my little sisters to pick it up), but The Mozart Season is a stunningly good young adult novel about a gifted young violinist’s summer. While practicing for a competition she’s entered, she learns about her family’s past. I reread this book once a year.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

The Martian Chronicles is a set of interlinked short stories about (what else) Mars – its early exploration, the people who settle there from Earth, and the long lost Martian civilization. Elegiac and kind of heartbreaking, this is one of the books that turned me onto science fiction in the first place.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Of course, I had to put something by William Shakespeare on here. There’s nothing about Hamlet that I could possibly say that a hundred wiser people haven’t already said. All I can say is, if you studied Shakespeare at all in school, do yourself a favor and go watch someone actually perform it. My senior class went on a field trip to watch a college perform Hamlet, which was enormously fun, though Gertrude had a really weird accent that I couldn’t quite place. That still bugs me. Anyway, I went and watched the Kenneth Branagh version after that, and it’s fabulous.  While the words on the page are magnificent, they really come alive when someone speaks them. At least, someone who’s not your seventy year old half cyborg AP English teacher.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is simply incomparable. The first book I read of hers was The Handmaid’s Tale (mostly because one of my English teacher’s recommended it to us with the addendum to not say that she’d done so, as it would upset our parents – after that, what teenager could resist?), but The Blind Assassin is my favorite of Atwood’s work because of the structure and a plot twist that I really did not see coming, though I probably should have. It’s the story of two sisters, intercut with letters and newspaper notices and passages from a pulpy old school science fiction book.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

This is the best book on writing I’ve ever read. Half autobiography, half instruction manual, Stephen King presents no nonsense advice that’s helpful to anyone who’s thinking about writing fiction as a career. I reread this sometimes when my writing gets particularly awful (in fact, I’m probably due for a reread right now), and I always take something new away. Read it regardless of whether you care for any of Mr. King’s usual fare – you won’t regret it.