In response to my post about that Modern Library book list, my friend Sean says: "Any list designed by committee is kind of pointless - weird decisions that arise from the normalizing effect of group work, rather than weird decisions that arise from some interesting individual character tic." And I figured, hey, I'm all about the character tics. I therefore present you with Shasta's Official List of the Hundred Best Books Ever.*

* Except I limited it to fiction, short stories, drama, and poetry, so that cuts out a bunch of books. I also didn't include any books I haven't actually read, so that cuts out a whole bunch more. When I was trying to decide between two or more books, my decisions were ultimately based almost wholly on whimsy and shelf positioning, so that detracts somewhat from the force of my claim that these are the Best Books Ever. But they are damned good books!

In no particular order:

1. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
2. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
3. V. – Thomas Pynchon
4. The Complete Poems – Marianne Moore
5. The Collected Poems – Wallace Stevens
6. Opus Posthumous – Wallace Stevens
7. The Company She Keeps – Mary McCarthy
8. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
9. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
10. Beloved – Toni Morrison
11. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
12. Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
14. The Collected Poems – W.B. Yeats
15. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
16. The Roaring Girl – Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker
17. The Complete Works – William Shakespeare (cheating! I know. It’s my list and I can cheat if I want to.)
18. Collected Works - Flannery O’Connor
19. The Viking Portable Library – Dorothy Parker (I actually like her criticism better than her poetry or her short stories, but this edition gives you all three in one place.)
20. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
21. Troilus and Criseyde – Geoffrey Chaucer
22. Leaves of Grass (the big Norton edition) – Walt Whitman
23. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
24. The Old Order – Katherine Anne Porter
25. Volpone – Ben Jonson
26. Bartholomew Fair – Ben Jonson
27. The Alchemist – Ben Jonson
28. The Plague – Albert Camus
29. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
30. The Oz series – L. Frank Baum (So it’s been over twenty years since I read these. I loved them. Plus, that’s where ’s username comes from.)
31. Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White (Same comments as above. Except for the part about .)
32. White Noise – Don DeLillo
33. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
35. The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
36. Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
37. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
38. Dracula – Bram Stoker
39. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
40. The End of the Road – John Barth
41. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
42. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 – Elizabeth Bishop
43. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
44. Ramayana – as retold by William Buck
45. Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
46. The Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, and Other Stories – Franz Kafka (everybody knows about “The Metamorphosis,” but don’t miss “A Report to an Academy,” which is narrated by an ape who manages “to reach the cultural level of an average European.”)
47. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
48. Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
49. Passing – Nella Larsen
50. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
51. Paradise Lost – John Milton (It’s good. Really!)
52. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
53. Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda (Love Song of the Dark Lord) – trans. Barbara Stoler Miller
54. Gargantua and Pantagruel – Francois Rabelais
55. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
56. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
57. Collected Poems, 1909-1962 – T.S. Eliot
58. Light in August – William Faulkner
59. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
60. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
61. Ceremonial Songs – Pablo Neruda, trans. Maria Jacketti (I chose this one because it has the Spanish and English versions on facing pages, which is great if your level of Spanish, like mine, is “kind of used to speak it ten years ago”)
62. Mumbo Jumbo – Ishmael Reed
63. Lord Byron: The Major Works – Lord Byron
64. The Complete Poems – John Keats
65. Candide – Voltaire
66. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia – Sir Philip Sidney
67. Amphitryon – John Dryden
68. The Optimist’s Daughter – Eudora Welty
69. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
70. Gallathea – John Lyly
71. Galatea 2.2 – Richard Powers
72. The Complete Poems – Emily Dickinson
73. Selected Poems - e.e. cummings
74. Selected Poems - Langston Hughes
75. The Poetry of Robert Frost – Robert Frost (“Good fences make good neighbors” has become the slogan for fence companies across the country. Oh, the irony!)
76. Collected Poems 1947-1980 – Allen Ginsberg
77. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
78. My Antonia – Willa Cather
79. Pictures from Brueghel – William Carlos Williams
80. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
81. The Woman Warrior – Maxine Hong Kingston
82. The Way of the World – William Congreve
83. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
84. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll
85. Neuromancer – William Gibson
86. Flowers in the Attic – V.C. Andrews (Kidding! I did actually read this, though. What can I say? I was young.)
87. The Aeneid – Vergil (I cried when Dido killed herself. I probably shouldn’t admit stuff like that. But hell, I just admitted that I read Flowers in the Attic. It could only go uphill from there.)
88. Paul Auster – The New York Trilogy
89. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
90. The Complete Poems - Andrew Marvell
91. The Duchess of Malfi – John Webster
92. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer – Aemilia Lanyer
93. The Satyricon – Petronius
94. Utopia – Sir Thomas More
95. The Inferno – Dante
96. Going After Cacciato – Tim O’Brien
97. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
98. Provinces: Poems 1987-1991 – Czeslaw Milosz (my copy is signed, even!)
99. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
100. Dr. Faustus – Christopher Marlowe