Appreciations: 20 Novels That Have Stayed With Me

Over the weekend, a challenge was issued to myself and several other Facebook friends to come up with 10 books that have “stayed with me.” I groaned when I first saw this. How could I come up with as many as 10?

Before long, however, my mind had raced far past that original limit. Moreover, though the challenge was to list 10 “books” in general, I noticed that only two or three on the list were not fiction.

Eventually, I decided to tweak the assignment—not just go beyond 10, but to limit myself to novels. (At some point, I’ll list 10 favorite nonfiction books—a roster that will surely include Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Thomas Merton’s The Seven-Storey Mountain, and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.) I decided not simply to post this on Facebook, the origin of the assignment, but also—in a mad attempt at, if you will, leveraging my brand (or, better yet, conserving my energy!)—post this on my blog, too.

In one important sense, however, I have stuck closely to the original challenge. I’m not going to argue that these are the best or most important books I’ve ever read, nor even—beyond the first two choices—that their importance is in the exact order of how I’ve listed them.. But the operative verb in the title—“stayed”—determines these selections. Something about all of these novels have stayed in my recollection, even after a number of years—a scene, a style, a sensibility toward the world. 

1.  “The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (pictured)
2.  "The Sun Also Rises,” by Ernest Hemingway
3.  “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain
4.   “Appointment in Samarra,” by John O’Hara
5.  “Anna Karenina,” by Leo Tolstoy
6.   “Washington Square,” by Henry James
7.  “The Fixer,” by Bernard Malamud
8.  “The Way We Live Now,” by Anthony Trollope
9.  “Bright Lights, Big City,” by Jay McInerney
10.  “Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole
11.  “Bleak House,” by Charles Dickens
12.  “The Woman in White,” by Willkie Collins
13.  “Cousin Bette,” by Honore de Balzac
14.  “The House of Mirth,” by Edith Wharton
15.  “Revolutionary Road,” by Richard Yates
16.  “Eugene Onegin,” by Alexander Pushkin
17.   “You Can’t Go Home Again,” by Thomas Wolfe
18.  “Sophie’s Choice,” by William Styron
19.  "Tom Jones," by Henry Fielding
20. “Ulysses,” by James Joyce