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.
- “The
Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (pictured)
- "The
Sun Also Rises,” by Ernest Hemingway
- “The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain
- “Appointment
in Samarra,” by John O’Hara
- “Anna
Karenina,” by Leo Tolstoy
- “Washington
Square,” by Henry James
- “The
Fixer,” by Bernard Malamud
- “The Way We Live Now,” by Anthony Trollope
- “Bright Lights, Big City,” by Jay McInerney
- “Confederacy
of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole
- “Bleak
House,” by Charles Dickens
- “The
Woman in White,” by Willkie Collins
- “Cousin Bette,” by Honore de Balzac
- “The
House of Mirth,” by Edith Wharton
- “Revolutionary
Road,” by Richard Yates
- “Eugene
Onegin,” by Alexander Pushkin
- “You
Can’t Go Home Again,” by Thomas Wolfe
- “Sophie’s
Choice,” by William Styron
- "Tom Jones," by Henry Fielding
- “Ulysses,”
by James Joyce
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This post started out with the headline “Rollin’ on the
River,” but the more I thought of the picture, the less likely the action of
this speedboat reminded me of “rollin’.”
“Rockin’” was more like it while keeping it in the rock ‘n’ roll idiom
that started it all.
“Your
enjoyment of the world is never right till every morning you awake in Heaven;
see yourself in your Father's Palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and
the air, as Celestial Joys: having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you
were among the Angels.”—English poet and Anglican priest Thomas Traherne (1636?-1674),
Centuries of Meditation, edited by Bertram Dobell (1908)
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I’m a sucker for a brass band in a small town on a
mild summer’s day. I got what I wanted early one afternoon this month, when I
photographed the Chautauqua Community Band and an appreciative crowd in
Bestor Plaza at the Chautauqua Institution. 
