Books Important to Me

These are books that I can remember that made the greatest impression on me --- not, certainly, the books I have read of the greatest literary merit. The list does not include plays or poems. This was very much off the top of my head, so I probably left out some important ones.

Most of these are very well known; a few are obscure. Some are by friends or family. As I say, it's a personal list.

Obviously, this displays my limitations conspicuously. The list here reflects a mental world that hardly goes beyond traditional Jewish material and modern Europe, and to a very large extent stays in England and the US of the last 250 years. The underrepresentation of women authors and the non-existence of authors who are people of color is also conspicuous. Hopefully I can somewhat remedy this in the years that remain to me.

In roughly chronological order by publication (I didn't check):

  1. The Hebrew Bible
  2. The Annals --- Tacitus
  3. Pirkei Avot
  4. The Passover Hagaddah
  5. The High Holidays Mahzor
  6. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire --- Edward Gibbon
  7. The Life of Samuel Johnson --- James Boswell
  8. Pride and Prejudice --- Jane Austen
  9. Emma --- Jane Austen
  10. The Red and the Black --- Stendhal
  11. Macaulay's Essays
  12. Walden --- Henry David Thoreau
  13. Uncle Tom's Cabin --- Harriet Beecher Stowe
  14. David Copperfield --- Charles Dickens
  15. Great Expectations --- Charles Dickens
  16. Barsetshire Chronicles --- Anthony Trollope
  17. Anna Karenina --- Leo Tolstoy
  18. The Brothers Karamazov --- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  19. Middlemarch --- George Eliot
  20. Life on the Mississippi --- Mark Twain
  21. Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass --- Lewis Carroll
  22. Treasure Island --- Robert Louis Stevenson
  23. Sherlock Holmes (collectively) --- Arthur Conan Doyle
  24. Plain Tales from the Hills --- Rudyard Kipling
  25. Short stories (collectively) --- Anton Chekhov
  26. The Story of the Treasure Seekers --- E. Nesbit
  27. The Time Machine --- H.G. Wells
  28. The Varieties of Religious Experience --- William James
  29. Little House series --- Laura Ingalls Wilder
  30. The Victorian Age in Literature --- G.K. Chesterton
  31. Eminent Victorians --- Lytton Strachey
  32. The Trial --- Franz Kafka
  33. Haircut and other stories --- Ring Lardner
  34. The Magic Mountain --- Thomas Mann
  35. Legends of the Jews --- Louis Ginsberg
  36. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man --- James Joyce
  37. The Life of Abraham Lincoln --- Carl Sandburg
  38. Right Ho, Jeeves --- P.G. Wodehouse
  39. The Hobbit --- J.R.R. Tolkien
  40. At Swim-Two-Birds --- Flann O'Brien
  41. Animal Farm --- George Orwell
  42. 1984 --- George Orwell
  43. Mimesis --- Erich Auerbach
  44. The Collected Essays, Letters and Journalism of George Orwell
  45. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits --- Bertrand Russell
  46. The History of Western Philosophy --- Bertrand Russell
  47. The Lord of the Rings --- J.R.R. Tolkien
  48. Unpopular Essays --- Bertrand Russell
  49. The World of Sholom Aleichem --- Maurice Samuel
  50. Certain People of the Book --- Maurice Samuel
  51. The Thurber Carnival --- James Thurber
  52. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions --- Thomas Kuhn
  53. Love in a Cold Climate --- Nancy Mitford
  54. The Devil in Massachusetts --- Marion Starkey
  55. The World of George Washington and The World of Abraham Lincoln -- Genevieve Foster
  56. The Lore of Large Numbers --- Philip Davis
  57. The Feynman Lectures on Physics --- Richard Feynman
  58. The Aleph --- Jorge Luis Borges
  59. Labyrinths --- Jorge Luis Borges
  60. Other Inquisitions --- Jorge Luis Borges
  61. The Pooh Perplex --- Frederick Crews
  62. Civilisation --- Kenneth Clark
  63. The Siege --- Clara Claiborne Park
  64. Ever Since Darwin and other books of essays --- Stephen Jay Gould
  65. The Power Broker --- Robert Caro
  66. Fifth Business --- Robertson Davies
  67. The Yeshiva --- Chaim Grade
  68. The Thread --- Philip Davis
  69. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid --- Douglas Hofstadter
  70. The Mathematical Experience --- Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh
  71. Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein --- Abraham Pais
  72. Parting the Waters --- Taylor Branch
  73. Samuel Johnson --- John Wain
  74. Harry Potter (the series) --- J.K. Rowling
  75. The Language Instinct --- Steven Pinker
  76. Life of Lyndon Johnson --- Robert Caro
  77. In the Land of Invented Languages --- Arika Okrent
  78. Geometry Revealed: A Jacob's Ladder of Modern Higher Geometry --- Marcel Berger
  79. Post-War --- Tony Judt
  80. Apollo's Angels --- Jennifer Homans