davidgagne.net

This list of my favorite books has been floating around my site for about a decade now … Originally I had it prefaced with:

“This is my list of the all-time best books ever written. If you get a chance, read at least one of these before you die. The WWW is great fun, TV is great, the radio is always playing, but nothing compares to a good book. Please, do yourself a favor, read. I’ll add more as I come across them, but the truly great are rare.”

I’ll revise that now to simply say that it’s a list of what were my favorite books in the 90s. Some of them I still consider faves. YMMV.

• Becket – Jean Anouilh
• Naked – David Sedaris
• Hamlet – William Shakespeare
• Johnny Tremain – Esther Forbes
• Lake Wobegon Days – Garrison Keillor
• Lempriere’s Dictionary – Lawrence Norfolk
• Love and Garbage – Ivan Klima
• Mosquito Coast – Paul Theroux
• My Side of the Mountain – Jean George
• No One Here Gets Out Alive – Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman
• Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and Survivor Type – Stephen King
• To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway
• The Vampire Lestat – Anne Rice (You must read this book if you ever hope to know anything about me.)
• Physics, Science, Math, Sociology, Psychology, etc.
  • Labyrinths of Reason and Prisoner’s Dilemma – William Poundstone
  • 13th Gen – Neil Howe and Bill Strauss
  • bots – Andrew Leonard
  • What Do You Care What Other People Think? – Richard Feynman
  • For Shame – the Loss of Common Decency in American Culture and Adcult – James Twitchell
  • The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition – Ed Regis
• Mystery
  • all of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels
  • Presumed Innocent – Scott Turow
  • Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
  • A Case of Need – Michael Crichton
• Sci-Fi
  • V – A.C. Crispin
  • The Cylon Death Machine – Glen A. Larson and Robert Thurston
  • Glory Lane – Alan Dean Foster
  • Han Solo at Stars’ End – Brian Daley