{"id":4798,"date":"2009-02-21T11:07:27","date_gmt":"2009-02-21T16:07:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=4798"},"modified":"2009-02-21T11:07:27","modified_gmt":"2009-02-21T16:07:27","slug":"books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=4798","title":{"rendered":"Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

These are my 50 favorite books. These are books I wouldn't feel bad about recommending; books I already have, or will probably, read multiple times. I do not claim these are the best books ever written.<\/p>\n

The order here is: off-the-top-of-my-head (or as I found them on my bookshelf). I didn't go back and do a real ranking, because I don't think I could. Because a book takes so long to read, as compared to listening to an album for example, it's hard to develop the kind of fine-grained familiarity and appreciation I think I need to be able to judge the 43th<\/sup> vs. the 44th<\/sup>. I might be able to rank the top five or ten - things I find truly outstanding<\/em>. But I didn't do that here.<\/p>\n

In other words: it's best if you just ignore the numbers. If it's on the list, I like it.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Jeff VanderMeer - City Of Saints And Madmen\n
  2. Mark Helprin - Memoir From Antproof Case\n
  3. China Mieville - Perdido Street Station\n
  4. Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow\n
  5. David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest\n
  6. The Lord Of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien\n
  7. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien\n
  8. Jonathan Lethem - Gun With Occasional Music\n
  9. Edward Gorey - The Ghastlycrumb Tinies\n
  10. J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter (series)\n
  11. John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy Of Dunces\n
  12. Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian\n
  13. Neil Stephenson - Cryptonomicon\n
  14. Frank Herbert - Dune\n
  15. W. Shakespeare - Hamlet\n
  16. W. Shakespeare - Othello\n
  17. Hunter S. Thompson - Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas\n
  18. Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles\n
  19. George Orwell - 1984\n
  20. Michael Chabon - The Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay\n
  21. Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn\n
  22. William Golding - Lord Of The Files\n
  23. Walter Van Tilburg Clark - The Oxbow Incident\n
  24. Larry Niven - Ringworld\n
  25. Anne Rice - Interview With The Vampire\n
  26. Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - The Mote in God's Eye\n
  27. Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange\n
  28. Joseph Heller - Catch 22\n
  29. Hermann Hesse - The Glass Bead Game\n
  30. Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird\n
  31. J.D. Salinger - The Catcher In The Rye\n
  32. Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita\n
  33. Jerzy Kosinski - The Painted Bird\n
  34. Stephen Crane - The Red Badge Of Courage\n
  35. Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint\n
  36. Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy\n
  37. Ken Kesey - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest\n
  38. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby\n
  39. Nick Hornby - High Fidelity\n
  40. Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland\n
  41. John Updike - Rabbit, Run\n
  42. Matt Ridley - The Red Queen\n
  43. Douglas Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach\n
  44. Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel\n
  45. James Gleick - Chaos\n
  46. Stephen Hawking - A Brief History Of Time\n
  47. Michael Azerrad - Our Band Could Be Your Life\n
  48. Murakami - The Wind-up Bird Chronicle\n
  49. Thomas Hardy - Tess Of the d'Urbervilles\n
  50. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game\n<\/ol>\n

    Any potentially embarrassing omissions ?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    These are my 50 favorite books. These are books I wouldn't feel bad about recommending; books I already have, or will probably, read multiple times. I do not claim these are the best books ever written. The order here is: off-the-top-of-my-head (or as I found them on my bookshelf). I didn't go back and do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}