If you are what you read, then this is an essential element of my story. A few years back, I bought about a half a ton of books that were important to me at different stages of my life. I didn’t go to Bauman’s to purchase pristine first editions for hundreds, even thousands of dollars. I’m not cheap. Well, I’m a little cheap. But I went out and bought used copies. I like books that look and feel like somebody actually read them, and maybe reread them.
My taste in books, and pretty much everything else, is all over the lot. I can prove it right now. Here are some of the books that mean something to me for all sorts of personal reasons.
The Tin Drum, Günter Grass
Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell Jr.
Setting Free the Bears, John Irving
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty
The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth
Eye of the Needle, Ken Follett
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest J. Gaines
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
Ninety-Two in the Shade and The Sporting Club, Thomas McGuane
Night Dogs, Kent Anderson
Double Indemnity, James M. Cain
A Time to Kill, John Grisham
Marathon Man, William Goldman
Anything by Don Winslow or Lee Child
Winter’s Bone, Daniel Woodrell
Goodbye, Columbus and When She Was Good, Philip Roth
A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley
Push, Sapphire
Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes
Different Seasons, Stephen King
Cogan’s Trade and The Friends of Eddie Coyle, George V. Higgins
Them, Joyce Carol Oates
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
The Virgil Flowers novels, John Sandford
The Forever War, Dexter Filkins
The Natural and The Fixer, Bernard Malamud
Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand
Steps and The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles
The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Birdy, William Wharton
Red Dragon, Thomas Harris
Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion
Fat City, Leonard Gardner
The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer
Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet
City of Night, John Rechy
Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone
Rage, Fear, and Peril, Bob Woodward
Anything by Ron Chernow
Nine Horses, Billy Collins
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers and Leaving Cheyenne, Larry McMurtry
How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, Sarah Bakewell
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne
I could go on, but yeah, I read a lot, and I really like books. All kinds of books.
But especially the ones that are dog-eared, beat-up, and look well loved and well read.