Top Ten plus some hangers on

Everyone is doing top ten lists.  This the season, I suppose.   But reading over Neil Patrick Harris’s list in the New York times made me think what are my favorites. And how often does that list change.  For me, there was no change from 2015.  That’s not to say I didn’t read some very good books.  Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises came close as did the Flannery O’Connor collection of short stories (while many of her stories would make my all time favorite short stories list, the collection falls just short). Robert Penn Warren’s Democracy and Poetry (which I reread this year) also ranks in the upper echelons but its more a collection of essays than book per se.  Perhaps I need time to marinate on them and my affinity to categories.  But so far, as of this post, nothing I read in 2015 cracked my all time list.  So that said, I am going to list my top ten books of all time here and then list ten books I plan to read for this coming year, some for the second time.

Top ten favorite books:

Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisenwood Bible

Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale

Fydor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Fydor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Louis Menard, The Metaphysical Club

Kazoo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

Saint Augustine, The Confessions

Jean Paul Sartre, The Words

Yann Martel, Life of Pi

Ten Books to Read

Homer’s, The Odyssey*

James Joyce, Ulysses

Ernest Hemmingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Margaret Atwood, The Heart Goes Last

Richard Ellman, Yeats: The Man and the Masks

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle*

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces*

Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities*

Theresa of Avilla, The Interior Castle

Flannery O’Connor, Prayer Journal

* indicates that I have read these before (perhaps they will make the all-time cut in 2016). 

What books make your top ten list and what are you planning to read in 2016?