My 48 Favorite Books For The 48 Years Of My Life

In celebration of my 48th birthday earlier this month, I am doing three special posts: first, this one on my 48 favorite books for the 48 years of my life; then, this Wednesday, my 48 favorite movies; and this Friday, my 48 favorite albums.

For today’s list, I decided to try to go from childhood to the present and to try not to include trilogies or series, with a few notable exceptions in both cases. For example, I included two comic book collections and tacked on one at the end because it was the end of a series and also a good place to end. Many are from high school and college reading lists and classes, such as the Knowles, Milton, Faulker, and O’Connor, with the last two being for a course on both of them. Others are the start of series that I love, many at the beginning and a few in the middle. I want to give a special shout-out to The Bloom County collections, which helped me through mandatory chapel at Messiah College in the late 80s and early 90s. Thank you, Berke Breathed.

1. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins  by Dr. Seuss
2. Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss
3.  In The Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
4. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
5. Stuart Little by E.B. White
6. Big Red by Jim Kjelgaard
7. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
9. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
10. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
11. Lord of the Flies by William Goulding
12. The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
13. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
14. The Autobiography of Malcolm X
15. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
16. Dune by Frank Herbert
17. Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saaverda (abridged, translated, and edited by Walter Starkie)
18. The Stand by Stephen King
19. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
20. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
21. The River Why by David James Duncan
22. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
23. Paradise Regained by John Milton
24. The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell
25. Harvest Poems: 1910-1960 by Carl Sandburg
26. Ariel by Sylvia Plath
27. Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams by William Carlos Williams
28. All of Us: The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver
29. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor by Flannery O’Connor
30. The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
31. Truman by David McCullough
32. Modern Man in Search of a Soul by C.G. Jung
33. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
34. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
35. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
36. Harry Potter and The Order of Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
37. To Kill a Mockingbird  by Harper Lee
38. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
39. Flesh and Bone by Jonathan Maberry
40. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
41. Being Mortal by Atul Gawende
42. The Essential Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterston
43. Bloom County: Volumes 1 through 5 by Berke Breathed
44. The Black Echo by Michael Connelly
45. White Butterfly by Walter Mosley
46. Dogstar Rising by Parker Bilal
47. Memory by Donald E. Westlake
48. Curtain by Agatha Christie

If you had a list of favorites for every year of your life, what would be some of those you’d have to include? Any crossovers?