Favorite Novels

It’s difficult for me to name favorite novelists because I tend to think in terms of individual works… there aren’t a lot of authors whose work I am ready to buy, sight unseen, as soon as it comes out (and a good portion of those authors area dead). So here I am capturing, slowly, a list of my own favorite novels as they occur to me.

What this list is emphatically not is any kind of list of “best” novels. These are novels that have meant something significant to me, sometimes for extra-literary reasons. Caveat emptor.

• 2001: a Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
• A Deepness in the Sky - Vernor Vinge
• A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
• A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L’Engle
• Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
• Bleak House - Charles Dickens
• Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
• Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee
• Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card
• Fiskadoro - Dennis Johnson
• Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow
• His Dark Materials trilogy - Philip Pullman
• Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
• In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
• Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
• Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
• Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
• Money - Martin Amis
• Mysteries of Pittsburgh - Michael Chabon
• Rainbows End - Vernor Vinge
• Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C. Clarke
• Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
• Suttree - Cormac McCarthy
• The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
• The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
• The Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov
• The Glass Bead Game - Herman Hesse
• The Goldbug Variations - Richard Powers
• The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford
• The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Lord of the Rings trilogy - J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
• The Quiet American - Graham Greene
• The Road - Cormac McCarthy
• The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - John Le Carre
• Time’s Arrow - Martin Amis
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
• Ulysses - James Joyce
• Wise Blood - Flannery O’Connor