Here
is a list of my favorite literary works. The list is not complete and
is totally subjective in that the books listed are my personal favorites
- the books that I go back to for whatever reason and read again and
again. This is NOT a list of books I think have the most literary merit,
this IS a list of books I have enjoyed reading the most for whatever
reason. My friend and peer, Vincenzo Bilof has done a similar list you
may find of interest here, in response to a challenge I made to him. This, of course, being my response to said challenge.
My Favorite Books (to date) - Recommended Reading
Fiction (Novels)
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Big Sur – Jack Kerouac
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Infinite jest – David Foster
Wallace
The Killer – Colin Wilson
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood
Anderson
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Redemption Falls – Joseph
O’Connor
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor
Doystevsky
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts
Bliss – Peter Carey
Killer on the Road – James Ellroy
Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon
– Thomas Harris
David Morrell – First Blood
Surfacing – Margaret Atwood
The Walking Drum – Louis L’amour
Tortilla Flat – John Steinbeck
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony
Burgess
The Shipping News – Annie Proulx
In My Father’s Den – Maurice Gee
In the Name of the Rose – Umberto
Eco
The Novel – James Michener
The Unpleasant Profession of
Jonathan Hoag – Robert A Heinlein
The Girls He Adored – Jonathan
Nasaw
Ham on Rye – Charles Bukowski
Zombie – Joyce Carol Oates
Dandelion Wine, The October
Country – Ray Bradbury
The End of the Night – John D
Macdonald
The Journal of Albion Moonlight –
Kenneth Patchen
Fiction (Horror)
Abarat, The Hellbound Heart –Clive Barker
The Backwoods – Edward Lee
The Face That Must Die – Ramsey
Campbell
Exquisite Corpse – Poppy Z Brite
This Symbiotic Fascination –
Charlee Jacob
Mystery Walk, Baal – Robert
McCammon
The Shining, IT, The Dead Zone,
The Stand – Stephen King
Ghost Story – Peter Straub
Psycho, American Gothic – Robert
Bloch
Rats, Lair, Domain, The Fog – James
Herbert
Slob – Rex Miller
Spawn – Shaun Hutson
Telekiller – John Warwick
The Lost – Jack Ketchum
Children of the Night, Carrion
Comfort – Dan Simmons
Flesh and Blood, Family Portrait
– Graham Masterton
Futile Efforts – Thomas
Piccirilli
The Amityville Horror – Jay Anson
The Exorcist – William Peter
Blatty
Short Story Collections
By Bizarre Hands – Joe R.
Lansdale
The Complete Stories – Flannery
O’Connor
Blue World – Robert McCammon
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
– Edgar Allan Poe
Night Shift – Stephen King
Books of Blood 1-3 – Clive Barker
A Peaceable Kingdom – Jack
Ketchum
The Most Beautiful Woman in Town,
Tales of Ordinary Madness – Charles Bukowski
Collected Stories, The Fat Man in
History – Peter Carey
The Nightmare Chronicles –
Douglas Clegg
Ray Bradbury Stories (Vol 1 and
2) – Ray Bradbury
Red Dreams – Dennis Etchison
Run With the Hunted: A Charles
Bukowski Reader – Charles Bukowski
20th Century Ghosts – Joe Hill
The Collection – Bentley Little
Anthologies
Dark Forces – Ed. Kirby McCauley
Cutting Edge – Ed. Dennis
Etchison
Prime Evil – Ed. Douglas E Winter
Psycho-paths – Ed. Robert Bloch
Psychos – Ed. John Skipp
999: New Stories of Horror and
Suspense – Ed. Al Sarrantonio
Faces of Fear Ed. Douglas E
Winter
Poetry
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell –
William Blake
Selected Poems – Carl Sandburg
Complete Works, Prufrock &
Other Observations, Four Quartets – T.S. Eliot
The Cantos – Ezra Pound
Greed – Ai
The Monkey’s Mask – Dorothy
Porter
Love is a Dog from Hell,
Mockingbird Wish me Luck – Charles Bukowski
The Divine Comedy (Hell &
Purgatory) – Dante Aligheri
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
Ring of Bone – Lew Welch
The Theatre and its Double –
Antonin Artaud
A Season in Hell – Arthur Rimbaud
The Flowers of Evil –
Charles Baudelaire
Cap and Bells – Francis Webb
Complete Poems – Kenneth Patchen
Philosophy
Aristotle – Ars Poetica,
*Metaphysica, The Nicomachean Ethics
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations (trans. Graves)
Jean Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulation
Walter Benjamin – Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
William Blake – The Marriage of Heaven & Hell
Edmund Burke – A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Albert Camus – *The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel
Thomas Carlyle – Sartor Resartus
Khalil Gibran – The Madman, *Thoughts & Meditations, The Prophet
Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason, *Critique of Judgment
Jiddu Krishnamurti – Beyond Violence, The Awakening of Intelligence, *Freedom from the Known
Bruce Lee – Tao of Jeet Kune Do
Frederich Nietzsche – *Beyond Good and Evil, The Antichrist, The Gay Science, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Human, All Too Human
PD Ouspensky – The Fourth Dimension (from A New Model of the Universe), Tertium Organum, *The Fourth Way
Bertrand Russell – *The Problems of Philosophy, The Analysis of Mind
Arthur Schopenhauer – The World as Will & Representation, *On the Suffering of the World
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching
Alan Watts – *The Wisdom of Insecurity, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Colin Wilson – *The Outsider, Beyond the Outsider
Ludwig Wittgenstein – *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations
Marcus Aurelius – Meditations (trans. Graves)
Jean Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulation
Walter Benjamin – Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
William Blake – The Marriage of Heaven & Hell
Edmund Burke – A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Albert Camus – *The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel
Thomas Carlyle – Sartor Resartus
Khalil Gibran – The Madman, *Thoughts & Meditations, The Prophet
Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason, *Critique of Judgment
Jiddu Krishnamurti – Beyond Violence, The Awakening of Intelligence, *Freedom from the Known
Bruce Lee – Tao of Jeet Kune Do
Frederich Nietzsche – *Beyond Good and Evil, The Antichrist, The Gay Science, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Human, All Too Human
PD Ouspensky – The Fourth Dimension (from A New Model of the Universe), Tertium Organum, *The Fourth Way
Bertrand Russell – *The Problems of Philosophy, The Analysis of Mind
Arthur Schopenhauer – The World as Will & Representation, *On the Suffering of the World
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching
Alan Watts – *The Wisdom of Insecurity, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Colin Wilson – *The Outsider, Beyond the Outsider
Ludwig Wittgenstein – *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations
And there you have it - my list,
not by any means complete or chronological, just what it is. This will evolve.
