Before I became a library worker I did a course on Library and Information Studies. During a lecture I asked the other students what were some of their favourite books, and some of them could not come up with an answer. Which astounded me. I have very firm views on what books are my faves. I mean, you know it when you read the damn things. Don’t you? Anyway, the list features the usual bunch of scifi books, but I mix it up. There’s some classics, some non fiction, some childhood faves, some plays, some poetry, even a manga. If I had more time, I would read them all again (some, I have).
100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
(the book that introduced me to Magic Realism)
I Heard the Owl Call My Name – Margaret Craven
The Dispossessed – Ursula Le Guin
(the book I love the most)
Martian Time Slip – Philip K Dick
Urusei Yatsura – Rumiko Takahashi
The Man In the High Castle – Philip K Dick
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula Le Guin
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Persuasion – Jane Austen
(the book that reminded me I have resources for solitude)
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
The Gormenghast Trilogy – Mervyn Peak
My Brother Jack – George Johnston
The Time Machine – H G Wells
Timescape – Gregory Benford
An Atlantic Tunnel, Hurrah – Harry Harrison
Lord of the Rings – J R R Tolkien
The Hobbit – J R R Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy – Isaac Asimov
Rendezvous With Rama – Arthur C Clarke
Contact – Carl Sagan
An Alien Heat – Michael Moorcock
(the book that took me to the future)
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Riddley Walker – Russell Hoban
Revolution In the Head – Ian Macdonald
Everyone’s Gone to the Moon – Philip Norman
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom – Nick Cohn
1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die – Tom Moon
The Elements of Style – William Strunk Jr & E B White
The Tao/Te Ching – Lao Tzu
A Wizard of Earthsea – Ursula Le Guin
Gateway – Frederick Pohl
Anne of Green Gables – L M Montgomery
The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles
Tom’s Midnight Garden – Philippa Pearce
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C S Lewis
Watership Downs – Richard Adams
To Your Scattered Bodies Go – Philip Jose Farmers
The Thrill of the Grass – W P Kinsella
Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg
Tess – Thomas Hardy
Dinotopia – James Gurney
The Jungle Books – Rudyard Kipling
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Lost World – Arthur Conan Doyle
Ulysses – James Joyce
Dune – Frank Herbert
Perelandra – C S Lewis
Tiger Tiger – Alfred Bester
Crash – J G Ballard
A Canticle For Leibowitz – Walter M Miller
Earth Abides – George R Stewart
Tau Zero – Poul Anderson
The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth – Roger Zelazny
Understanding Jung – Peter O’Connor
Beyond the Promised Land – David Noble
The Indispensable Chomsky – Noam Chomsky
Hi Fidelity – Nick Hornby
The Music Goes Round My Head – David Johnston
Homage To Catalonia – George Orwell
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Swords and Deviltry – Fritz Leiber
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Greg Matthews
King Solomon’s Mines – H Rider Haggard
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – William Shakespeare
Rimbaud Complete Works – Arthur Rimbaud
The Shipping News – E Annie Proulx
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
Like Water For Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
Eva Luna – Isabelle Allende
Lavinia – Ursula Le Guin
Was – Geoff Ryman
Waterland – Graham Swift
Wind In the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Charlotte’s Web – E B White
Chronicle – Bob Dylan
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Dragonflight – Anne McCaffrey
Winnie the Pooh/House On Pooh Corner – A A Milne
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe
The Egyptian – Mika Waltari
The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
Methuselah’s Children – Robert Heinlein
The Silver Locusts – Ray Bradbury
The Edge of Beyond – Captain W E Johns
The Chris Godfrey Series – Hugh Walters
Raiders of the Rings – Alan E Nourse