As Time Goes By

I’ve been publishing some form of A Celebration of Reading since the mid-90s and it represents a lot of reading ,,, a lot of books. I just spent more than an hour revisiting my annual lists of the 20 or so books I found that deserved mention. I’m sure after 25 years some of my old evaluations might no longer hold true but for the most part, even with my dimming gray cells, I can still recall why I enjoyed or was enlightened by most of the texts.

When I started this site I was actively (frantically?) collecting book lists from around the internet. Now I realize that I have created my own recommended reading lists and might humbly suggest that anyone following the my suggestions could easily be considered well-read. Look at the first entry for this website:

1997

1. The Cairo Trilogy — Naguib Mahfouz [Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street]
2. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austin
3. The Odyssey — Homer
4. The Snows of Kilimanjaro — Ernest Hemingway
5. War with the Newts — Karel Capek
6. The Shipping News — E. Annie Proulx
7. Chronicle of a Death Foretold — Gabriel García Márquez
8. Children of the Alley — Naguib Mahfouz
9. Jealousy — Alain Robbe-Grillet
10. Balthazar — Lawrence Durrell
11. A River Runs Through It — Norman Maclean
12. Journey To the End of Night –Louis-Ferdinand Céline
13. Corelli’s Mandolin — Louis De Bernières
14. The Dharma Bums — Jack Kerouac
15. Dracula — Bram Stoker
16. An Artist of the Floating World — Kazuo Ishiguro