The Best of the Last Eight Years

My Top Ten Reads Since January 2007

Back in August of 2012 I listed the top ten books I had read since the inception of my blog in 2007.  This is my first attempt to update that list, I expect to update it again by the tenth anniversary of my blog if not sooner.  Sometimes books rank higher one day, and lower the next. These are my favorites today in no particular order. They may vary slightly from my annual book rankings, but they are all included in the best of my reading from each of the years I have been blogging.  

I started my blog in earnest January 2007. So these are my Top Ten Reads for the last eight and a half years.  The mix has swung toward fiction with only two works of non-fiction on the list.  One work is a trilogy of plays, The Coast of Utopia, by Tom Stoppard, and the rest are novels of varying lengths.  I could have easily included more works by Thomas Mann, but limited the list to only one by this author.  I also regret that I had to leave authors that I have rated highly, including Samuel Beckett, Charlotte Bronte, Robert Frost, John Williams, Joshua Slocum, Tim Winton, and others, on the cutting room floor. 


Top Ten Reads 


The Roots of Heaven   by Romain Gary


In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust


The Coast of Utopia  by Tom Stoppard


The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil


The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky


East of Eden  by John Steinbeck


Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau


The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph by T. E. Lawrence


The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz


Joseph and His Brothers  by Thomas Mann



If you'd like the view of a professional writer and reader consider this essay by Joe Queenan from the Wall Street Journal:  My 6,128 Favorite Books