Book Lust

I was asked for a book suggestion the other day, and I figured why not pontificate to the public about my favorite books. So this evening I sat in front of my recently thinned bookshelves ( 6 boxes are going to Powell’s Books in Portland next weekend, partly to make room for books piled on the floor and partly to help pay for holiday merriment and presents) and came up with a list of my top 10 fiction books. They are presented in alphabetical order by author. Of course there are many others that I feel bad about not including, but one has to draw the line somewhere.

1. Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
2. The More Than Complete Hitchhikers Guide by Douglas Adams
3. The Classic Illustrated Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaardner
5. The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
6. Borderliners by Peter Hoeg
7. Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murikami
8. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
9. In The Beginning by Chaim Potok
10. Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
11. Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams

Also ran/ honorable mention:
1. The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
2. Kafka was the Rage by Anatole Broyard
3. Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
4. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
5. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig

What can I say, it’s hard to limit yourself to a list. Keep in mind these are only books from the fiction wing, and only those on the shelves. Presumably none of the books to be sold would make it on the list. And of course there are a lot of other great books, fun (books like The Cockroaches of Staymore by Donald Harrington or the Frisco Pigeon Mambo by C.D. Payne) or challenging in their own way (like Vineland by Thomas Pynchon), but I must not have read them recently enough to list them today. It should also be noted that these are not necessarily books that I would recommend to others. Some of them remain on my shelves for particular reasons beyond their literary worth.

So what have I missed? Are there any books that I have been a fool to go so long without reading? Any that ought to be removed from the list? Do you people read?