My Top 10 Book Recommendations (by Genre)

I’d argue that books, more so than eyes, are the true the windows to the soul.  If someone tells you their favorite books, it’s a window into their imagination.  There are few things more personal.  If you love the same books as someone else, that’s a profound thing and the basis for a beautiful friendship.

When you share a book, you share a part of yourself.  If someone doesn’t love a book that you cherish, you feel jilted in the same way you might when a lover leaves.  You feel confusion, hurt, and sometimes even disdain.  But when someone loves one of your favorites, your treasures, there’s a bond that forms and a shared understanding that grows.  There are few better gifts than a book truly loved.

In this age of soundbites and cat clips, it’s ever more important to carve out some time to seclude yourself every once in a while, sit down, and get lost in a great book.  There are few things like the obsession that comes over you when you dive into a compelling and engrossing novel, unable to pull yourself away or stop with the most recent chapter.  There’s a mania to the flipping pages: you want desperately to finish but at the same time you don’t want the journey to end.  It’s better than any Netflix binge and more satisfying than a superhero movie.  A life well-read is never dull.

So I come before you, ready to bare my soul—to give you the full monty as it were.  Kim Kardashian bares her breasts and I offer my books—an exhibitionism of a different sort.  Rather than just give a simple top 10 (that would be far too limiting), I decided to offer up my favorite works in my favorite genres.  By the end of this entry, you’ll have a better sense of what makes me tick.  And hopefully you’ll be able to add a tome or two to your respective reading lists.  I know I’m always in the market for more great books so I’d love to hear some of your favorites as well. Without further ado, here we go…

10. Plays: The Taming of the Shrew (William Shakespeare)

Shakespeare’s tale of the thorny Katerina and the conniving Petruchio always gets me.  Maybe it’s because I love a sassy woman, maybe it’s because Shakespeare was always at his best writing satire, but this is his finest work as far as I’m concerned.  It’s been reproduced in numerous formats (Kiss Me Kate, 10 Things I Hate About You), but there’s no touching the original.  Even the ending is beautifully uncertain with Kate’s ambiguous monologue.  Has she really seen the virtues of wifely obedience, or is she merely playing the part?  All the world’s a stage and no one set it better than the Bard.

Honorable Mention: Brighton Beach Memoirs (Neil Simon), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (William Shakespeare)

9. Classics: The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)

Oscar Wilde penned the most beautiful sentences ever constructed in the English language.  Bar none.  He wasn’t always the most artful storyteller, but his way with words more than made up for any dramatic shortcomings.  There are so many delightful turns of phrases in The Picture of Dorian Gray that you sometimes lose yourself in the language, though the recounting of the rise and fall of the beautiful, cruel, and narcissistic Mr. Gray is certainly a harrowing one.  The quotes are too numerous to list, but here are a few to whet your appetite:

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”

You may not love the protagonist, but you can’t help but admire his way with words.

Honorable Mention: The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas), The Stranger (Albert Camus)

8. Children’s Books: Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Come Now? (Dr. Seuss)

We all have that one book that we made our mom or dad read to us endlessly.  Once is never enough.  Twice?  “Just once more, Mom?”  Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Come Now? was that book for me.  Maybe it was the obstinate protagonist that appealed to me, refusing to do what he was told.  Maybe it was Dr. Seuss’ inimical rhyme schemes and playful banter.  Whatever it was, it kept me spellbound, and I love it to this day.  And despite the decades that pass, I feel like my kids, and their kids, will feel the same.  Time passes, but some things just never get old.

Honorable Mention: Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Giving Tree (Shel Silverstein)

7. Young Adult: The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky)

Recently made into an excellent movie, this epistolary novel recounts the difficulties that precocious Charlie, a freshman in high school, navigates as he makes friends and finds love for the first time.  The jarring, emotional revelations that come to light throughout the course of the book make it impossible to forget and really hard not to cry.  Perks clocks in at a reasonably short 224 pages, and you just might read it in one sitting.  It’s that compelling.

Honorable Mention: The Giver (Lois Lowry), The Harry Potter Series (J.K. Rowling)

6. Non-fiction: The Bottom Billion (Paul Collier)

This is the book that made me want to be an aid worker.  To work in really poor countries on truly difficult problems.  Collier lucidly and rationally breaks down why we often focus on the wrong problems and devote resources to the wrong countries.  He prescribes when, where, and how aid can actually work and where it can’t.  It’s the perfect blend of data-driven pragmatism and an idealistic call for change, not as naively optimistic as Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty or as curmudgeonly dismissive as William Easterly’s The Elusive Quest for Growth or as morbidly fatalistic as Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid.  It’s the baby bear of aid books—just right.

Honorable Mention: Naked Economics (Charles Wheelan), The Signal and the Noise (Nate Silver)

5. Dystopian Fiction: 1984 (George Orwell)

I don’t know that a book has ever haunted me, ever stuck with me like 1984.  You read the last line, set the book down, and your jaw drops.  Damn.  Has any one work of fiction ever so completely defined a genre?  Has any other book added so many new terms to the lexicon?  Who doesn’t know about Big Brother?  About groupthink?  Written in 1949, it’s just as relevant today as it was then, despite perfectly capturing the absurdity of Stalinist Russia.  Few writers possessed Orwell’s power, command of language, and clarity of thought.  Just thinking about, decades after I last read it, gives me chills.

Honorable Mention: Lord of the Flies (William Golding)

4. Fantasy: The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)

Fantasy, above all, should be fun.  And diverting.  And should transport you instantly to another world.  Bradley’s re-telling of the Arthurian legend from the female point of view is simply spellbinding.  Despite its 876 pages, I easily read it twice.  And will no doubt read it again.  The well-known characters are so vividly unique; they are familiar but somehow new.  The story you know, told in a way that makes it more accessible, more engaging, and more alive.  If you love The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, or any of the Arthurian myths, pick up this book.  You won’t put it down.

Honorable Mention: The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkein), A Song of Ice and Fire (George R.R. Martin)

3. Magical Realism: 100 Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

Yes, I’m beginning to split hairs with my genres, but how can you not give Garcia Marquez and the genre he spawned its own category?  100 Years of Solitude may be the most perfect book ever written.  It is beautifully wrought, carefully constructed, and artfully told.  The story of the Buendía family, mirroring the history of Garcia Marquez’s native Colombia, is colorful, tragic, hopeful, and mournful all at the same time.  It cautions us that history has a way of repeating itself when we fail to learn its lessons.  Garcia Marquez is a master of language, and this is his opus.

Honorable Mention: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz), Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie)

2. Historical Fiction: The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)

This is the book that I have most often gifted to my friends, and it never fails to amaze.  Everyone I know who has read it has loved it.  It is also the book that I turn to for inspiration to get me through the difficult times; it gives me the strength and resolve to persist.  The story of Peekay, a young English boy growing up in apartheid South Africa, is told with such a loving, delicate touch.  This book has had such a profound effect on me that I can’t imagine it not being in my life and not being a cornerstone of my literary persona.  I honestly think that I boxed welterweight and played scrum half for my rugby team in college because Peekay did.  Its sweeping sense of history yet careful, detailed narrative demonstrate the best qualities of historical fiction and show the true promise of the genre.  If you ever need a literary pick-me-up, this is your novel.

Honorable Mention: Exodus & Trinity (Leon Uris), Shogun (James Clavell)

1. Science Fiction: Dune (Frank Herbert)

My favorite book of all-time.  The book that captured my 13 year-old imagination and never let go.  The one I can’t stop reading (five times, at last count).  The sweeping galactic epic that blends philosophy, religion, ecology, sociology, political science, and psychology.  It is the most ambitious book I have ever read.  Despite its other-worldly setting, it is also the one to which I relate the most.  Young Paul Atreides’ (later Muad’Dib) journey of self-discovery and self-actualization sucks you in as he navigates the perils of the classic Joseph Campbell hero cycle.  Always profound, absolutely multi-layered, Frank Herbert bequeathed us the perfect science fiction novel, and the most engrossing story I have ever read.  And re-read.  And read again.

Honorable Mention: Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card), The Forever War (Joe Haldeman)

But don’t take my word for it, take theirs.  You won’t be sorry that you did.