My 10 Favorite Books (OK, Actually 28)

The following list is my favorite books as of right now. This is, of course, subject to change over time. I was asked for my ten favorite books by a family member and immediately went to my goodreads account to refresh my memory. 

My initial strategy was to only look at books that I rated a perfect five out of five stars. However, this actually didn't work at all. When I was making the list, I kept remembering books that "had" to be on it, but for whatever reason didn't receive a five star rating from me. It's strange to think that many of the books the wound up on the final list were not ones I originally reacted to with complete appreciation.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the best example of this. I had to plod through much of the second half of the book and force myself to finish. I finished with a rather sour taste for it, but it was the first book I thought of to include on this list and one that absolutely had to be on it. As I said at the beginning, my family member asked me for ten. I actually emailed her 11, but the 28 below were all on the first draft before widdling it down to 11. I bolded the 11 that I actually sent her.

1. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky
2. The House of the Dead by Dostoyevsky
3. Dead Souls by Gogol
4. Politics by Aristotle
5. Dubliners by Joyce
6. Dune by Herbert
7. Foundation by Asimov
8. Siddhartha by Hesse
9. The Things They Carried by O'Brien
10. Ethics by Spinoza
11. Practical Programming for Strength Training by Rippetoe
12. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Price
13. The Affluent Society by Galbraith
14. Three Kingdoms by Guanzhong
15. A River Sutra by Mehta
16. A Nietzsche Compendium by Nietzsche
17. The Art of Happiness by The Dalai Lama
18. Spark by Ratey
19. The Stress of Life by Selye
20. Anitfragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Taleb
21. Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl
22. Toward a Psychology of Being by Maslow
23. Green Hills of Africa by Hemingway
24. Antilinguistics by Gethin
25. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami
26. South of the Border, West of the Sun by Murakami
27. Alexander by Dodge
28. Family Happiness by Tolstoy

Hopefully I can look back at this list in the future and see if any changes have occurred. I'm really interested to see how my tastes change over time. Also, it is interesting to note that seven of the eleven sent were non-fiction and four were fiction. From this list of 28, there are 12 non-fiction and 16 fiction.  I wonder if this will change over time or not.