Top 40

As many of you know, your Center City Correspondent is an avid reader. One of the only advantages of living in the hinterlands was being able to read on the train ride every day. During the 25+ years I commuted, I read hundreds of books which might have been the only thing to keep me sane while subjected to Septa's "hospitality." A while back I distilled all those books down to a list of 40 that I enjoyed or changed the way I thought or lived my life (no exaggeration). If you had asked me before I compiled the list, I would have told you that there would only be about 5-10 novels and the rest non-fiction. To my surprise the majority of the books on the list are fiction, which probably says something about the conflict between the right and left sides of my brain.


Some of these books I would wholeheartedly recommend to any reader (The Things They Carried and Catcher in the Rye), but others I would merely invite you to read because they are tough to get through (Moby Dick and Les Miserables). The book that changed my life is An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. I identified with Clyde who discovers too late the perils of dissolute living. The book made me re-examine my life and make changes for the better (I started listening to Mrs. CCC).

And speaking of Mrs. CCC, it’s been gratifying that she now enjoys the non-fiction books that I recommend for our book club. There was a time that she never would have read anything I did, but now we share a lot of books.

So here’s the list, in no particular order, and even though the list is 10 years old, I only made one change today. So they have withstood the test of time. I’d be happy to hear about books that you enjoyed. I’m always on the hunt for a new one, either for me or the book club. Drop me a line at cjones1216@mail.com.

All for now. Make sure you have a book or two on hand to weather the upcoming snowstorm.

Fiction
1. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
2. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
3. Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) by Victor Hugo
4. Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
5. Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
6. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
7. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
8. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
9. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
10. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
11. Henry V by William Shakespeare
12. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
13. Paco’s Story by Larry Heineman
14. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
15. The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner
16. The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat
17. Skinny Legs & All by Tim Robbins
18. Jaws by Peter Benchley
19. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
20. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
21. The Essential Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
22. Dubliners by James Joyce
23. Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
24. Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis


Non-fiction
1. Liars’ Poker by Michael Lewis
2. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
3. Against the Gods by Peter Bernstein
4. House of Morgan by Ron Chernow
5. The Bible
6. A Civil War by John Feinstein
7. Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik
8. To Every Thing a Season by Bruce Kuklick
9. It’s Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong
10. The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger
11. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
12. In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
13. Joan of Arc by Pernoud and Clin
14. Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby
15. The War Poems by Wilfred Owen
16. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe