A Pilgrim’s Digression

I think it likely I will leave many books that have influenced me unaccounted for, but here is a starter list. As I remember more books, I will add to the list. Technically, one should not have to remember favorite books, but I’ve simply read too many that I’ve enjoyed to easily answer the old question, “what books would you want if you were stranded on a desert island?”

Interestingly, most of my choices are works of American modernism, though in Graduate school I studied British literature from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Make sense of that, if you can. I can’t.

• Ulysses
• Finnegans Wake
• Lord of the Rings
• The Nick Adams Stories
• The Sun Also Rises
• A Moveable Feast
• To the Lighthouse
• Jacob’s Room
• Paradise Lost
• The Stand
• The Dark Tower Series
• Look Homeward, Angel
• Main Street
• Babbitt
• As I Lay Dying
• The Sound and the Fury
• Light in August