My All-Time Favorite Books

Beginning in 1960, I've probably read this five times.

And here they are in the liberally approximate order of favoritude (if that's a word)!  (Non-fiction are in blue.)

1. Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
2. Thus Far and No Further, Rumer Godden
3. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
4. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
5. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
6. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
7. The Zen Environment, Marian Mountain
8. A Smile in the Mind's Eye, Lawrence Durrell
9. The works of the Brontës, Jane Austen, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Rumer Godden, Willa Cather, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, William Maxwell, Wallace Stegner
10. The short stories of W. Somerset Maugham, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen
11. The memoirs of Leonard Woolf, Emily Carr, Simone de Beauvoir, M.F.K. Fisher
12. Brideshead Revisted, Evelyn Waugh
13. The Lover, Marguerite Duras
14. The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman
15. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
16. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
17. Middlemarch, George Eliot
18. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
19. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
20. Cross Creek, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
21. Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer
22. The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller
23. Garden of the Brave in War, Terence O'Donnell
24. West With the Night, Beryl Markham
25. The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
26. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
27. Gift From the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindberg
28. The Razor's Edge, W. Somerset Maugham
29. The Points of My Compass, E. B. White
30. Books on writing (and life) by Brenda Ueland, Natalie Goldberg, Anne Lamott
31. The journals of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield
32. The works of the more recent writers Shirley Hazzard, Anita Brookner, Penelope Lively, Barbara Pym, Ivan Doig
33. Books about growing up in Africa by Elspeth Huxley and Alexandra Fuller
34. The bicycle adventure tales of Dervla Murphy
35. And, in his own special category, the generally soothing and ruminative fiction of Alexander McCall Smith about Botswana, Edinburgh, and London

Two works by Rumer Godden

I've read and re-read these.  One is Taoism, the other is Zen.

Oddly, reading so much, I have become more fussy about the physical book ... and, yes, I do require a physical book.  I have no interest in cyber books.  I want the tactile pages.  But I now prefer paperbacks that aren't too heavy, that aren't hard to hold when reading in bed, with non-glossy paper, non-sharp corners, and no teensy print or crammed-together lines, though I can still read without glasses.  Something holdable and cozy-feeling even if the words on the page are not always cozy.  Of course, I'll still read other formats.