The Best Books I've Read

I've read many of these books many times, and perhaps I've understood them better on the third or fourth read. The years they are posted under here are the years when I first read them. This is not anything close to a complete list.

Highlights from pre 1999

• A Wrinkle In Time by Madeline L'Engle
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter
• The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
• Seventh Son and Red Prophet by Orson Scott Card

I can't remember when I first read these

• Many of Shakespeare's plays, including Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing
• Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
• Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
• Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
• The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry
• Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot

1999

• Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
• All In The Timing by David Ives
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Our Town by Thornton Wilder
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
• Ender's Game, Speaker For The Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card

2000

• Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
• A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
• A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
• Tartuffe by Moliere
• The Pearl by John Steinbeck
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

2001

• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

2002

• The Noonday Demon: an atlas of depression by Andrew Solomon
• Concious Loving by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks
• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
• Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
• Neuromancer by William Gibson
• The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber
• The People's Guide to Mexico by Carl Franz
• Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• Reinventing Comics by Scott McCloud

2003

• Real Live Nude Girls by Dr. Carol Queen
• The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders
• Talk Dirty To Me by Sally Tisdale
• The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
• Persuasion by Jane Austen
• You Just Don't Understand by Deborah Tannen
• The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling
• The Dyke and the Dybbuk by Ellen Galford
• Nickle and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreicht
• The Moon Is Always Female by Marge Piercy
• Impro by Keith Johnson
• Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
• How Children Learn by John Holt
• It's Easier Than You Think by Sylvia Boorstein
• My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
• The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman
• A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, Richard Lannon
• Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
• The Tassajara Bread Book

2004

• Against Forgetting edited by Carolyn Forsyth
• A Journey Through the Deaf World by Harlan Lane, Ben Bahan, Robert Hoffmeister
• Discrimination from the Opposing Viewpoints series
• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
• The Invisible Man by Orson Wells
• The Survival of the Bark Canoe by John McPhee
• Algebra Unplugged by Ken Amdahl

Books I will someday read and/or finish

• The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley
• Metamagical Themas and Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
• Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis by Wendy Cope
• Full Exposure by Susie Bright
• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
• Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
• Archetype to Zeitgeist by Howard Zinn
• The Way Life Works: The Science Lover's Illustrated Guide to How Life Grows, Develops, Reproduces, and Gets Along by Mahlon Hoagland and Bert Dodson
• Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and C. Weingartner
• Maus by Art Spiegelman
• Utopia by Thomas Moore
• Caculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach by Morris Kline
• The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture by Frank R. Wilson
• When The Mind Hears by Harlan Lane
• The Mask Of Benevolence by Harlan Lane
• The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins
• Woman: an intimate geography by Natalie Angier
• Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
• Stuff by Fritjof Capra
• And Stephen Hawking
• And Dan Savage
• And John McPhee
• And John Holt

Books that have influenced my life without my actually reading them

• The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn
• How Children Fail by John Holt