100 Favorite Books, 2020 edition
Every year (since 2012) I post a list of my 100 favorite books. That’s exactly what it is, a list of my favorite books: not a canon, not a prescription, not a greatest books compilation. The list changes a little every year—some books are replaced, with much regret, and sometimes they come back later. What these titles all have in common is the sheer pleasure I have gotten from reading them. If you’re looking for something to read, I recommend these highly.
Note: The first time I made this list I noticed that 75 percent of them were written by men. I realized that this was because most of the books I read were by male authors. From then on I made a conscious effort to address the imbalance by reading more books by women. And I found that their work spoke to me, and they became my new favorites. Last year the list achieved parity, this year there are 51 books by women and 49 by men. (I consider The Book of J, a section of the Old Testament translated by David Rosenberg, as having been written by a woman.) Seriously, why did I never take Little Women, a book I had always loved, seriously? It took the anticipation for the new film adaptation by Greta Gerwig to make me realize this. Was it because it was a book for girls and therefore inferior to, say, Huckleberry Finn?
PS There’s some cheating involved. I count all the Jeeves and Wooster stories as one book when in fact they take up several volumes. The five Patrick Melrose novels I count as a single book.
This list will change again next year. I have just discovered Dawn Powell. For more discussion of these 100 Books, follow me on Instagram @jessicazafrascats.
100 Favorite Books, 2020 edition (in alphabetical order)
The Oresteia, Aeschylus
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
The Collected Poems of W.H. Auden
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Eve’s Hollywood, Eve Babitz
HHhH, Laurent Binet
The Decameron, Boccacio
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Possession, A.S. Byatt
The Outsider, Albert Camus
Burning Your Boats, The Collected Short Stories, Angela Carter
Love in a Fallen City, Eileen Chang
The Stories of Your Life, Ted Chiang
The Stories of John Cheever
The Stories of Anton Chekhov
Cheri and The Last of Cheri, Colette
Another Marvelous Thing, Laurie Colwin
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Seven Gothic Tales, Isak Dinesen
The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Don’t Look Now, Daphne Du Maurier
The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy
King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett
The End of Days, Jenny Erpenbeck
A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald
Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
Paris Stories, Mavis Gallant
Amphigorey, Edward Gorey
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
Dune, Frank Herbert
Ripley’s Game, Patricia Highsmith
The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Black Diamond and Other Stories, Rachel Ingalls
The Lottery and Other Stories, Shirley Jackson
Jesus’s Son, Denis Johnson
For Keeps, 30 Years at the Movies, Pauline Kael
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
The Smiley novels, John LeCarre
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem
Complete Stories, Clarice Lispector
Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively
The Balkan Trilogy, Olivia Manning
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
The Ashenden Stories, W. Somerset Maugham
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Love In A Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
Young Once, Patrick Modiano
Isabelo’s Archive, Resil Mojares
From Hell, Alan Moore
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris
Homesick for Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh
The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories by Saki, H.H. Munro
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata
The Friend, Sigrid Nunez
The Love Object, Selected Stories, Edna O’Brien
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
The Collected Short Stories, Flannery O’Connor
The Collected Stories, Grace Paley
The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
Playing With Water, James Hamilton Paterson
Cubao: Pagkagat ng Dilim, Tony Perez
There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Collected Stories, Jean Rhys
The Book of J, translated by David Rosenberg
Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
A Sport and A Pastime, James Salter
Transit, Anna Seghers
Collected Plays, William Shakespeare
The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By, Georges Simenon
How to be both, Ali Smith
The Patrick Melrose novels, Edward St. Aubyn
The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
The Door, Magda Szabo
Oliver VII, Antal Szerb
Minotaur, Benjamin Tammuz
The Makioka Sisters, Junichiro Tanizaki
You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There (stories), Elizabeth Taylor
Flights, Olga Tokarczuk
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Ogre, Michel Tournier
The Diaries of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend
Miss Garnet’s Angel, Salley Vickers
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Once and Future King, T.H. White
The Jeeves stories, P.G. Wodehouse