Joyce Carol Oates' 10 Favorite Books

I reread this book on the beach last summer and felt as enthralled by it as the first time round. There are different views on this book, ranging from "It nearly finished me. It was like having an illness" (Robert Louis Stevenson, in admiration) to Peter Kemp of the Sunday Times, who dismisses the book as so much hysteria and hallucination. I loved it again, especially the mood swings and the writer’s craft to evoke these fantastic scenes of poverty and degeneration in St. Petersburg, and uses these as the background for a fantastic literary detective story.

Ulysses is in my top five... it's an interesting story about intertwined lives of people in Dublin during one day in June. It uses a lot of language play, and the chapter's themes resemble those in Homer's Odyssey. There is love, humor, and misunderstandings.

Incidentally, Ulysses was banned in America when it first came out, and people smuggled it into the country under their coats. It is now considered one of the five most important books of modernism, along with Proust, Thomas Mann, and Virginia Woolf. If you like Ulysses, you'd probably also like Joyce's other books.

The Sound and The Fury is one of my top five favorite books. I read it when I was in college, and it is still one of my favorites 30 years later. It has interesting characters and voices; it's set in the South. Some of the points of view are from children. Faulkner said he wanted it published in five different colors of inks for all the different voices. Read this Faulkner first, and then read the rest of his work.

This is the only complete set of Dickinson's poetry— over 1,500 poems in all. It's interesting to watch how she matured and changed as a poet.

Although first published in 1830 in French, The Red and the Black is still resonant today. Aspects of feeling different from your family, aspirations for your future, love and passion and hate and passion are all written in an easy to read language.

Stendhal also wrote A Life of Napoleon in his defense, but I found his novel much more gripping and interesting. Chapters open with quotations to set the scene. If you love reading 19th century literature, this is a MUST.

I read this in high school and still can't forget it 30 years later. (Well, 35.) Lawrence creates interesting characters and interesting relationships. He is all about romantic relationships, Britain at the turn of the century, the class system, industrialism. It's interesting stuff.

Oh my bejeezus, Herman Melville has a great sense of humor.

I put off reading this book 'cause I thought it was slow-going; turns out, I just wasn't catching his dry, witty sense of humor, and once I did, he just kept getting better and more clever!

Ishmael is a truly funny character, in a dark way, which makes me wonder why they haven't made a movie yet (don't get any ideas! Don't ruin it! Just kidding — a little).

I don't suppose there are too many readers who are not already familiar with this title. I happened to write about this classic on my blog, due to the decision to put out a new edition with all instances of "the N-word" omitted. The reason why this decision was made and the reason I oppose, despite its good intent, says all that needs to be said about why this is the first title on my list. The brilliance of Twain's novel is that it shows how basically good people can be conditioned to have reprehensible attitudes and not even realize their wrong doing. We forgive a character such as Huck Finn in spite of himself, which makes us wonder what sins we ourselves may be unknowingly committing on a regular basis. How many of us would be willing to do what our conscience says is the right thing when society says such behavior will result in banishment to Hell?