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.

Though the cover says Mark Twain, this book is written by Huck with hilarious results. Huck is not a great writer. His spelling is awful and his grammar not much better. Proof-reading in something he never heard of. He simply writes it as he lives and feels it.

He starts out with the fun and excitement of a boy on a great adventure. But he finds himself betraying what he thinks is right, to be true to what he feels is right. Lying to save Jim. Helping him escape. He finds himself changing, growing up. Trapped and having to consider the consequences of fighting his way out of the trap. It's not all fun and games for anymore. He's very intelligent, but his position makes him vulnerable. He's a child, he's aiding a fugitive, he's a fugitive himself, and he's uneducated.

Throughout the story, Twain makes sure we don't forget that, though we watch him grow before our eyes. One of the funniest, most thought-provoking books I've ever read.

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).