My Top Ten Favorite Books

1. Ficciones (Borges)

This collection of short stories is not only the finest example of prose in the Spanish language, but quite likely one of the most important literary achievements of the twentieth century. I’ve read and taught most of these texts dozens of times and they continue to dazzle. In an ideal world, I’d drop a few pages from Ficciones and replace them with a couple of stories from El Aleph, Borges’s follow up collection of tales, but this is about as good as it gets.

2. Don Quijote (Cervantes)

I had put off reading Don Quijote as long as possible before I took my MA exams. Because it was, you know, a classic, which meant that reading it would be good for you in the same way that eating your spinach or exercising is good for you. Needless to say, I was absolutely floored not only by the richness of Cervantes’ masterpiece, but how totally enjoyable it was to read. This book has only gotten better in the four hundred years since it was first published.

3. Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)

I’m not generally a fan of psychological fiction but Crime and Punishment is simply stunning. This is Dostoevsky at his finest.

4. Neruda (any good anthology)

Neruda was to poetry what Picasso was to painting: he was incredibly prolific and wrote seemingly effortlessly. There’s some dross among the gems, but no other poet has so excelled in mastering so many poetic idioms and making them his own. I love it all, from his early love poetry, to his avant-garde stuff, to his poems of outrage (and even the bloated excess of poems like “Alturas de Macchu Picchu.” Only Neruda could get away with such stuff—sorry Octavio!)

5. Collected Poems (Yeats)

I love Yeats, theosophic warts and all: from “The Happy Shepherd” to “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” to “The Second Coming” and on and on… I’ve memorized more of Yeats' poems (or tried to) than those of any other poet.

6. Dune (Herbert)

I just finished rereading this for the first time since high school. I was simply amazed at the scope of Herbert’s vision and his tirelessness in creating not only a new mythology but a totally coherent yet radically alien history, culture, and technology for his worlds (which turn out to be, I think, not so far removed from our own as we would like to believe). And for a sci-fi writer (no, I don’t mean to be damning with faint praise), his style and facility with language is impressive in the extreme.

7. Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price (selections) [Joseph Smith]

Joseph Smith didn't think of himself as a writer, of course. He tended to think of himself as a translator of ancient texts. And that is part of the immense appeal of his religious vision. I concur with Harold Bloom's appraisal of Joseph Smith: he was an authentic genius in the creativity of his religious thought and is utterly without parallel in American culture. His brilliance lay in his astonishing capacity to repurpose ancient Hebrew scripture and boldly inscribe the history of the Americas into a Biblical framework. It is too bad that so many of Joseph Smith's detractors and defenders alike get caught up in sterile debates about whether or not there were horses in Mesoamerica or where the Garden of Eden was located. Infinitely more valuable and interesting is Joseph's radical rethinking of the Judeo-Christian tradition and his uniquely American and uniquely prophetic voice.

8. The Name of the Rose (Eco)

Had Borges written a novel, it would have looked more or less like this. I remember reading The Name of the Rose as an undergraduate and seriously considering changing my area of study from contemporary Latin American literature to medieval studies. That’s really saying something.

9. Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein)

I took a course on Wittgenstein as an undergraduate and for many years afterward proudly identified myself as a Wittgensteinian. Everything about this book is fascinating to me: the problems Wittgenstein identifies; his totally idiosyncratic and intense way of addressing them. To read Wittgenstein is to watch someone thinking and to be obliged to think along with him.

10. Being and Time (Heidegger)

I hated Heidegger for a long time. More accurately, I grudgingly respected him because I knew I was supposed to (see Cervantes, above). Even a course that I took at Cornell dedicated exclusively to Being and Time didn't change my mind. It wasn't until I read some very good secondary material on the work (by Dreyfus and Wrathall) that I began to realize that Heidegger is likely to become indispensable to my future work.

Texts not quite making the cut: The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Arthur Danto), Blindness (José Saramago), Sailing Alone Around the Room (Billy Collins), The Riverside Shakespeare, The Backslider (Peterson).