favorite books

[Paul Mackin]

The following are books I would like to sit down right now and reread
once again although I would judge doing so a waste of time because I've
already done multiple rereads and there are so many good books I haven't
yet read. The selections are not always among the best books (best imho)
ever written but each contains some particular attraction for me.   

1. Oliver Twist--Dickens (scared me as a child)

2. The Red and the Black--Stendhl (freed me from any lingering belief I
still might have had in the honest soul)

3. Two Girls, Fat and Thin--Gaitskill (I'm obsessed by this kind of
obsession)

4. Gravity's Rainbow--Pynchon (I can relive WW II) 

5. The Counterlife--Roth (best postmodernity, self-reflexivity)

6. The Treasure Seekers--Nesbit (a happy return to childhood)

7. Harlot's Ghost--Mailer (I'm intrigued by the life of deception)

8. Ada--Nabokov (so beautifully corrupt and self-indulgent)

9. In Search of Lost Time--Proust (I read at this almost
continually--talk about obsession)

10. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--Joyce (I too went to school
with the Jesuits and remember the sermons)