The abandoned posts from my canceled blog tour continue with this week’s blog, where I was asked to list my Top 5 favorite books of all time. The following novels aren’t in any order, except the first one.
1. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Still my favorite book of all time. Salinger absolutely nails adolescence and all its glories, complications, and—most poignantly—pain (especially of the internal variety). After reading this for the first time as an impressionable and alienated teen, I finally found someone who thought like me and realized I wasn’t alone at feeling alone.
2. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
If you’ve read How to Save a Drowning Butterfly from my short story collection The Electric God and Other Shorts, you know how influential Keyes’s novel was for me. The story of the “dumbest” person in the book being the most kindhearted and human in an unforgiving world was just heartbreaking to me. As an added bonus, being an editor and grammar nerd myself, I adored the unique, first-person structure of the book; the purposefully misspelled sentences in the beginning gradually become coherent and even brilliant before (Spoiler Alert!) they revert back to a childlike language full of errors. Just a masterpiece.
3. 1984 by George Orwell
Orwell’s dystopian future of censorship, techno surveillance, and a “Big Brother” government was insanely prescient. He was only off by about 40 years.
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
One-upping his previous novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, this is probably the greatest literary sequel of all time. In following Sawyer’s friend, Twain keeps all the adventure of Tom Sawyer but expands its themes to include a heartfelt story about race, understanding, and just the overall unfairness of the world and your place in it. Another heartbreaker on this list. As you can see, I have a type.
5. Mail Order Wings by Beatrice Gormley
This is probably the least known book on my list. I checked this novella out at a library before a long flight when I was a kid and read it on the plane. It was my first exposure to magical realism, which is a genre I dabble in frequently with my own writing. I love the idea of only one thing being magical in an otherwise normal world, like the titular wings in Gormley’s story and the titular, supernatural mountain in my debut novel Danger Peak. With apologies to fans of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, personally, when everything in the book is magical, it almost feels like nothing is. By limiting the otherworldly aspects of your story to a single item or area, it makes it that much more special to me.
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In other MTP news, I’ll be signing discounted copies of my books, including both softcover and hardcover versions of Is There Life After College?, at the Bay Shore Bean coffeehouse this Sunday, November 8th, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. After a very busy year, this will be my last solo signing until 2027. The gourmet coffee at Bay Shore Bean is delicious, so if nothing else, come enjoy a hot cup of java. For more info, please see the flyer below:
Hope to see you there!
MTP
P.S.: Next blog: My Lost Interview
P.P.S.: The Danger Peak audiobook is available!
P.P.P.S.: Is There Life After College? is now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble:
