© Lydia Hudgens

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us – never cease to instruct – never cloy. – Charles Caleb Colton 

For better or for worse, my view of the world was shaped early on by the following books:

1.  Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
2.  The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
3.  The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
4.  The Story-Makers edited by Rudy Wiebe (particularly the short story, Guests of the Nation by Frank O’Connor)
5.  A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
6.  Lust for Life by Irving Stone
7.  My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
8.  The Sun King by Nancy Mitford
9.  The Major Victorian Poets edited by William H. Marshall
10. Mythology by Edith Hamilton
11. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
12. Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
13. Hedda Gabler play by Henrik Ibsen
14. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
15. The Stranger by Albert Camus
16. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
17. Hills Like White Elephants, short story by Ernest Hemingway
18. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
19. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
20. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
21. Metamorphosis, novella by Franz Kafka
22. The Penguin by John Lennon
23. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
24. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
25. The Mountain is Young by Han Suyin
26. Love Story by Eric Segal
27. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
28. Romeo and Juliet, play by William Shakespeare
29. 1984 by George Orwell
30. Animal Farm by George Orwell
31. The Divine Comedy, epic poem by Dante
32. The Odyssey, epic poem by Homer
33. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
34. Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener

I would love to know what books top your list?

Model: Lauren DiMarco