I started out to write down a list of my favorite books, after coming across an old one this afternoon, and I found it to be much less eclectic than I had expected. As you can see, it's mostly literature, but as I scanned our bookshelves, the ones I found myself compelled to add were the ones that, in the words of A Common Reader, are simply
Thumping Good Reads

Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson
The Mozart Season, Virginia Euwer Wolff
Pensees, Blaise Pascal
Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
Emma, Jane Austen
The Deed of Paksenarrion, Elizabeth Moon
Confessions, St. Augustine
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
The Aeneid, Virgil
A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Flannery O’Connor
The Little Bookroom, Eleanor Farjeon
Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, Pamela Dean
Keep A Quiet Heart, Elisabeth Elliot
The Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet, Edith Pargeter
The Little Country, Charles de Lint
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
The Day I Became An Autodidact, Kendall Hailey
Emily of New Moon, L.M. Montgomery
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
A String in the Harp, Nancy Bond
Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
The Hawk and the Dove, Penelope Wilcock
Agnes Grey, Anne Bronte
His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman
The Blue Sword, Robin McKinley
Incident At Hawk’s Hill, Allan W. Eckert
My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George
The Cornish Trilogy, Robertson Davies
The Annotated Alice, Lewis Carroll & Martin Gardner
Hideous Kinky, Esther Freud
Many Waters, Madeleine L’Engle
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Notes From A Small Island, Bill Bryson
A Gathering of Days, Joan W. Blos
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
The Borrowers series, Mary Norton
The Hound and the Falcon, Judith Tarr
Divine Secrets of the Ya?Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
The Thinking Reed, Rebecca West
The Little House on the Prairie series, Laura Ingalls Wilder
Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild
One Morning in Maine, Robert McCloskey
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
Drawn From New England, Bethany Tudor
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Miss Rumphius, Barbara Cooney
The Heaven Tree Trilogy, Edith Pargeter
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Possession, A.S. Byatt
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
Picnic, Lightning, Billy Collins
Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
Enchanted April, Elizabeth Von Arnim
Phedre, Jean Racine