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Twenty-five Books Only

If you could only own twenty-five books, which ones would you choose? These aren't necessarily your favorite books, or the greatest books of all time, but the volumes you would always want at hand for your personal enjoyment and edification. Though I reserve the right to revise it later, here's my list in no particular order:

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
2. Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions
3. H.P. Lovecraft: Tales
4. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
5. The Best of Wodehouse by P.G. Wodehouse
6. The Best Poems of the English Language, ed. Harold Bloom
7. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
8. The Sibley Guide to Birds
9. The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White
10. The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters
11. 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith
12. Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith
13. Bedford Introduction to Literature
14. A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
15. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
16. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
17. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
18. Watership Down by Richard Adams
19. Existentialism and Human Emotions by Jean-Paul Sartre
20. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein
21. Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
22. Complete Works of William Shakespeare
23. The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
24. Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory
25. Zurich International Chess Tournament, 1953 by David Bronstein

© Paul Gorman