Favourite Books

“Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only.

Like a jealous lover I don't want anybody else to hear of it.” —W. H. Auden, “The Dyer’s Hand”

I have accumulated thousands of books over the years and have dozens of bookcases around my house. Nearly every shelf has books stuffed across the top and stacked in front. I have acquired an average of at least one book every day for more than 35 years. That’s a lot of books (including haiku journals). Poetry, especially haiku and tanka, has been my central focus (thank goodness that many haiku books are small), but I also collect books on science/mathematics, language/grammar, world religions (especially Zen and Taoism), children’s literature, fiction, graphic design and typography, humour, travel, art, music, and more, such as small collections on the theory of play and shelves devoted to such topics as optical illusions, Japanese culture, concrete poetry, plagiarism, Paul Reps, John Cage, Alan Watts, comics, and photography. I have bookcases devoted to Martin Gardner, E. E. Cummings, and Lewis Carroll, including books dating back to the 1800s, and another large bookcase filled with hundreds of computer books I’ve edited. Amid all these thousands of books, I would say the following, in alphabetical order by author, have risen to the top as among the most influential and admired in my life. Which of these books have you read?

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll       +       +

• The Tao and Mother Goose by Robert Carter

• I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven       +

• 1x1, 95 Poems, and Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings       +

• Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty

• The River Why by David James Duncan

• Tao Te Ching translated by Jane English

• The Art of Loving by Erich Frome

• Markings by Dag Hammarskjold

• Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

• The Haiku Handbook by William J. Higginson

• Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

• The Bat Poet by Randall Jarrell

• The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

• The Compact Culture (also titled as Smaller Is Better) by O-Young Lee (about Japan)

• On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (who I share a birthday with)

• Devotions by Mary Oliver

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig       +

• The Tao Is Silent by Raymond Smullyan

• The Haiku Anthology edited by Cor van den Heuvel       +

I also have a habit of reading bathroom books, such as quotation books or other short episodic collections. Haiku and tanka books sometimes make good bathroom books. So far, though, my favourite bathroom book has been 99 Red Balloons and 100 Other All-Time Great One-Hit Wonders by Brent Mann.

See also “Favourite Movies.”