I have an odd love-hate relationship with book lists. I like to read them in order to find books that I might otherwise miss out on, but I invariably feel a twinge of guilt when someone lists a book I haven’t read. John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men often makes it onto people’s lists, as does Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Yes, I missed them in high school. Sue me. Or better yet, sue the school board. I still got my diploma.

Drawing up this list often seemed like an exercise in futility. I’d originally planned to list one hundred books, but I had to scale it back to fifty; I read so much that I can barely remember what I’ve read two months ago, much less two years ago. And then there’s the question of how much snobbery I should let out. Do I list James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, thereby showing people how well-read I am? In the end, I decided not to. I wouldn’t recommend Joyce to the average reader—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has its moments, but reading it can seem like pulling teeth—and The Great Gatsby is, in my blasphemous opinion, greatly overrated. But I digress.

So in making this list, I decided to focus less on literary merit and more on enjoyment. These are the books that I couldn’t put down, for one reason or another. They’re the ones that really stick in my mind and I certainly wouldn’t mind revisiting them. Yes, I have questionable taste—Stephen King and Anne Rice made my list, while I intentionally left William Shakespeare off. Boo. And Ray Bradbury is a better prose stylist than Ernest Hemingway. Boo back. So here it is, warts and all—my list of what Stefanie calls “thumping good reads.”

And this time, feel free to sue me.

• 1984 by George Orwell
• The Trial by Franz Kafka
• Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
• The Green Mile by Stephen King
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• The Inferno by Dante
• Night by Elie Wiesel
• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
• White Fang by Jack London
• The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
• Mythology by Edith Hamilton
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
• The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
• Grendel by John Gardner
• Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
• Wicked by Gregory Maguire
• The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
• The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
• Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
• Wizard and Glass by Stephen King
• Complete Tales and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
• The Travelling Vampire Show by Richard Laymon
• The Stranger by Albert Camus
• Beowulf by Anonymous
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
• Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle