Favorite Books, Authors, and Poets

While creating my profile, I ran into a problem. No matter how I tried, I couldn't seem to squeeze all of my favorite writers into 2,000 characters! I started omitting some names but felt guilty because they deserved a mention as much as the others did. That comes from a lifetime of collecting stories, I suppose.

Long before I was an English and American Literature major, I was an avid reader (The term "voracious" is an understatement that still applies today). This was thanks to my mom, who had severe dyslexia yet managed to teach me to read when I was about four years old. As soon as I could read on my own, I read to her. This has been the saving grace of my life; it gave me the foundation for the education I possess today.  This is a long river of a list that flows from the distant past until this point in time, stretching nearly the length and width of me. I've forgotten some names and titles, which I hope to remedy soon. Because of this literary river, "my soul grows deep." I hope that yours will, too. Enjoy!

Here is a tentative list of significant stories:

• "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson 
• "Bless Me Ultima" by Rudolpho Anaya
• "The Complete Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Anderson" 
• "Tales of The Arabian Nights"
• "Thirteen Reasons Why" By Jay Asher
• "Tuck Everlasting" by Natalie Babbit
• "The Little White Bird" by J. M. Barrie
• "Peter Pan" By J. M. Barrie
• Basho's haiku
• "The Wizard of Oz" and "The Wonderful Land of Oz" by L. Frank Baum
• "The Uses of Enchantment" by Bruno Bettelheim
• "J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys" by Andrew Birkin
• "A Bear Called Paddington" by Michael Bond
• The poems of Anne Bradstreet
• "Collected Poems in English" by Joseph Brodsky
•  "Nativity Poems" by Joseph Brodsky
• "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte
• Emily Bronte's poems
• The "Winds of Light" series by Sigmund Brouwer
• "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" by Lewis Carroll
• "Call if You Need Me" by Raymond Carver
• "The Perks of Being A Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky
• Charles Dickens: "The Old Curiosity Shop," "A Tale of Two Cities," and "Great Expectations"
• "A Shortcut in Time" by Charles Dickenson
• Emily Dickinson's poems
• "The Spiderwick Chronicles" by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black
• "A Gentle Creature and Other Stories" by Fyodor Dostoevsky
•  "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" by Frederick Douglass
• "Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• "The City of Ember" (series) by Jeanne DuPrau
• "The Wasteland and Other Poems" by T. S. Eliot
• "Nature," "The American Scholar" and "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The Great Gatsby," "Flappers and Philosophers," and "Tales of the Jazz Age"
• Marie Louise Von Franz: "Individuation in Fairy Tales" and "Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales"
• "The Poems of Robert Frost"
• "Faeries" by Brian Froud and Alan Lee
• The poems of Tu Fu
• Neil Gaiman: "American Gods," "Anasi Boys," and "The Ocean at the End of the Lane"
• "The Story of My Experiments with Truth" by Mohandas K Gandhi
• "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"
• "Paper Towns" by John Green
• "The Adventures of Robin Hood" by Roger Lancelyn Green
• The Complete Fairy Tales of The Brothers Grimm"
• "The Motorcycle Diaries" by Ernesto "Che" Guevara
• "The Heart of The Buddha's Teaching" and "Peace Is Every Step" by Thich Nhat Hanh
• "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• "A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway
• "Out of the Dust" by Karen Hesse
• "The Odyssey" and "The Iliad" by Homer
• "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving
• "The Essential Kierkegaard"
• "Please Understand Me II" by David Keirsey
• "On Writing" and "The Shining" by Stephen King
• "The Bean Trees" by Barbara Kingsolver
• "Naruto" by Masashi Kishimoto
• "Bleach" by Tite Kubo
• "The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation"
• "The Blue Fairy Book" by Andrew Lang
• "To Kill A Mockingbird" by Harper Lee
• "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle
• "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "The Dark Tower" by C. S. Lewis 
• The complete poems of Federico Garcia Lorca
• "Phantastes" by George Macdonald
• "Le Morte D'Arthur" by Sir Thomas Malory
• "Rebecca" by Daphne Du Maurier
• "Many Years from Now" by Sir Paul McCartney
• "Peter Pan in Scarlet" by Geraldine McCaughrean
• "Portraits" by Steve McCurry (photography; still deserves a mention)
• The Winnie the Pooh series by A. A. Milne
• "The Iceworker Sings and Other Poems" by Andres Montoya
• "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern
• "Lovely Complex" by Aya Nakahara
• "One Piece" by Tite Kubo
• "Bridge to Terabithia" by Katherine Patterson
• "The Higher Power of Lucky" by Susan Patron
• "The Nautical Chart" by Arturo Perez-Reverte
• Li Po's poems
• "Art Deco: The Golden Age of Graphic Art and Illustration" by Michael Robinson and Rosalind Ormiston (still deserves a mention)
• The Harry Potter series and "The Tales of Beedle the Bard" by J. K. Rowling
• "Holes" by Louis Sachar
• "Wind, Sand, and Stars" by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
• "Nine Stories," "The Catcher in the Rye," "Franny and Zooey," and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter and Seymour: an Introduction" by J. D. Salinger
• "Peanuts" by Charles Schulz
• William Shakespeare's sonnets and some plays: "Antony and Cleopatra," "The Comedy of Errors," "Hamlet," "The Merchant of Venice," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Much Ado About Nothing," "Othello," "Romeo and Juliet," "The Tempest," "Troilus and Cressida," "Twelfth Night," and "The Winter's Tale"
• "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley
• "Notes from the Midnight Driver" by Jordan Sonnenblick
• "Nobody Likes You: Inside the Turbulent Life, Times, and Music of Green Day" by Marc Spitz
• "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson
• "Dracula" by Bram Stoker
• "Walden" and "Resistance to Civil Government" by Henry David Thoreau
• "The Lord of The Rings" by J. R. R. Tolkien
• "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain
• Biographies about Mark Twain 
• "Journey to the Center of the Earth" by Jules Verne
• "Calvin and Hobbes" (series) by Bill Watterson
• Poems of Phyllis Wheatley
• "Charlotte's Web" by E. B. White
• "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman
• "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde
• "The Glass Menagerie" and "Cat on A Hot Tin Roof" by Tennessee Williams
• "True Believer" by Virginia Euwer Wolff
• "Selected Poems" by Lu Xun
• "Nana" by Ai Yazawa
• "Clean Slate" by Daisy Zamora