Stolen from Kevin Brockmeier’s top-50 lists, these are the 50 books that live in my DNA. From childhood to recent reads, these books resonate the longest and deepest. No author is represented more than once and the top-10 are asterisked.

1.)   The Book of Three – Lloyd Alexander

2.)   60 Stories – Donald Barthelme*

3.)   Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges*

4.)   Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card

5.)   Where I’m Calling From – Raymond Carver

6.)   The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

7.)   The Collected Stories of John Cheever - John Cheever

8.)   Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Patricia Clarke

9.)   D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myth – Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire

10.)  Slouching Towards Bethlehem – Joan Didion

11.)  The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

12.)  My Side of the Mountain – Jean George

13.)   The Quiet American – Graham Greene

14.)   Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

15.)  Dune – Frank Herbert

16.)  The Friends of Eddie Coyle – John V. Higgins

17.)  The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith

18.)  The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

19.)  Redwall – Brian Jacques

20.)  Jesus’ Son – Denis Johnson*

21.)  Ulysses – James Joyce

22.) The Collected Stories – Franz Kafka

23.)  The Stand – Stephen King*

24.)  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – John Le Carre*

25.)  The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem

26.) Magic for Beginners – Kelly Link*

27.)  H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald

28.)  Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy

29.)  Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

30.)  Watchmen – Alan Moore*

31.)  Beloved – Toni Morrison*

32.)  Runaway – Alice Munro

33.)  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami

34.)  The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

35.)  A Collection of Essays – George Orwell

36.)  The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

37.)  Clockers – Richard Price

38.)  Gilead – Marilynn Robinson*

39.)  Mortals – Norman Rush

40.)  Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

41.)  CivilWarLand in Bad Decline – George Saunders

42.)  Dog Soldiers – Robert Stone

43.)  The Secret History – Donna Tartt

44.)  Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

45.)  Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

46.)  Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace

47.)  Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward

48.)  Stoner – John Williams*

49.)  Winter’s Bone – Daniel Woodrell

50.)  Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates

Five outside:, Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle, In the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, Speedboat by Renata Adler, The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Fell Out: The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor, The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson, Big Sur by Jack Kerouac, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, Libra by Don DeLillo, Poachers by Tom Franklin, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, If This Is Man by Primo Levi, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Father and Son by Larry Brown, The Postman Always Rings Twice by James L. Cain, Dying Light by Skip Hays