This came about due to a friend’s list of top 10 books during the Covid-19 crisis.  It made me think, so here are my lists.  As always, this list will likely change (maybe even as I’m pressing the [Publish] button), but it stands as a testament to this moment.

Fiction

  1. The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)
  2. Circe (Madeline Miller)
  3. The Iliad (Homer, Caroline Alexander translation)
  4. All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)
  5. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
  6. The Foundation Trilogy (Isaac Asimov)
  7. Manfred (Lord Byron)
  8. Grendel (John Gardner)
  9. Embers (Márai Sándor)
  10. The Hound of the Baskervilles (Arthur Conan Doyle)
Nonfiction
  1. The War That Killed Achilles (Caroline Alexander)
  2. Everybody Talks About the Weather (Ulrike Meinhof)
  3. Socialism: Past and Future (Michael Harrington)
  4. Command and Control (Eric Schlosser)
  5. Manufacturing Hysteria (Jay Feldman)
  6. Fermat's Enigma (Simon Singh)
  7. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Mary Wollstonecraft)
  8. The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx)
  9. Infections and Inequalities (Paul Farmer)
  10. Down and Out, on the Road (Kenneth Kusmer)