I managed to read quite a few books this year. My list of favorite books that I read over its course is a bit more diverse than last year, managing to mix the must-read classics with high political fantasy, modern pop lit, and even a non-fiction argument against the existence of god, a book that convincingly goes so far to say that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion. As always, feel free to recommend me any books to add to my ever-amassing collection of “must reads” that are piling up next to my already full bookshelf. If only I could be like Larry in The Razor’s Edge, loafing around for years in exotic countries reading for ten hours a day, maybe I would be able to get through them all within a couple of years.

Don’t forget to check out last year’s list also. Like I mentioned, it’s not quite as diverse, with Cormac McCarthy making the list an unprecedented four times.

10. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Quotable: I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

9. American Rust by Phillipp Meyer
Quotable: Maybe all people with minds like Isaac’s were the same. She knew he would make a much larger contribution than she ever would – he cared only about things much bigger than his own life. Ideas, truths, the reasons things were. As if he himself, his own existence, was somehow incidental.

8. Rabbit Redux by John Updike
Quotable: Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he’ll always know.

7. Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck
Quotable: I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.

6. A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire #1) by George R. R. Martin
Quotable: “Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?” / “That is the only time a man can be brave.”

5. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Quotable: This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.

4. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Quotable: We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

3. Everyman by Philip Roth
Quotable: Terrifying encounters with the end? I’m thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you’re seventy-five! The remote future will be time enough to anguish over the ultimate catastrophe!

2. The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
Quotable: “And after that? What are you going to do with all this wisdom?” / “If I ever acquire wisdom I suppose I shall be wise enough to know what to do with it.”

1. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Quotable: Never, never will I understand men who throw over everything for some woman. The trick, the joy of it, is to prosper on all fronts, enlist money in the service of love and love in the service of money. As long as I am getting rich, I feel that all is well.