Favorite books

This list is a collection of my favorite books of any genre. As such, there are a wide range of categories, although you'll notice that "literary fiction" or even "Literary fiction" is not among them. You might also notice that a number of works on here are considered by academia to be "literary fiction." However, I resist that label as they define it; I do not believe the content of a book or a particular approach to plot or character or whatever, is what makes a work "literary." Many great literary works throughout the ages defy or blatantly depart from what academia currently teaches as "literary," and I, for one, consider what they call "literary fiction" as merely another genre. As such, I have adopted the term "mainstream fiction" to refer to contemporary works in that vein, while much of the work on this list I would consider "Literary" in the more important sense of a work that is timeless because it speaks to the reader without respect to the time period in which it was written, and that does so on many levels. Such works may possess any number of characteristics that are reviled by literary snobs today as "genre" if it is a contemporary work, but as classic if the work was written in a previous time period.

NOTE: This is a list of my favorite books in each genre listed, not necessarily all books I enjoy in those genres. Thus, many books may be left off this list that deserve mentioning, where I simply listing all books and works that I like or enjoy.

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