What Are the Best Books You've Ever Read? Those Are Your Ideal Bookshelf!
- Melissa Gouty
- Feb 10
- 8 min read
Updated: Feb 18
Harder than you think to determine!
When my sister gifted me a copy of Bibliophile, I had no idea what a treat I was in for!
This wonderful book about books is designed to entice true bibliophiles like me. It's filled with illustrations of bookstacks by genre. Facts about authors, sketches of bookstores, and tantalizing trivia about literature are contained in these ingenious pages.
The author of Bibliophile, Jane Mount, is an artist. She started doing illustrations of people's ideal bookshelves.
"What's an ideal bookshelf?" you may ask.
An ideal bookshelf is a painting of the books that most represent you, the books you love the most. As Mount describes it,
"Everyone has a favorite, maybe the first book they held to their chest and told someone else about, or the one that changed the way they saw the world forever. Many of us have several. Painted together on a shelf, these books tell a story of what we've experienced, what we believe, and who we are."
It's taken me two weeks to figure out my ideal bookshelf!
Those of us who are true bibliophiles have read hundreds of books over the years, and many, many of them were fantastic reads. How do we distill all those books down to the ones worthy of your ideal bookshelf? You have to figure out the "best" books you've ever read although "best" does NOT refer to quality of literature or the amount of hype it's received. Your "best" books are the ones that affected you long-term, that touched your heart, marked an era of your life, or changed the way you see the world.
Your ideal bookshelf is harder than you think to determine!
It took me two weeks to make my choices, remembering - and then deliberating - about which books have impacted my life the most over the past six decades. Here's what I came up with, in chronological order.
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
I was in third grade when my teacher, Mrs. Handy, began reading The Hobbit to our class every day after lunch. The rhythm of the words and the story of Bilbo Baggins, the adventurous hobbit who encounters dwarves, a dragon, a wizard, and a ring that makes him invisible, was a story that got into my blood like a sugar rush from a candy bar.
I was hooked. Listening to The Hobbit fueled my fire to read every story I could get my hands on from that point on.
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
Mrs. McGuire was an older teacher with cat-eye glasses who I wasn't particularly fond of. I became even less fond of her when she thoroughly embarrassed me in front of my entire fifth-grade class.
We had free time for reading at the end of the day. I was deep into Charlotte's Web. Fully engrossed in the book, I was smelling the hay, watching Wilbur, and grieving Charlotte's death. Tears rolled down my face. Mrs. McGuire marched down the aisle waving a tissue at me.
"Look! She's crying real tears!" she announced to my classmates.
Maybe she was commiserating, but it felt like she was mocking.
It was the first time I realized that books were connected to your heart and that I had a stronger connection from the page to my heart than others.
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Clarksville High School performed Thorton Wilder's Our Town in 1975. I played Emily, the young woman the play follows from childhood, to marriage, through death. The play takes place in Grovers Corner, a small town in New Hampshire - or any small town in America - like mine.
Years later, my beloved friend and mentor, Martha, mentioned that Our Town was her favorite play. Over more than three decades of friendship, we have performed several excerpts from the play for small groups. More importantly, we have tried to be some of the few people who appreciate each minute of life, answering Emily's question:
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?”
Yes, Emily, some do. We may not be saints or poets, but we took your play to heart.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
I was reading To Kill a Mockingbird on the back deck of my home in Kentucky on a hot summer afternoon. I was in my early twenties, and it was my first read of the classic. I fell in love with Atticus Finch that day, for the first time understanding how few people fight for justice and how difficult it is to find it in a prejudiced world.
For more than thirty years after, I counted To Kill a Mockingbird as the best book I'd ever read, and it's still on my ideal bookshelf.
Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey by Lillian Schlissel
I remember browsing the pages of the Book of Month club catalog in 1982, whittling down my choices, and then deciding on Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey by Lillian Schissel. At that time, my choice of reading material was historical fiction with an occasional Gothic or mystery thrown in. I rarely chose nonfiction works, and I don't think - other than The Diary of Anne Frank - that I'd read diary literature before.
How glad I am that I made this foray into a new kind of reading! Powerful, poignant, amazing stories in the words of women on the Westward trail were recorded in journals and chronicled in this amazing book. Hearing their voices walking through trials and tragedies on their way to new lives gave me courage. This book showed me how strong women can be and helped me decide to change my own life.
Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
Okay. Bring on the schmaltz!
While I work to read Pulitzers and books that have received lots of hype, I'm also a sucker for a great story. Like sixty million other people, I got an emotional wallop from this book published in 1992.
I was struggling in my own marriage, feeling trapped and bitter. This book awakened an intense longing in me and made me acknowledge that I was unhappy.
When I saw the book years thirty years later on a clearance rack, I had an unexpected visceral reaction, my eyes tearing up as I glimpsed the cover of Bridges of Madison County.
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Published in 1994 at the beginning of my own writing career, Anne Lamott's honest, funny, sometimes irreverent book about writing, Bird by Bird, inspired me. I underlined quotes, highlighted passages, and turned down the page corners. Thirty years later, I still pull this book off the shelf often, re-read the advice, and get inspired just like I did the very first time I read it!
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
This is a charming book written by a former columnist and children's book author, Amy Krouse Rosenthal. I LOVED this book because it was unique. Instead of organizing her story chronologically or thematically, Rosenthal distilled moments and observations from her "ordinary life" into encyclopedic entries that together depicted her life as a whole.
Rosenthall had me hooked from the very first page in what she calls, "Reader's Agreement," asking me to agree with her on dozens of funny, but pragmatic viewpoints. She tells love stories by remembering a single vocabulary word, writes timelines of mundane moments, and crafts decidedly quirky - but somehow true - definitions to otherwise ordinary words.
I adore the Foreward to Lamott's book:
"I was not abused, abandoned, or locked up as a child. My parents were not alcoholics, nor were they ever divorced or dead. We did not live in poverty, or in misery, or in an exotic country. I am not a misunderstood genius, a former child celebrity, or the child of a celebrity. I am not a drug addict, sex addict, food addict, or recovered anything. If I indeed had a past life, I have no recollection of who I was. I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story."
Rosenthall taught me that books don't have to be written sentence by sentence in linear form to create a brilliant, coherent story. Her "Foreward" was exactly what I wanted to portray in my memoir, The Magic of Ordinary.
If you want something fun and extraordinary, get Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life.
The Book Thief by Markus Zakov
The Book Thief tops my list of all-time favorite books, knocking To Kill a Mockingbird Down to second position. I've read The Book Thief three times, and each time, I'm wowed by its masterful structure and the power of its story (or as a poet friend of mine once said, I am "struck dumb by a thing of beauty.")
Death is the narrator of Markus Zakov's novel, a unique approach for sure! Death meets Liesel, the book's main character, three times, and always while she's stealing books. Liesel is a foster child to a German couple who experience the war alongside their neighbors, all while hiding a Jewish man in their basement.
There is no way I can do this book justice by describing it, but if you haven't read it yet, don't wait! The writing is superb, the structure is magnificent, and the colors pack an emotional wallop.
Ava's Man by Rick Bragg
My friend, Terri, gave this book to me as a gift. Before then, I had never heard of Rick Bragg or been exposed to his powerful prose. A Pulitzer-winning journalist, Bragg uses all the tools of his trade to create meaningful nonfiction books about his life and his family living in the deep South.
Ava's Man is the story of Charlie Bundrum, the grandfather Rick Bragg never knew. The book is an honest, riveting story of his grandfather and his grandmother living in a different era.
I will read Ava's Man several more times before I die because of its power, loveliness, and the feeling that Charlie Bundrum was a man that I didn't want to miss knowing.
Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
You wouldn't think that a book about dealing with terminal illness, aging, and death would be on my ideal bookshelf. But then again, you might not have experienced the death of your parents, written for an end-of-life organization, or truly contemplated the difference between quality of life and quantity of life.
When my mother was dying, Being Mortal helped me think about living a good life in a different perspective. It's not about using medicine to extend a life that is already guaranteed to expire, but about focusing on the joy of living in the present, even with infirmities, knowing that yes, we all have to die.
The NIV Study Bible
My ideal bookshelf is mine, and mine alone. It wouldn't be complete without my Bible, the book that teaches me daily about life and how to live it.
The Runners-Up
I debated about The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, my first exposure to excellent Christian fiction. There was Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund, a book that etched on me the possibilities of examining characters outside the perimeter of a story. The Scarlet Letter almost made it. Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic tale of the adultress taught me the glory of a first-time reading and epiphany. I experienced actual goosebumps when I read this book in seventh grade and figured out who the father of Hester Prynne's baby was!
These books and other great stories didn't make the cut because while they were fantastic reads, I haven't gone back to them over and over like the other volumes on my ideal shelf.
My challenge to you
What books have impacted your life and influenced your thinking? What have you returned to for information, salvation, or pleasure? What would your ideal bookshelf look like? Please tell me. I really want to know!
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Buy The Hobbit from Amazon (online retailer)
Buy The Hobbit from Bookshop.org (supports independent bookstores)
Buy Charlotte's Web from Bookshop (supports independent bookstores)
Buy Being Mortal from Amazon
Buy The Bible / NIV Study edition from Amazon