i’m procrastinating. that’s got to be it. i’ve written twenty pages in four days which is five times more than i’ve written in six months. i’m on a roll. i should be writing. but yesterday was show us your books day, and i arrived late to that party, as usual. and i’d been feeling guilty for not being a better reader of others’ bloggies, so i put the picky reads roll back in my sidebar in hopes that its presence might encourage me to be more social (because i’m not social. AT ALL. i’m hot. it’s may in texas, and i’m hot inside my house). anyway, i was looking through my feed and came across nathan bransford’s the best hundred novels challenge. and i was all: OOH! I CAN MAKE ANOTHER LIST! let me at it. so apparently the only writing i’ll be doing today involves banging on the keys for this here blog. it’s half past three in the afternoon, and i’m still in my jammies, yall. whatever.

the rules: there’s only one. you can only name books you’ve actually read. so there goes a huge chunk of the literary canon. i graduated with an english degree but was never assigned anything by dickens, austen, either of the brontes, none of the russians… there was some faulkner and hemingway in there, but i never read more than a few paragraphs. the rest of the stuff held little to no appeal. unless you’re teaching, an english degree’s little more than a license to bullshit, and in five years of studies, i got really good at it. i did get around to reading austen at some point; ain’t no way she’s making this list, but god love her for paving the way. i spent freshman and sophomore year at a small women’s college in the middle of nowhere. sure, we read. we read smut. and as i got older i graduated to good love stories and discovered i liked writing those as much as i enjoy reading them, so yeah… there’s gonna be a lot of love on this list. it was jumbled, but the obsessive-compulsive streak my father gave me couldn’t have that, so now it’s alphabetized by author; if there’re multiple works by an author, they’re either listed by preference or series order. so of the books that i have read, these are the one that i think are the best. those in bold are the ones i can heartily recommend.