300 Posts, 300 Books I Am Glad I’ve Read

Today’s posting marks the 300th post on MontanaWriter, a nice round number.

Round numbers are hard to resist. There is a something complete and satisfying in their shape… in what they symbolize: the 20th reunion, the 50th wedding anniversary, the centennial, the bi-centenial.

Round numbers invite reminiscences and memories. They invite self-reflection and nostalgia. They make us reflect upon the very nature of time and the passing of time.

20 months and 300 posts down the line and I am still thinking about what I have been thinking about most of my life: words and poems and books.

In honor of today’s milestone, I am posting a list of 300 books that matter to me. They run the gamut of genres and weight, but in the end they have one thing in common, I am very glad I read them. I enjoyed each and every one of them!

300 books I am glad I’ve read (in no particular order)

1. Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
2. Roughing It, by Mark Twain
3. Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, by W. B. Yeats
4. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
5. Karpov on Karpov, by Anatoly Karpov
6. Poems, by William Wordsworth
7. Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, by Bill James
8. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
9. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown
10. Omar N. Bradley a Soldiers Story, by Omar N. Bradley
11. Life Work, by Donald Hall
12. Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn
13. A Sportman’s Sketches, by Ivan Turgenev
14. Parades End, by Ford Madox Ford
15. The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
16. The Green Hills of Africa, by Ernest Hemingway
17. Dyer’s Hand, by W.H. Auden
18. Selected Poems of Dylan Thomas, by Dylan Thomas
19. Trout Fishing in America, by Richard Brautigan
20. On Poetry and Poets, by T.S. Eliot
21. I, The Jury by Mickey Spillane
22. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
23. This House of Sky, by Ivan Doig
24. Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
25. The Source, by James Michener
26. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
27. Homage to Robert Frost, by Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott
28. All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy
29. Essays and Introductions, by W.B. Yeats
30. Autobiographies, by W.B. Yeats
31. Night, by Elie Wiesel
32. The Seven Story Mountain, by Thomas Merton
33. The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, by Carl Sandburg
34. Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
35. The Book of Basketball, by Bill Simmons
36. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
37. Sweeney Astray, by Seamus Heaney
38. Poetry and Ambition, by Donald Hall
39. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
40. Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton
41. .44, by H.A. DeRosso
42. Can Poetry Matter?, by Dana Gioia
43. For Whom the Bells Toll, by Ernest Hemingway
44. Complete Poems, Marianne Moore
45. 100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
46. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solhenitsyn
47. Idle Days in Patagonia, by W.H. Hudson
48. The Fabulous Clip Joint, by Frederic Brown
49. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
50. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
51. At the Earth’s Core, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
52. On the Banks of Plum Creek, Laura Ingalls Wilder
53. Gulag Achipelego,  by Alexander Solhenitsyn
54. A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
55. Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold
56. Irish Fairy and Folk Tales, by W.B. Yeats
57. A Bend in the River, by V.S. Naipaul
58. A Day in the Bleachers, by Arnold Hano
59. The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence Ritter
60. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. The Complete Father Brown, by G.K. Chesterton
62. The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
63. My Turn at Bat, by Ted Williams
64. The Plague, Albert Camus
65. Travels with Charly by John Steinbeck
66. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
67. Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, by Edgar Allan Poe
68. Bible
69. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
70. Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges
71. Collected Poems of John Milton, by John Milton
72. The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuscinski
73. Collected Poems, by W.H. Auden
74. The Pitch that Killed, by Mike Sowell
75. Black Elk Speaks, by John John Neihardt
76. Citizen Soldiers, by Stephen E. Ambrose
77. Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
78. Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis
79. Portrait of Picasso, by Norman Mailer
80. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, by Hugh MacDiarmid
81. Dispatches, by Michael Herr
82. Chiricahua, by Will Henry
83. Conan, Robert E. Howard
84. Selected Poems, John Donne
85. Riders of the Shadowlands: Western Stories, by H.A. DeRosso
86. Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
87. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
88. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John le Carre
89. A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean
90. The Green Fool by Patrick Kavanaugh
91. Poems of Byron, Keats and Shelley, by Elliott Coleman, ed.
92. The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
93. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick
94. The Empty Copper Sea, by John D. MacDonald
95. Collected Poems 1917-1982, By Archibald MacLeish
96. Night Squad, by David Goodis
97. My Favorite Year, Mickey Mantle
98. Deeper,  by Jeff Long
99. Life of Tom Horn, by Tom Horn
100. Eye of the Storm,  by Jack Higgins
101. Valdez is Coming, by Elmore Leornard
102. The Simple Art of Murder, by Raymond Chandler
103. Collected Stories, by William Faulkner
104. Red Storm Rising, by Tom Clancy
105. Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, by Paul Klee
106. Mythologies, by W.B. Yeats
107. Damanation Alley, by Roger Zelazny
108.  Weather Central, by Ted Kooser
109. Aran Islands by John M. Synge
110. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
111. Savage Range, by Luke Short
112. Let Me Tell You a Story, by Red Auerbach
113. Field Work, by Seamus Heaney
114. The Complete Angler, by Izzak Walton
115. Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot, by T.S. Eliot
116. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche
117. The Celebrated Case of Judge Dee, by Robert Van Gulik
118. The Curious Case of Syd Finch, by George Plimpton
119. Iceberg, by Clive Cussler
120. The Stranger, by Albert Camus
121. The Complete Stories, by Franz Kafka
122. Christ and Culture, by H. Richard Niebuhr
123.  Native Tongue, by Carl Hiaasen
124. The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction, by Ed Gorman, ed.
125. Collected Poems, by  Patrick Kavanaugh
126. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, by Robert Penn Warren
127. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
128. Hockey Heroes & Me, by Red Fischer
129. The River Why, by David Duncan
130. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
131. Shadow Prey, by John Sanford
132.  Sailing Alone Around the Room, by Billy Collins
133. The Goodbye Look, by Ross MacDonald
134.  The Haw Lantern, by Seamus Heaney
135. Three Plays, by Sean O’Casey
136. Collected Poems, by Austin Clarke
137. War and Peace, by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
138. El Borak, by Robert E. Howard
139. Black Diamonds, John Holloway
140. Letters to a Young Poet, by Ranier Maria Rilke
141. Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig and His Time, by Ray Robinson
142. Report to Greco, by Nikos Kazantzakis
143. The Godwulf Manuscript, by Robert Parker
144. Open Net, by George Plimpton
145. Get Shorty, by Elmore Leonard
146. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
147. Selected Poems, by Robert Browning
148. Ted Williams Reader, by Lawrence Baldassaro
149.  The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
150.  The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum
151. Poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
152. The Stanglers, by Loren Estleman
153. The Polish Officer, by Alan Furst
154.  Winter Morning Walks, by Ted Kooser
155. Father’s and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
156. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
157. Writers of the Purple Sage: Anthology, by Russell Martin ed.
158. Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes
159. The Mooring of Starting Out, by John Ashbery
160. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
161. The Complete Stories, by Flannery O’Connor
162.  Far Away and Long Ago, by W.H. Hudson
163.  The Nine Tailors, by Dorthy Sayers
164. New & Collected Poems, by Geoffrey Hill
165. Exodus, by Leon Uris
166. Collected Poems of William Blake, by William Blake
167. Shoeless Joe, by W.P. Kinsella
168. Gorky Park, by Martin Cruz Smith
169. Beowulf, by Seamus Heaney trans.
170. Savage Night, by Jim Thompson
171. Plays of John M. Synge, by John M. Synge
172.  Battle of the Bulge, by Charles Whiting
173. Tal-Botvinnik, 1960, by Mikhail Tal
174. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
175.  The Polish Officer, by Alan Furst
176. Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, by Lawrence Block
177. Selected Poems, by Galway Kinnell
178. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
179. Christianity and Culture, by T.S. Eliot
180.  Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
181. Selected Poems, by Osip Mandelstam
182.  A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
183.  War of the Rats, by David L. Robbins
184. In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead, by James Lee Burke
185. Sacred Hoops, by Phil Jackson
186. Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy
187. The Blizzard Voices, by Ted Kooser
188. The Bride Wore Black, by Cornell Woolrich
189.  Plays of Henrik Ibsen, by Henrik Ibsen
190.  Penquin Book of Irish Verse, by various
191.  The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, by Stephen King
192. The Flying Frenchman, by Maurice “Rocket” Richard
193. Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton
194. Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, by Ezra Pound
195. Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame, by Bill James
196.  Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon
197.  Mr. Samler’s Planet, by Saul Bellow
198. The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler
199. A Continuing Journey, by Archibald MacLeish
200. Indemnity Only, by Sara Paretsky
201. Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever, by Satchel Paige
202.  Together We Kill, by Mickey Spillane
203. Preoccupations, by Seamus Heaney
204.  All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
205.  Lions in Winter, by Allan Turowetz
206. Walking Down the Stairs, by Galway Kinnell
207. My Greatest Game, by Ralph L. Finn ed.
208.  Dune, by Frank Herbert
209. The Moving Target, by Ross MacDonald
210. In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, by Jack Henry Abbott
211. Eight Million Ways to Die, by Lawrence Block
212. The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
213. The Inner Room, by James Merrill
214. Cancer Ward, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
215. The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard
216.  Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of ’41, by Michael Seidel
217. Selected Letters, by Ernest Hemingway
218. Thief of Time, Tony Hillerman
219. Complete Plays, by W.B. Yeats
220. End Game: Kasparov vs. Short, by Dominic Lawson
221.  The Castle, by Franz Kafka
222. Selected Poems, by John Ashbery
223. Cobb: A Biography, by Al Stump
224. Trinity, by Leon Uris
225. The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
226. Selected Poems, by Tomas McGrath
227.  Washington Square, by Henry James
228. Iowa Baseball Confederacy, by W.P. Kinsella
229.  Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
230. The Second Coming, by Walker Percy
231. Selected Poems, by Derek Walcott
232. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee
233. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
234.  Gustavo Gutierrez: Liberation Theology, by Robert McAfee Brown
235. Letters and Papers from Prison, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
236. Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
237. Undaunted Courage, by Stephen E. Ambrose
238.  A Fine Red Rain, by Stuart M. Kaminsky
239. Dubliners, by James Joyce
240. The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
241. The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard, by Elmore Leonard
242.  St. Francis, by G.K. Chesterton
243. Poetry and the World, by Robert Pinsky
244. The Zebra-Stripped Hearse, by Ross MacDonald
245. Eight Men Out, by Eliot Asinof
246. Crossing the Threshold of Hope, by John Paul II
247. The Black Company, by Glen Cook
248. Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
249.  Jesse James, by T.J. Stiles
250.  Sez Who? Sez Me, by Mike Royko
251. A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, by Lawrence Block
252.  The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
253. Timbered Choir, by Wendell Berry
254. Poems, by Wallace Stevens
255. Paper Lion, by George Plimpton
256.  Theology of Culture, by Paul Tillich
257. My Life in Hockey, by John Beliveau
258.  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
259.  D-Day June 6, 1944, by Stephen E. Ambrose
260. Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
261. Selected Poems, by Ranier Maria Rilke
262.  Here at Eagle Pond, by Donald Hall
263. Collected Poems, by Robert Frost
264. The Long Walk, by Stephen King
265.  Theology in a New Key, by Robert McAfee Brown
266. Under the Burning Sun, by H.A. DeRosso
267.  Leaping Poetry, by Robert Bly
268.  Slick, by Whitey Ford
269.  A Bridge Too Far, by Cornelius Ryan
270. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carre
271. First & Only, by Dan Abnett
272.  Selected Poems, by William Carlos Williams
273. Farewell My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler
274. The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett
275. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by John Ashbery
276. The Odessa File, by Frederick Forsyth
277. August 1914, by Alexsandr I. Solzhenitsyn
278. Brand, by Henrik Ibsen
279. Ball Four, by Jim Bouton
280. Bunts, by George Will
281. Daily Horoscope, by Dana Gioia
282. Out of My League, by George Plimpton
283. The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson
284.  Selected Poems, by Mark Van Doren
285. Fathers Playing Catch with Sons, by Donald Hall
286. The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett
287. Either / or: The Gospel or Neopaganism, by Carl  E. Braaten, ed.
288. Washing of the Spears, by Donald R. Morris
289. The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle
290.  Love and Responsibilty, by John Paul II
291.  High Priest of Califorina, by Charles Willeford
292.  Explorations, by W.B. Yeats
293.  West of Honor, by Jerry Pournelle
294.  Some Imagist Poets, by Richard Aldington and various
295.  The Big Sky, by A.B. Guthrie
296. The Boat of Quiet Hours, by Jane Kenyon
297.  The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
298.  Robert Browning, by G.K. Chesterton
299.  Short Stories of Henry James, by Henry James
300.  Complete Poems, by e.e. cummings

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