vaneramos | My favourite books

To have some fun and help identify my entries about 6 Changes, I decided to create a new userpic for each undertaking. The first change this year deals with reading. Besides, I wanted to create a book userpic a long time ago. So this evening I put together a pile of all-time favourite books (fiction, non-fiction and poetry) and photographed them together. Some are great literature, others have significantly inspired or benefitted my life. In no particular order, from left to right:

Creating a Life Worth Living: a Practical Course In Career Design For Artists, Innovators, and Others Aspiring To a Creative Life, by Carol Lloyd
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis
Intimacy and Solitude, by Stephanie Dowrick
The Rebel Angels, by Robertson Davies
The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay
Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg
The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Nature's Healing Arts: From Folk Medicine to Modern Drugs, by Lonnelle Aikman
About This Life, by Barry Lopez
Not Wanted On the Voyage, by Timothy Findley
Heaven's Coast, by Mark Doty
Fooling With Words, by Bill Moyers
Watership Down, by Richard Adams
The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks
Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard
Writing the River, by Luci Shaw
Possibly my favourite novel is A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin, but it is missing from my library, so for this photo I substituted Always Coming Home, which I like almost as much

Actually I wanted to photograph a larger pile, but it simply wouldn't fit in the photograph neatly. That forced me to pare this grouping down to my bare bones favourites. Nevertheless, this created a second tier of favourites, which may also be of interest. Again, in no particular order:

A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold
The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho
Bellwether, by Connie Willis
Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
Such a Long Journey, by Rohinton Mistry
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
The Essential Gay Mystics, ed. Andrew Harvey
Dune, by Frank Herbert
What We All Long For, by Dionne Brand
House Plants For the Purple Thumb, by Maggie Baylis
Paddle-to-the-Sea, by Holling Clancy Holling
The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss
The Seven Crystal Balls (from The Adventures of Tintin) by Hergé
Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens
Cultivating Sacred Space: Gardening For the Soul, by Elizabeth Murray
A Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

These lists could easily have included multiple titles by Ursula K. LeGuin, Timothy Findley, Richard Adams, Barry Lopez and J.R.R. Tolkien, but I kept it simple.