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With Christmas break 2021 just ahead of us, and new Covid restrictions and lockdowns looming yet again on the horizon, I am thinking of what to read, and re-read. For there are quite a number of books I never get tired of. Below is a Top 10 of my favorite books of all time – thus far. What are yours? Share your recommendations with us in your comments on social media.
Here they are, in ascending order from # 10 to the especially extraordinary # 1.
The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.
Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate.
Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth.
He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children’s television, direct mail, and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world’s greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics.
Through the author’s acute reading of history and his marvellous storytelling prowess, the reader follows John Franklin’s development from awkward schoolboy and ridiculed teenager to expedition leader, governor of Tasmania, and icon of adventure.
Slow and deliberate from boyhood, Franklin appeared destined to be a misfit. But he escaped from the ever-expanding world of industry and Empire to the sea’s silent landscape, where the universe seemed more manageable.
At age fourteen he joined the navy. After surviving the harrowing battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar, he embarked on several voyages of discovery into the Canadian North and served as governor of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania).
Everyone with whom he came into contact sensed that Franklin was a rare man, one who was “out of his time” and who moved to a different, grander beat.
That beat eventually led Franklin to sail once more—on his final, fateful voyage—into the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage.
David’s entire twelve-year life has been spent in a grisly prison camp in Eastern Europe. He knows nothing of the outside world. But when he is given the chance to escape, he seizes it.
With his vengeful enemies hot on his heels, David struggles to cope in this strange new world, where his only resources are a compass, a few crusts of bread, his two aching feet, and some vague advice to seek refuge in Denmark. Is that enough to survive?
David’s extraordinary odyssey is dramatically chronicled in Anne Holm’s classic about the meaning of freedom and the power of hope.
With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson brilliantly explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience, and sheer fun of the English language.
From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can’t), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world’s largest growth industries.
Looking back after a distinguished NASA career, Hickam shares the story of his youth, taking readers into the life of the little mining town of Coalwood and the boys who would come to embody its dreams.
A powerful story of growing up and of getting out, of a mother’s love and a father’s fears, Homer Hickam’s memoir Rocket Boys proves, like Angela’s Ashes and Russell Baker’s Growing Up before it, that the right storyteller and the right story can touch readers’ hearts and enchant their souls.
A uniquely endearing book with universal themes of class, family, coming of age, and the thrill of discovery, Homer Hickam’s Rocket Boys is evocative, vivid storytelling at its most magical.
The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it.
To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.
Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, this book takes readers to the roots of human behavior – to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos.
In the predawn hours of July 10, 2014, twenty-seven-year-old Cody Roman Dial, the son of preeminent Alaskan scientist and National Geographic Explorer Roman Dial, walked alone into Corcovado National Park, an untracked rainforest along Costa Rica’s remote Pacific Coast that shelters miners, poachers, and drug smugglers.
He carried a light backpack and machete. Before he left, he emailed his father: “I am not sure how long it will take me, but I’m planning on doing 4 days in the jungle and a day to walk out. I’ll be bounded by a trail to the west and the coast everywhere else, so it should be difficult to get lost forever.”
They were the last words Dial received from his son.
The Adventurer’s Son recreates the author’s two-year quest to learn the truth about his child’s disappearance.
When a deadly diphtheria epidemic swept through Nome, Alaska, in 1925, the local doctor knew that without a fresh batch of antitoxin, his patients would die.
The lifesaving serum was a thousand miles away, the port was icebound, and planes couldn’t fly in blizzard conditions—only the dogs could make it.
The heroic dash of dog teams across the Alaskan wilderness to Nome inspired the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and immortalized Balto, the lead dog of the last team whose bronze statue still stands in New York City’s Central Park.
This is the greatest dog story, never fully told until now.
This is the true story of four men locked in a race to transplant the first human heart – a riveting tale of surgical daring, unyielding ambition, and scientific adventure.
Some of these men were friends. Others were enemies. Only one of them would be the first.
From a dank, underequipped hospital in Cape Town to a cramped lab in San Francisco, the surgeons worked their own individual miracles to prolong their patients’ lives, testing the limits of science, and nature itself.
Like the classics of medical adventure – from James Watson’s The Double Helix to John Barry’s The Great Influenza – Every Second Counts is an unforgettable story of not only competition and fame, but of life and death.
Last Chance To See is a 1989 BBC radio documentary series and its accompanying book, written and presented by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine.
In the series, Adams and Carwardine travel to various locations in the hope of encountering species on the brink of extinction.
The book was published in 1990 and manages to highlight these critically endangered species in a wonderfully compassionate and humorous way.
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Liam Klenk was born in Central Europe and has since lived on four continents. Liam has always been engaged in creative pursuits, ranging from photography and graphic design, to writing short stories and poetry, to working in theatre and shows. In 2016, Liam published his first book and memoir, 'Paralian'.
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