After examining three bookshelf walls in our home—one in the living room and two in the basement (one on the “finished” side of the basement and one of the side of the basement with the boiler and the washer/drier), here’s a list of fifty books that pillar my reading and writing life:

1. 1. SuccessSuccess by Martin Amis
   2. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
   3. Leviathan by Paul Auster
   4. The Fermata by Nicholson Baker
   5. 60 Stories by Donald Barthelme
   6. The Watch by Rick Bass
   7. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
   8. Among the Thugs by Bill Buford
   9. The Most Beautiful Woman in Town by Charles Bukowski
   10. The Stranger by Albert Camus
   11. Cathedral by Raymond Carver
   12. Spanking the Maid by Robert Coover
   13. Samuel Johnson is Indignant by Lydia Davis
   14. White Noise by Don DeLillo
   15. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
   16. The White Album by Joan Didion
   17. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
   18. Zeroville by Steve Erickson
   19. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
   20. Rock Springs by Richard Ford
   21. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
   22. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
   23. Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel
   24. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
   25. Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones
   26. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
   27. Dubliners by James Joyce
   28. Ulysses by James Joyce
   29. Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game by William Kennedy
   30. Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
   31. Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson
   32. Cruel Shoes by Steve Martin
   33. Michael Martone by Michael Martone
   34. Spence and Lila by Bobbi Anne Mason
   35. Anagrams by Lorrie Moore
   36. The Moons of Jupiter by Alice Munro
   37. The Only Good Things Anyone Has Ever Done by Sandra Newman
   38. My Father’s Son by Frank O’Connor
   39. The Four Ways of Computing Midnight by Francis Phelan
   40. Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon
   41. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
   42. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
   43. To Absent Friends by Red Smith
   44. The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens
   45. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
   46. American Genius by Lynne Tillman
   47. Killings by Calvin Trillin
   48. Collected Stories by Eudora Welty
   49. Birdsong by James P. White
   50. The Collected Poems by W. B. Yeats

Editor’s Note: This list is part of Big Other’s Tribute to William H. Gass’s 88th Birthday.