Benjamin Watts

The Best Books in the World

Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Blood Meridian

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men
 and East of Eden

Mary Shellys Frankenstein

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead

James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

George Orwell's 1984

Homer's The Odyssey

Steve Earle's A Well Tempered Heart

Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, The Kite
 Runner
and And the Mountains Echoed

Adolfo Casares' The Invention of Morel

Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning

David Goggins' Can't Hurt Me

The Secret Barrister's The Secret Barrister

Rich Roll's Finding Ultra

Christopher McDougall's Born to Run

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

Dava Sobel's Longitude

Anders Ericsson's Peak

Book Quotes

Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Blood Meridian

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed with mystery."
   - The Road

"Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."
   - The Road

“They moved like migrants under a drifting star and their tracks across the land reflected in its faint arcature the movements of the earth itself. To the west the cloudbanks stood above the mountains like the dark warp of the very firmament and the starsprent reaches of the galaxies hung in a vast aura above the riders’ heads."
   - Blood Meridian


Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

“Even now, as I commence my task, his full-toned voice swells in my ears; his lustrous eyes dwell on me with all their melancholy sweetness; I see his thin hand raised in animation, while the lineaments of his face are irradiated by the soul within. Strange and harrowing must be his story; frightful the storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its course, and wrecked it - thus!”
   - Frankenstein

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
   - Frankenstein