As Dr. Johnson wrote of Paradise Lost, none who read it ever wished it longer. I once tried to estimate how many Important books there were. It worked out to more than you could read in a lifetime. So I decided to read all the fun ones first, and if there was time left over, I would start in on the rest. This is a list of what have seemed to me the most pleasing books of all-- the kind of books you wish you hadn't read, because then you'd still have the pleasure of reading them for the first time. My Family and Other Animals Franklin's Autobiography Tom Jones The Sot Weed Factor The Aubrey-Maturin novels Hajji Baba Civilisation The Decameron Evelyn's Diaries Shakespeare's Plays (Pelican edition) Lattimore's translations of the Iliad and Odyssey The Canterbury Tales (Penguin modern English edition) Village in the Vaucluse The World We have Lost Pepys' Diaries The Lord of the Rings Montaigne's Essays Don Quixote The collected Tatler and Spectator Lives of the Poets The Three Musketeers The Count of Monte Cristo Cellini's Autobiography Pride and Prejudice Sense and Sensibility Mansfield Park Persuasion Xenophon's Anabasis The Arabian Nights The Nude Science in History Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Chesterfield's Letters to his Son The Long Week-End The Fall of Constantinople Consider the Oyster Joinville's and Villehardouin's Chronicles (often published together) The Alexiad Twenty Years A-Growing E. B. White's Essays Froissart's Chronicles The Copernican Revolution (This is not a complete list.) "That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day." - Johnson, Lives of the Poets: Dryden