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David Benioff

Top Ten Books

As an author with an uncanny instinct for dialogue, it was inevitable that Benioff would find himself drawn to screenwriting, adapting his own books, such as The 25^th Hour (for Spike Lee) but also the works of others, like Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. But it is in television that Benioff has really found his métier, as the co-creator and show-runner for HBO’s all-conquering Game of Thrones. Below are David Benioff’s favorite books, available to purchase as a set or individually. See the full list...

10

The Holy Bible

Sure, it’s uneven. For every Book of Job there’s a Book of Leviticus, featuring some of the most boring prose ever written. But if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would better reward long study? And has there ever been a more beautiful distillation of existential philosophy than the Book of Ecclesiastes? Excluding those bizarre final verses, which seem to have been tacked on long after the book’s original composition, by priests nervous about the subversive message.

9

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway

Yes, a few of the lines are easy to mock (“I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.”) Yes, the constant use of “thee” is grating. But my love for this novel isn’t rational. I have no interest in defending it. I loved it from first to last. No final page has ever left me as shattered as this one.

8

The Collected Poetry of W.B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats

Despite his dodgy politics, Yeats remains an inspiration for his genius and the simple fact that the older he got, the better he wrote. “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” and “Politics”, both written while he was in his seventies, are some of the most memorable poems in the language: Now that my ladder’s gone / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Top that, young bastards.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
$180.53
The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin
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Miranda July
$300.80
Birds of America

Lorrie Moore
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Neil Gaiman
$161.92
The Man Who Was Thursday

G. K. Chesterton
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Caitlin Moran
$204.87
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll
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Doug Rushkoff
$168.95
Cosmic Trigger

Robert Anton Wilson
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John Irving
$156.93
Fifth Business

Robertson Davies
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Alan Hollinghurst
$171.79
The Blue Flower

by Penelope Fitzgerald
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Edmund White
$168.90
The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Richard Flanagan
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Sarah Waters
$160.64
Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm

Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm