Good morning, all.

When I started David's Lists at Facebook I prefaced the page with a note to the effect that reading book after book alone in my room could be seen as self-indulgent, whereas reading book after book alone in my room then encouraging others to read them feels wonderfully useful.

Making book lists grew naturally from that idea, and  

OK, the above isn't totally untrue, but the truer truth is that I have (to use the technical term), a serious "list-making jones." I must've been the kid who put all the blue things in a pile. In any case, the original David's Lists had an array of lists such as Books Cited Most Often in Magazine/Website Best Books of the Year Lists, or Good New Translations According to The Center for the Art of Translation and/or Words Without Borders . . . that kind of thing. 

But my whimsical angel insisted on other lists: 

Books About Flight [I WAS AMELIA EARHART, NIGHT FLIGHT, THE RIGHT STUFF, etc.]

Boarding/Rooming Houses in Fiction [BROOKLYN, GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS, THE YOCOUBIAN BUILDING, etc.]

Ordinal Sins [THE FIFTH CHILD, THE SEVENTH BOOK OF WONDERS, THE TENTH OF DECEMBER, etc.]  

14 Good Fiction with Swimming Pools [SWIMMING HOME, THE SWIMMING       POOL LIBRARY, CHOCOLATES FOR BREAKFAST, etc.]

WTF's Going On?  [ICE, THE UNCONSOLED, WITTGENSTEIN’S MISTRESS, etc.]

Twenty About Work [LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER, THIS SIDE OF BRIGHTNESS, DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON, etc.]

Forty-Eight Voicey Novels [TREASURE ISLAND!!!; RIDDLY WALKER; BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY, etc.]

Scenes From the Underlife [HOW LATE IT WAS, HOW LATE; TRAINSPOTTING; IRONWEED, etc.]

David's Lists 2.0 will have lists as well, but I have space to add commentary now, and to focus more on lesser-known/neglected/forgotten books that deserve to be remembered.

For now—today and the next several posts—I'll list some of my favorite works of fiction so you'll come to know my taste, what I value, etc. I'm going to omit titles lots of us have in our pantheons [The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary, Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, Beloved, Ulysses, Alice Munro's stories, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Blindness, and so on.] One gripe vis-à-vis the old site was that the lists were commonly too long [cf. "jones"]; I'll endeavor to keep the new ones shor(tish). The "faves" will be lists of eight titles.

DAVE'S FAVES [1]

Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson, 1992 

The Road, Cormac McCarthy, 2006

So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell, 1980 

Suttree, Cormac McCarthy, 1979 

Winter in the Blood, James Welch, 1974 

Sula, Toni Morrison, 1973

Old Mr. Flood [reportage], Joseph Mitchell, 1948 

Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton, 1911

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Lastly, some business: 

a)  Last week I put up a post titled 1950, which would be somewhat cryptic if you hadn't seen an earlier post describing the ongoing Birth Year Project.

Here's how it works: You supply your birth year [in a comment]; I'll respond with a short list of books published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I'd recommend. If your year's already been used, fret not; I'll do a fresh one.

Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you're unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I'll aggregate and post. 

b)  Week Three and we're up to 33 subscribers. Can you help shake the tree? Should we shoot for fifty??

Bye for now.