Knock-off Carlos Castaneda. It also manages to be pap, with a side of “run off and find yourself–the women are [stuck] taking care of everything at home, but you are special and deserve better than the drugery of daily existence.”
Here are a few more on my personal best-ever reads (I just looked at my “favorite books” shelf):
The Razor’s Edge by W. Somserset Maugham
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
The Chocolate Wars by Robert Cormier (it’s a YA novel, but I don’t care; I still love it)
Even if you count Sir Vidia’s Shadow (which probably shouldn’t be included since it is a memoir),that’s only 7, not 10, books, but I’m not sure how many books are on my favorites shelf, and it includes nonfiction as well, so I don’t have exactly 10 favorite fiction books. The titles I’ve listed would be on it if I did, though.
Brother Cadfael?
A rose is a rose is a rose…
ETA: honestly, I love all of Umberto Eco’s novels and his brilliant essays, but “The Name Of The Rose” is his masterpiece. But “Foucault’s Pendulum” is almost just as good, published in 1988, so years before the WWW, but precognisant of many developments of what became the internet, up to the blur between truth and fake news nowadays.
Spoilers about The Name of The Rose
To this day I’m sad about an inexistent library burning down, I keep rereading the book and everytime I get my hopes up that this time it will not happen…
Yeah, I have the same reaction, and it always breaks my heart when it happens in real life: