100 Best Journals Books of All Time

Alice Little

I remember being a fourth grader and trying to check out this book and being told it was grossly inappropriate and going so far as to have my parents take it to the school board and petition for me to be allowed to read this book. [source]

Catalina Penciu

I'm a huge fan of personal stories and biographies like this one. [source]

Tim Fargo

@Quixoticnance Good point, Nancy. The museum is a powerful experience, esp. when you've read her book. [source]

Arianna Huffington

Founder/The Huffington Post

I find this book so inspirational and instructive, it lives on my nightstand. [source]

Chip Conley

I have given this book away to a number of people. [source]

Marvin Liao

Partner/500 Startups

My list would be (besides the ones I mentioned in answer to the previous question) both business & Fiction/Sci-Fi and ones I personally found helpful to myself. The business books explain just exactly how business, work & investing are in reality & how to think properly & differentiate yourself. On the non-business side, a mix of History & classic fiction to understand people, philosophy to make sense of life and Science fiction to picture what the future could be like (not always utopian). [source]

Andrei Codrescu

Vampirism is a growth industry. Dracula is bigger than Jesus now. [source]

Becky Cloonan

@Noise_Raptor Oh, thank you so much! This book was such a delight, and such a challenge! Dracula is one of my favorites- funny enough I'd jump at the chance to do this again XD [source]

Claire Jarvis

Dracula is very explicit. That’s what’s so surprising about it. [source]

Ted Turner

Founder/CNN

When I got to college, I was a classics major, and that was mainly the study of Greek - and to a lesser extent Roman - history and culture, and that fascinated me: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid by Virgil. [source]

Charlotte Higgins

It’s a very easy read, and a completely different world from The Iliad. Whereas The Iliad depicts a militaristic and war-wrecked world, The Odyssey is like a fairytale and it’s fascinatingly complex. It’s told in flashbacks, it has time that’s extended and time that’s compressed, and it’s told from different viewpoints. [source]

Janine di Giovanni

The thing I loved about Ulysses was that he’s so in love with adventure and with love. [source]

Donna Dickenson

He discusses how the original ideals that America was founded on were being compromised, and how massive industrial interests were starting to dominate. [source]

Emily Thomas

The beginning is hard going. Once you get past that, then suddenly you’re into these beautiful and inspiring descriptions of nature. [source]

Joan Boixados

In case you were deceived and expected me to name Walden by Henry David Thoreau, you should read it too if you haven’t, it obviously is the inspiration to Walden Two. :) [source]

D J Taylor

The fascination of Down and Out in Paris and London is that it’s his first book. In it, you can see Orwell stumbling, moving towards the kind of writer he wants to be, choosing the sort of subject matter he thinks will be appropriate. He spent time in Paris, working humbly in hotels and restaurants as what the French called a plongeur, someone who basically does the washing up. Then, he came back to England and went on what he called his ‘tramping adventures,’ masquerading as a down and out. [source]

David Downie

That is a book I read when I was young – in my teens – and it really marked me. [source]

David Kramaley

I really enjoyed Down and Out in Paris and London. I think it’s meant to be a semi-autobiographical novel by George Orwell. I liked it because it was one of those books that had a big influence on the way I perceive and think about the world. Highly recommended. [source]

Blake Gopnik

We assume that Andy knew that they might be published, and he may have wanted them to be published – and so would have controlled and manipulated their content. He didn’t scribble these entries down in a notebook, for his own eyes only. So you never know if he’s speaking to posterity in order to falsify the record – or at least to construct a record – or whether the Diaries are actually giving you a genuine insight into the man himself, not only into his psyche but also into his actions and behaviours. There are incidents mentioned in the Diaries that his friends say are absolutely and simply untrue. [source]

Craig Brown

Warhol’s diaries came out shortly after he died, and at the time I couldn’t see the point of them at all. They were just a litany of names, all social gossip, very close to being boring. But reading them 20 years on, I find them fascinating. My edition is about 800 pages long. There aren’t many diaries you could read from start to finish, but this one is luminous. [source]

Estella Ng

Letters to a Young Poet - it is everything. … This line in Letters to a Young Poet “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches" is an important one to me. I constantly go back to this to evaluate if I have been living a full life. [source]

Todd Henry

A book of mentorship for young artists. [source]

Alex Carlile

Pepys gives you a total flavour of his time. It’s a wonderful picture of London – no one else has written remotely as well about London in those days. [source]

Alex Chase-Levenson

Pepys is a really great person to follow through an epidemic. He records day by day what it’s like to live in a plague-stricken city, and shows us the intertwining of things that are normal and things that are surreal. [source]

Peter Ackroyd

It is an invaluable picture of daily life in mid-17th century London and one that has never really been rivalled by any other diarist. [source]