The Books List, Part One

20 Books I Would Recommend Reading, 5 Books I Wouldn't, and 50 from my Reading List

It is March 2020, and we are currently staying at home because of the threat of COVID-19 (historical context!). People are looking for things to do while under this semi-quarantine, and a lot of us are finding more time to catch up on reading. It's always good to have friends who can recommend books that they enjoyed, to give us an idea of something we might try next. I personally read a lot of different kinds of things – fiction, non-fiction, Young Adult (YA), graphic novels, and several years ago, I started writing down everything I read, with a little smiley, meh face, or frown to remind me whether I liked it, didn't care, or disliked it, because I am certainly not going to remember every single book I read, but at least I know whether I would read it again or steer clear.

I am not going to write reviews or summaries of these books, because all that stuff is readily available online. This is just my very simple overall opinion based on how I felt after having read the book. Did I love it, or at least like it? Or did I feel like I wasted my time? The point of sharing this list with you is to give you some inspiration about what you might like to read.

My likes/loves: These are books that entertained me, moved me, taught me things, made me think, inspired me, and that I would heartily recommend. They are not ranked – they are merely in the order in which I read them.

1. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
2. By the Light of the Moon – Dean Koontz
3. The Art Book – Phaidon Press
4. Cat's Eye – Margaret Atwood
5. The Murder Book – Jonathan Kellerman
6. The Face – Dean Koontz
7. The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
8. The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
9. Enough Rope – Lawrence Block
10. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them – Al Franken
12. Light in August – William Faulkner
13. The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla – Stephen King
14. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
15. Stupid White Men – Michael Moore
16. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
17. Ender's Game – Orson Scott Card
18. The Songs of Distant Earth – Arthur C. Clarke
19. Jonah's Gourd Vine – Zora Neale Hurston
20. The Hammer of God – Arthur C. Clarke

My meh/yuck list: Did not find these appealing for any number of reasons – some were boring; some had an interesting subject but did not do it justice; some were flat-out terrible. All simply left me cold in some way. Although I am likely to read multiple books by authors I like (you will see a lot of Dean Koontz, Jonathan Kellerman, Margaret Atwood, Charles deLint and Zora Neale Hurston), I do not excuse those authors when they write a book I didn't like, so they might just show up here, as well.

1. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
2. The Official eBay Guide – Laura Fisher Kaiser and Michael Kaiser
3. Emotionally Weird: A Novel – Kate Atkinson
4. Don't Bend Over in the Garden, Granny, You Know them Taters Got Eyes – Lewis Grizzard
5. The South Beach Diet – Dr. Arthur Agatston

My Reading List: these are books I haven't read yet, so I don't have a reaction for you. However, I could semi-recommend them, based on the reasons they made it onto my list:

1. They were on one of those “100 Greatest Books” lists;
2. They are other books written by authors I really enjoy; or
3. I read a review, and it sounded like something I'd like.

#1 can be a bit hit-or-miss; #2 is almost (but not always) foolproof for me (but maybe not for you), and #3 usually works out pretty well, as it's a combination of the first two. As always, your results may vary, but consider them suggestions. These may tend to come in chunks of stuff by author (apologies). There are literally over 1400 books currently on my reading list (I'm stupidly ambitious), so this is a very small chunk. Don't worry; I'm planning on coughing up more of these posts.

1. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature – Steven Pinker
2. American Normal: The Hidden World of Asperger Syndrome – Lawrence Osborne
3. Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats – Craig Marberry
4. Partly Cloudy Patriot – Sarah Vowell
5. Lady Oracle – Margaret Atwood
6. Man's Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
7. Running with Scissors – Augusten Burroughs
8. Random Family – Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
9. Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
10. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
11. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
12. Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
13. My Antonia – Willa Cather
14. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
15. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
16. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
17. The Call of the Wild – Jack London
18. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
19. Dune – Frank Herbert
20. Fifth Business – Robertson Davies
21. The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
22. The French Lieutenant's Woman – John Fowles
23. Gravity's Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
24. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
25. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
26. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
27. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
28. Rabbit Run – John Updike
29. Slaughterhouse – Five – Kurt Vonnegut
30. Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
31. Sophie's Choice – William Styron
32. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
33. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
34. Ulysses – James Joyce
35. The World According to Garp – John Irving
36. The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell
37. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
38. Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner
39. Plainsong – Kent Haruf
40. Survival of the Prettiest – Nancy Etcoff
41. Learning Their Language – Marta Williams
42. Science and the Search for God – Gary Kowalski
43. Darkness Visible – William Styron
44. I Know What You're Thinking – Lillian Glass
45. The Fat Girl's Guide to Life – Wendy Shanter
46. Good Grief – Lolly Winston
47. Symptomatic – Danzy Senna
48. From Beirut to Jerusalem – Thomas Friedman
49. The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
50. Petersburg – Andrey Bely

That's all for now; hope you find these lists useful as you think about things you might like to read. Let's make quarantine fun and productive!

Here's the next list! : https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-books-list-part-two.html

Image from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/book-read-tee-literature-2020460/