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.
- The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
- By the Light of the Moon – Dean Koontz
- The Art Book – Phaidon Press
- Cat's Eye – Margaret Atwood
- The Murder Book – Jonathan Kellerman
- The Face – Dean Koontz
- The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
- The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
- Enough Rope – Lawrence Block
- The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them – Al Franken
- Light in August – William Faulkner
- The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla – Stephen King
- The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
- Stupid White Men – Michael Moore
- The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
- Ender's Game – Orson Scott Card
- The Songs of Distant Earth – Arthur C. Clarke
- Jonah's Gourd Vine – Zora Neale Hurston
- 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.
- For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
- The Official eBay Guide – Laura Fisher Kaiser and Michael Kaiser
- Emotionally Weird: A Novel – Kate Atkinson
- Don't Bend Over in the Garden, Granny, You Know them Taters Got Eyes – Lewis Grizzard
- 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:
- They were on one of those “100 Greatest Books” lists;
- They are other books written by authors I really enjoy; or
- 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.
- The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature – Steven Pinker
- American Normal: The Hidden World of Asperger Syndrome – Lawrence Osborne
- Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats – Craig Marberry
- Partly Cloudy Patriot – Sarah Vowell
- Lady Oracle – Margaret Atwood
- Man's Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
- Running with Scissors – Augusten Burroughs
- Random Family – Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
- Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
- The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
- Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
- My Antonia – Willa Cather
- Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
- Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
- The Call of the Wild – Jack London
- A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
- Dune – Frank Herbert
- Fifth Business – Robertson Davies
- The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
- The French Lieutenant's Woman – John Fowles
- Gravity's Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
- Rabbit Run – John Updike
- Slaughterhouse – Five – Kurt Vonnegut
- Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
- Sophie's Choice – William Styron
- To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
- Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
- Ulysses – James Joyce
- The World According to Garp – John Irving
- The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell
- The Hours – Michael Cunningham
- Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner
- Plainsong – Kent Haruf
- Survival of the Prettiest – Nancy Etcoff
- Learning Their Language – Marta Williams
- Science and the Search for God – Gary Kowalski
- Darkness Visible – William Styron
- I Know What You're Thinking – Lillian Glass
- The Fat Girl's Guide to Life – Wendy Shanter
- Good Grief – Lolly Winston
- Symptomatic – Danzy Senna
- From Beirut to Jerusalem – Thomas Friedman
- The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
- 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
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