Gacked from Egret over on Featherstalking Tales.
Here are the current top 50 books from www.whatshouldireadnext.com. Bold the books you have read, Italicize the books you might read, Cross out the books you probably won't read. Pass it on:
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown And boy am I sorry. What a waste of paper and time.
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger. Neither being nor planning on being a boy, I gave this a miss.
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams. Way better and much more fun than the movie.
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee. One of those books I keep meaning to read.
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger. Failed to grab me on the first page.
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman. Was vaguely disappointed by its ending. Pullman was too busy attempting to be the Anti-C.S. Lewis to write a good story without succumbing to didacticism, despite all his nattering about being "in service to the story."
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling. Confirmed Rowling fan.
Life of Pi - Yann Martel - Too much buzz.
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell. Wonder if W has read this? "Some animals are more equal than others . . ."
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller- Read all of these guys—Vonnegut, Heller, Pynchon, Kozinski, Robbe Grillet, Fuentes, Borges—in an experimental lit class in college. I like Vonnegut better than Heller.
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien. Thanks to my cousin Diane, RIP, who turned me on to these.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time- Mark Haddon - I'm intrigued by this after reading Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, written from the POV of a Tourette's sufferer. Autism’s got to be a tough POV to write convincingly.
Lord of the Flies - William Golding. Ew. Good, but ew. Seriously grim.
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen. Not an Austen fan. Heresy, I know, but there you have it.
1984 - George Orwell.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J.K. Rowling. Movie was fun, too.
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Right after he won the Nobel. That and the experimental lit class turned me on to magical realism.
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden. I read the memoir of the woman he interviewed. Does that count?
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini. Reading this right now for th book club at work. Great stuff.
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - seems so depressing, sez Egret. I agree.
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut - Not my favorite Vonnegut, but I’ve read it.
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown. I’d rather not encourage him.
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk. Maybe. I read Diary, which was stylistically interesting, but I have a hunch that’s the only way he knows how to write. I may just watch the movie instead.
Neuromancer - William Gibson. Gibson only gets better, and this is my least favorite of his books and it's still really good.
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson. Yeah Baby! I loved this!
The Secret History - Donna Tartt. This too.
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess. Like Lord of the Flies for Grownups, but I love the dialect in this.
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte. My least favorite Bronte book, too.
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley. Another book that needs to be on W's reading list. Not that he'd get it.
American Gods - Neil Gaiman - Yep, one of those books I want to own in hardcover.
Ender's Game (The Ender Saga) - Orson Scott Card. Generally I like OSC, but again, these aren’t my favorites in his bibliography.
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson.
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving. I gave up on John Irving after The Hotel New Hampshire.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis - I like Tolkien better and these never moved me.
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides. Er, maybe. I feel sort of uninterested in this.
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell. On the shelf, waiting patiently.
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien. The Ur fantasy, as far as I’m concerned.
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte. Still not my favorite Bronte book. Why isn’t Vilette on this list?
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman- Jen and Peri keep telling me how good this is and it’s two of my favorite authors, so I guess it’s probably only a matter of time.
Atonement - Ian McEwan- except that his books always make we want to take a shower afterwards, they’re so creepy.
The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Loved it.
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway- I hate Hemingway, sez Egret. Me too.
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood. When she’s good, she’s very, very good, when she’s bad, she sucks. This sucks. I found it totally unbelievable.
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath. Still like her poetry better.
Dune - Frank Herbert. All of them, God help me. The first one is really brilliant though.
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