During the great purge, a.ka. My Big Move, I swore that I would never have to make ten trips to Goodwill again. If I don't absolutely love it, it is not coming into my house. A corollary to this resolution: getting (and using) a library card.
My new place is a few blocks from a library - YES!! And a short walk from a great spot to settle down with a book and a cuppa. In keeping with my La Vie en Rose manifesto, I am now turning to you, gentle reader, for your top 5 books.
So, there's your assignment - do me proud!
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OMG- that's the cafe where I went! Kepler's used to be right next door, one of the finest purveyors of books in the Bay Area.
My Top 5 books are shameful and ever-changing. But I do love You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers and Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow, so those are my recommendations.
#1 hands down - Gone with the Wind
The Thursday Next Series by Jasper Fforde - 4 books (I think you'd really like these, Maisnon!)
The Other Boleyn Girl, The Queen's Fool, and The Virgin's Lover by Philippa Gregory
My Sister's Keeper and Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult
The Twentieth Wife and the Feast of Roses by Indu Sundaresan
Enjoy!! :)
Top 5 all time? Let's go with top 5 from the past few years.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. White Teeth by Zadie Smith. The Time-Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. About a Boy by Nick Hornby. And... hmm... Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem.
This is even harder than 55 Fiction Fridays... ok, 5 excellent books that I read recently are:
Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (Nirad Chaudhuri)
The Battle for God (Karen Armstrong)
A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
Einstein and Picasso (Arthur I Miller)
The Cornel West Reader (Cornel West)
CM: I was just flipping through "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" - I love that book! I read it in Chicago when I was at the Patent Law Job Fair - 30 screening interviews in 2.5 days. Reading that book really helped me escape. Also, *love* Nick Hornby.
Jay: "A Fine Balance" is amazing, and/but one of the most depressing books I've ever read.
Personally, I like the following Authors
1. Terry Pratchett
2. Douglas Adams
3. Stephen Donaldson
4. Leon Uris
5. Myself (seriously, I'm going to write a book :-) )
6. Wilbur Smith
7. Jeffrey Richter
8. Clive Cussler
Of course, its been a while since i've read anything by the last 3.
Libraries are great. I don't plan on buying another book until Harry Potter 7.
I don't play favorites. These are the books I've checked out:
Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich
The Magician and the Cardsharp by Karl Johnson
Q&A by Vikas Swarup
And those I await:
Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire
Wickett's Remedy by Myla Goldberg
You could do well to read Goldberg's first book, Bee Season, or previous works by Maguire, who wrote Wicked and does for fairy tales what the aforementioned Jasper Fforde does for novels.
I'm gonna give you the Top 5 Off the Top of My Head. I couldn't possibly pick a top 5 of all time! So, in no particular order:
The Kite Runner
The Namesake
Gone With the Wind (I realize it was said, but it's worth saying twice)
Sally Hemings
Valley of the Dolls
First ones that came to mind.
I'll chime in with a few that I have liked over the last couple years-
The Secret History by Donna Tartt Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Straight Man by Richard Russo
Some amusing non-fiction:
"Them: Adventures With Extremists" by Jon Ronson, and "City of Djinns" and "Age of Kali" by William Dalrymple.
I like your handle maisnon. It took me a while to get it though.
cornel west? Recommended for someone recovering from the bar? Perhaps something a bit lighter...
For reading on the beach/in the sun, pick up anything by Marian Keyes. She's amusing. Also Nick Hornby, though I prefer High Fidelity to About a Boy.
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie is delicious; and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is stunning.
And I'll always recommend anything by Jonathan Carroll. From the Teeth of Angels is one of my favorite books ever.
Hooray for libraries! Enjoy!
1+2. the last books i lurved (i.e. couldn't put down or stand to be away from) were the two by indu sundaresan that janani mentioned.
3. i think you should read "salt and saffron" by kamila shamsie as well.
4. for something non-brown that's fluffy but not lame, try "i don't know how she does it" by allison pearson. i've actually blazed through it four times. i love it.
5. if you liked numbers one and two, you might want to try "raj" by gita mehta, who is my fave female author.
p.s. i'll tell you how "Q+A" is, since someone mentioned it above and i just got a copy in the mail...
p.p.s. kisss yr lps!
SG: That wasn't J-spice (i.e. Peppermint Mocha), it was a friend of mine from high school :)
Gone With the Wind: read it in 7th grade (yes, for fun.) I remember it as being enthralling in the beginning and end, and dragg-y in the middle. Maybe I should try it again?
So many, many books - pages, and pages. Yum.
I'm stuck, so I'm going to try to pick 5 recent reads:
1. Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
2. Ian McEwan, Atonement
3. Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors
4. Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (though this seems to be an unpopular opinion in blog-land)
5. Tanuja Desai Hidier, Born Confused (this is kind of a trashy teenybopper novel, but I really liked it.)
Oh, I also like pretty much anything by Roddy Doyle (esp. The Barrytown Trilogy) and Stephen Fry.
Happy reading!
(let me know if you want to borrow any of these.)
Its quite amazing to see how different people's reading styles are. For instance, almost all of you read books by at least 1 indian author. With the ladies, Gone with the Wind seems to be a recurring theme. With the men, not so much.
ads, i've got your six re: your numbers four and five. :D
deeeee- my bad. i guess i just want to see janani EVERYWHERE, so i hallucinate her now. ;)
Gosh, how can Wodehouse not yet have featured on this list?
Leave it to Psmith; Right ho Jeeves; Sam the Sudden; Hot Water and Mike and Pmsith, if you have not discovered the perfection that is Wodehouse.
Also,
-Catch 22, by Joseph Heller
- Neil Simon's plays Vol.1 for pure, frothy fun
-Blind Assasin, by Margaret ATwood
-House for Mr Biswas, by V.S.Naipaul
-And, again, leave it to Psmith
the only two books that matter:
1)confederacy of dunces - toole
2) a theory of justice - rawls
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