I have an account over at goodreads.com, where you can rate all the books you've ever read, compare your opinions of books to those of your friends, read user reviews, list books you want to read, etc. The three default bookshelves are "read," "to-read," and "currently reading," but you can create your own bookshelves as well. I made one of my favorite books, and here they are in alphabetical order by author's last name (absolute favorites are in bold):
*Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. This is a great young adult novel about a high school freshman who has just recently gone through a traumatic experience and has lost all of her old friends. It deals with some heavy stuff, but Melinda Sordino is such a funny and relatable protagonist that the story avoids being depressing. I think I've read this at least seven times since I was a sophomore in high school.
*The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
*Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
*Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
*In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Hands down, my favorite book of all time. Capote blends fact with fiction, detailing the true-life murders of the Clutter family in a sleepy farm town in Kansas and following the murderers as they try to avoid being caught, filling in the parts and dialogue he couldn't possibly have known with his own creative touches. Capote befriended the murderers in their Kansas jail cell after they'd been caught, as they went through trial, and as they went through appeals on death row; he was there the night they were hanged. He focuses much of the book on giving Perry Smith, the one who actually pulled the trigger, a human side, and if you read or see Capote or see Infamous (not as good as the former), you'll learn that this was because he felt a connection with Smith based on their similarly sad and neglected childhoods. This is an amazing book and should absolutely be required reading.
*The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
*The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
*The Hours by Michael Cunningham
*Middlesex by Jeffrey Euginides. Epic. Do yourself a favor and ignore the Oprah sticker on the cover--I read this book about four years ago, so before it was ordained by the big O, and probably would have avoided it if she'd gotten to it before I did.
*The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Euginides
*Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Foer creates one of my favorite characters in contemporary literature with little nine-year old Oskar Schell who's trying to learn more about his father who died in the World Trade Center on September 11th.
*Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
*The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser
*Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress by Susan Jane Gilman
*Mythology by Edith Hamilton
*A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
*One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
*The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
*To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Undeniably great.
*The Giver by Lois Lowry
*Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
*Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
*Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
*Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
*Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
*The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I know it's cliche for teenage girls to love this book, but I really did love it when I first read it at 16. In fact, a lot of my favorite books as a teenager were about suicidal women--this, The Virgin Suicides, Girl, Interrupted, probably others. I wonder if that means anything...
*Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
*Empire Falls by Richard Russo
*The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
*Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
*Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
*We Need to Talk about Kevin: A Novel by Lionel Shriver
*Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
*Antigone by Sophocles
*The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. This book follows the Joad family as they migrate from Kansas to California during the depression, but my favorite parts are the alternating chapters where Steinbeck writes in his own voice, not that of the Joads, about the general plight of the migrant workers.
*East of Eden by John Steinbeck. An Oprah book club selection I read knowing full well that she'd put her stamp of approval on it. I only read it because it was an established classic independent of her, and I'm so glad I did because it's incredible.
*The Color Purple by Alice Walker
*A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
*Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
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