« moving day | Main | busy days »

Thursday, December 02, 2004

a book meme

Another book meme lifted from KiwiRia.

The idea is to recommend a few books from each genre.

01. Horror:

• The Stand by Stephen King. This is in a different vein from most of the other stuff he wrote -- at least, what he'd written up until the early 90's when I stopped reading his books.


• Edgar Allen Poe's short stories. The Pit and the Pendulum, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell -Tale Heart -- wow. One of my junior-high friends had a tape set of Vincent Price reading some of Poe's short stories; we lay in her rec room listening to them on Halloween night and neither of us could get up afterward to
  blow out the candles we'd lit, so we just let them burn down until they were gone.

02. Suspense/Mystery: I am drawing a blank here. I know I've read some good suspense stuff in the last few years but I just can't remember any of it. So I'll shrug and say, "Trixie Belden. She was way better than Nancy Drew."

03. Science-Fiction/Fantasy:

• The Martian Chronicles -- Ray Bradbury


• The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. The movies are pretty well-made, but as is the case with almost all adaptations, if you've seen them, you haven't experienced the whole stories. The books are much richer, and the characters are more admirable in the original than they're portrayed to be in the movies.


• The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. These are, no pun intended, an absolute staple in our household.

04. Romance/Chick Lit:

• Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series


• Sara Donati's Into the Wilderness series (both of the
  above are really deeply researched historical fiction)


• A few of Jennifer Crusie's books. Some of them are too over-the-top for me, but I really like her latest one, called Bet Me.


• Elizabeth Berg -- she writes chick lit but not romances. Read with tissues.


• Marian Keyes. So funny and yet she's not JUST funny.

05. American Classic:

• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee -- this is an absolute, utter must-read, in my opinion.


• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Don't be turned off by having been forced to read this in high school. Read it in your twenties or beyond and you'll get a lot more out of it.


• Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. They're ostensibly for kids but they're an amazing look at pioneer life.


• Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain


• Of Mice and Men, and even though I disagree with its overarching political message, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

06. British/World Classic:

• Any of Jane Austen's six novels (yes, even Mansfield Park), along with her juvenilia and unpublished work.


• Dickens: David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist ... I could go on.


• Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera


• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë


• L.M. Montgomery's books. Not just the Anne of Green Gables series, although that's wonderful; she wrote a dozen other novels, and they're all worth reading.

07. Drama (Play):

• Shakespeare of course, when you feel like slogging through a lot of words to get the meaning of a great story ;-) (also, reading Shakespeare is great because you realize just how many of his phrases and quotations have made their way into common speech)


• Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

08. Biography/Autobiography:

• MiG Pilot by John Barron, about Viktor Belenko. This tells the story of a Russian fighter pilot who, in the late 70's, defected to the US along with his top-secret jet. His impressions of America alone make the book worth reading.


• Mover of Men and Mountains by R.G. LeTourneau.
  Autobiography of a Christian inventor who lived to see (and in great part brought about) mind-blowing changes in the mechanical and earth-moving industries. Not just a Christian testimony or a book about tractors; you get a very good picture of life in the early 20th century and beyond from this book.


• The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery in five volumes.
  There was a lot going on behind the scenes as all those tranquil "children's" books were being written.

Comments

Post a comment