Kite Runner -- Khaled Hosseini (thanks to my wife for forcing me to read it -- perhaps the best piece of literature I've ever touched)
A Prayer for Owen Meany -- John Irving
To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee
My Dog Skip -- Willie Morris
My Losing Season -- Pat Conroy
The Sound and the Fury -- Faulkner
Candide -- Voltaire
Russka -- Edward Rutherford
The Right Stuff -- Tom Wolfe
Gone With the Wind -- Margaret Mitchell
When all is said and done more is said than done.
I took my favorites from different times and places...
The Rabbit trilogy (plus novella) - John Updike
Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry
The Stand - Stephen King
The World According To Garp - John Irving
The Killer Angels - Jeffrey Shaara
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Doestoevsky
The Caine Mutiny - Herman Wouk
The Kid from Tomkinsville - John R. Tunis (had to throw this in for my namesake)
She used to wake me up with coffee ever morning
Read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina, which is supposed to be one of the best, most true to Tolstoy. This book covers every aspect of life, and it was as meaningful to me, sitting in my daughter's back yard in Portage Park (Chicago) w/ the dogs and a cup of tea, as it would have been sitting somewhere on Levin's farm in 1877 Russia.
woy and pedro: you must read!
teach tolerance.
teach tolerance.
She used to wake me up with coffee ever morning
Top 11 All-Time Fiction:
1. A Fan's Notes, Frederick Exley
2. Middlemarch, George Eliot
3. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
5. Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
6. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
7. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
8. The Sportswriter, Richard Ford
9. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
10. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
11. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Expery
Top 11 Non-Fiction:
1. America, Charles Kuralt
2. The Great Shark Hunt, Hunter S. Thompson
3. The Proud Highway, Hunter S. Thompson
4. The American Political Tradition, Richard Hofstadter
5. Ball Four, Jim Bouton
6. Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi
7. Lords of the Realm, John Helyar
8. The End of Faith (Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason), Sam Harris
9. From Dawn to Decadence (1500 to the Present), Jacques Barzun
10. All the President's Men, Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein
11. Paris 1919, Margaret MacMillan
Yep, it's the equivalent of my reaction to U2's Zooropa, a bit of the original vibe and a lot of other stuff I don't really find compelling.I had trouble with Irving's latest as well woy.
It was the same with Bleak House by Dickens for me.
My high school history teacher loved his work. He threw away our textbooks and gave us all a copy of Hofstadter instead. It's really too advanced for high schoolers, but it does something important that text books don't: it makes you think. I think it's a very well balanced look at American politics & history.
I've read his "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life", and I found that one to be a bit more tedious but very high quality nonetheless. I've been planning to check out a few more of his books, but I've just never gotten around to it. A new book, or music, or football game, or 6 pack of Killians always manages to trip me up instead.
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