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Books, Books, Books.

By jlynch on October 4, 2007.

Since PZ got it from Wilkins, I might as well chime in. I bold those I’ve read and italicize those I’ve partially read.

  • Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
  • Anna Karenina
  • Crime and Punishment
  • Catch-22
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude
  • Wuthering Heights
  • The Silmarillion
  • Life of Pi : a novel
  • The Name of the Rose (Multiple times - great book)
  • Don Quixote
  • Moby Dick
  • Ulysses
  • Madame Bovary
  • The Odyssey
  • Pride and Prejudice
  • Jane Eyre
  • The Tale of Two Cities
  • The Brothers Karamazov
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
  • War and Peace
  • Vanity Fair
  • The Time Traveler’s Wife
  • The Iliad
  • Emma
  • The Blind Assassin
  • The Kite Runner
  • Mrs. Dalloway
  • Great Expectations
  • American Gods
  • A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
  • Atlas Shrugged
  • Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
  • Memoirs of a Geisha
  • Middlesex
  • Quicksilver (another great book!)
  • Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
  • The Canterbury tales
  • The Historian : a novel
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  • Love in the Time of Cholera
  • Brave New World
  • The Fountainhead
  • Foucault’s Pendulum
  • Middlemarch
  • Frankenstein
  • The Count of Monte Cristo
  • Dracula
  • A Clockwork Orange
  • Anansi Boys
  • The Once and Future King
  • The Grapes of Wrath
  • The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
  • 1984
  • Angels & Demons
  • The Inferno
  • The Satanic Verses
  • Sense and Sensibility
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • Mansfield Park
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
  • To the Lighthouse
  • Tess of the D’Urbervilles
  • Oliver Twist
  • Gulliver’s Travels
  • Les Misérables
  • The Corrections
  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
  • Dune
  • The Prince
  • The Sound and the Fury
  • Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
  • The God of Small Things
  • A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
  • Cryptonomicon
  • Neverwhere
  • A Confederacy of Dunces
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything (Heh! Reading at the moment)
  • Dubliners
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  • Beloved
  • Slaughterhouse-five
  • The Scarlet Letter
  • Eats, Shoots & Leaves
  • The Mists of Avalon
  • Oryx and Crake : a novel
  • Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
  • Cloud Atlas
  • The Confusion
  • Lolita
  • Persuasion
  • Northanger Abbey
  • The Catcher in the Rye
  • On the Road
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame
  • Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
  • The Aeneid
  • Watership Down
  • Gravity’s Rainbow
  • The Hobbit
  • In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
  • White Teeth
  • Treasure Island
  • David Copperfield
  • The Three Musketeers

I really need to read more fiction. Any readers want to suggest things on this list - or otherwise - I should read?

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Yup. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Wonderful book.

I never could get through The Corrections.

I really enjoyed Love in the Time of Cholera (don't let the fact that it is Oprah's book club pick put you off). It is my favorite book of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude would be my second pick by him.

Anything Ayn Rand is worth reading if you are interested in Existentialism (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged). Middlesex was also quite good. The Kite Runner was very good but disturbing. Another good one is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night (a good, quick read).

The Amazing Adventures of Kavlier and Clay is an amazing book. Chabon can sometimes be quite wordy but in this book, it works. I liked this better than The Yiddish Policeman's Union.

For a good case of angst, anything Russian (Anna Karenina, Crime and Punsishment). If you couldn't get through Brothers Karamazov, you probably won't like the others.

Angels & Demons is junk. If you've read Da Vinci Code, you don't need to read Angels & Demons.

Definitely read Collapse and Jonathan Strange. Freakonomics is a good, fun read.

If you want to be depressed, read Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

May I suggest both Cloud Atlas and The Amazing Adventures of Kavlier and Clay. Besides The Great Gatsby, Kavlier and Clay is the closest thing I've ever read to "the great American novel". Who knows if such a thing exists, but if it does that book has a legitimate claim. Although there is a Nietzschean eternal recurrence theme that doesn't quite pull through, Cloud Atlas is a beautifully written book with some seriously skillful story telling.

Also, you should read The Catcher in the Rye, even if you aren't into the whole teenage angst thing. Finally, don't waste your time with Ayn Rand, even if (maybe even especially if!) you are interested in existentialism.

Though I have read more than just these titles on the list, I really liked:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Historian

I also read Quicksilver and loved it, but still haven't made it all the way through the other two parts of The Baroque Cycle.

Also, I'd recommend Towing Jehovah by James Morrow.