List It: 20 Books That Stick
Growing up, I had hundreds of books (maybe even thousands? back me up, dad) and every time I moved my parents made me donate my newly accumulated gems to charity. Which may explain my deep seated resentment of charity. Kidding. Not. Kind of. No, really.
Anyhoo, I managed to smuggle my favorite books from my past into my present and they cumulatively, along with a few newfound loves, compose that list of books - you know the one - books you'd have to rip from my cold, dead, rigor mortis set fingers. So I thought I'd use that list for this viral blog thing to list 20 book keepers. Take up the torch on your own blogs!
1. Jane Eyre
2. Persuasion
3. Hunger Games
4. Just As Long As We're Together
5. The Trumpet of the Swan
6. Ballet Shoes
7. Ender's Game
8. Say Godnight Gracie
9. The Giver
10. Forever
11. The Lovely Bones
12. The Time Traveller's Wife
13. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
14. Dogs of Babel
15. The Sparrow
16. Heidi
17. The Secret Garden
18. Interpreter of Maladies
19. The Neverending Story
20. The Pilot's Wife
Sure, I've kept countless other books. Dune. Black Like Me. The works of Kafka, Allende, Alice Walker, and Marquez. Shakespeare's collections. HG Wells. Practically every novel written by Anne Tyler, Jodi Picoult and the rest of Anita Shreve's colection. Plenty of Neil Gaiman. Children's classics by Susan Cooper and JK Rowling. The Twilight saga. I love me some books.
But the list of 20 differs because not only do I reread the works, when I first read each story it was like discovering something amazing for the first time. A new voice. A concept. I still get a tingly feeling when I think about these stories.
It's only now, as I study the list, that I realize how many of my favorite stories are children's or YA and I wish I'd known it before!
Labels: Book Review
posted by Martha Flynn @ 10:19 PM
8 Comments:
Great list! You've got some of my absolute favorites on there and some I've never heard of like Dogs of Babel and The Sparrow. Must check them out. I also thought it interesting you had Pilot's Wife on there. Very good book. I'd forgotten about that.
OMG, it would be sooo hard to pick 20. Off the top of my head, here are some of my favorites.
1. The Secret Garden
2. The entire Harry Potter series
3. The entire Twilight series
4. The Kin of Ata are Waiting
5. Secret Liar
6. The Prize
7. The Secret
8. Sherlock Holmes, volumes 1 & 2
9. The Princess Bride (which I still need to own)
...
I know there are more, I just can't remember them off the top of my head.
am i lame b/c i never knew that the neverending story was a book? i hate myself.
Christina - Pilot's Wife just had such a voice about it that made it such an easy read and I was so jealous of how unconscious it felt. I really love The Sparrow - a great literary/sci-fi combo that was unexpected.
Alie - I'll have to check out Kin of Ata...hmmm.
Oh JD - really???? I'll have to show you my copy. It's all gnarly. I used to hope if I read it enough, that I'd end up IN the book. I'm so lame.
Great list of books! The Neverending Story - the book - is SOOOOOOO much better than the movie!
Jane Eyre -- I've just reread that for the fourth or fifth time. And I LOVE The Secret Garden.
I've got The Borrowers in storage somewhere, and all of Elizabeth Gaskell's books, along with Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth. There are some books I have connected with so powerfully that I can never get rid of them. I put them in my own charity bag, thinking I've finished with them, then have to take them out -- time after time.
I read Ender's Game and I just didn't get it. I mean, I got it, but didn't like it. Or, I guess I liked it, but....I don't know what I'm saying. You get what I mean.
1. A Treasury of Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle
2. Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer, plus The Adventures of Huck Finn
4. Collected Poems and Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe (any version that has the all)
5. Einstein: His Life and Times Ronald W. Clark (best of many fine ones)
6. Inside The Third Reich Albert Speer (Memoirs of a person who was part of it all and who had to come to grips with that.)
7. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich William L. Shirer
8. Flatland E.A. Abbott
9. The Decameron Giovanni Boccaccio
10. Death Be Not Proud John Gunther
Just to name a few I think that are worth reading. Think most of these are still in circulation in some form. Could have named others that probably aren't.
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