Favorite Books?
Just wondering what kind of books you guys like to read.
My favorites are She Said Yes (written by the mother of one of the Columbine victims), A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon, How Good Do We Have to Be? by Harold S. Kushner, Go Ask Alice, Letters to a Young Teacher by Jonathan Kozol, Chicken Soup for the American Idol Soul, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Breaking into Acting for Dummies, Who Will Cry When You Die by Robin Sharma, Called Out of Darkness by Anne Rice, Lucky by Alice Sebold, Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom, Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger, The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom, Don't Sweat the Small Stuff series, and Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford
I read a LOT, but don't have really many favorites.
Shelley, it's interesting that the She Said Yes book is based on recanted witness testimony. A very powerful book has just come out, forget the title, explaining what happened with this particular event, among many other things. It's totally not the fault of the parents that the story was misreported. A great many things were, including the assertion that the killers were outcast or were subjected to bullying.
I lived in Littleton during Columbine and knew one of the victims' families quite well. It was all just a horrible tragedy. My friends lost their 15-year-old son. At the time, they and many others found great comfort in She Said Yes story and book.
What really happened, according to eye witnesses, is that that young woman was already shot and either dying or dead when another young woman was caught praying. The shooter asked her if she was religious. She said she was, and he walked the other way (distracted by something else). That young woman survived. Initially another witness who had survived confused the identities of the two girls and has since recanted. His initial confusion formed the basis for the book.
Not trying to be ornery -- it's just part of my historic accuracy fixation.
I also really enjoyed Curious Incident very much!
My favorite books list would include many on the list provided by Elanivalae. I was an English Major and love hundreds of books, so my list would be very long. Off the top of my head I'd include:
The English Patient
Attonement
The Shipping News (what do you think about a possible diagnosis for Quoyle?)
Possession (did I get that right? AS Byatt's hit historical novel)
House of the Spirits
Song of Solomon
Beloved
The Bluest Eye (marvelous little novel, Toni Morrison's first)
Moby-Dick (my absolute favorite novel!)
Bonfire of the Vanities
Slaughterhouse Five
On the Road
Howl
Leaves of Grass
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (great fun)
Mrs. Dalloway (wow!)
Anything by Jane Austin
Anything by William Faulkner
Crime and Punishment and Demons and really anything by Dostoevsky (freakishly ahead of his time)
Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness
Great Expectations
The Stranger
Any play by Harold Pinter, especially The Birthday Party and Betrayal
Equus, Amadeus
Anything by Samuel Beckett
Madame Bovary
Anna Karenina
Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D'Ubervilles
Poetry. any of it, by Pushkin
Love in the Time of Cholera
Tales of King Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory
King Lear, MacBeth, Othello, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, King Henry IV by Shakespeare
Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseide by Chaucer
And although they aren't "great literature" I really thoroughly enjoyed the Harry Potter series.
And a lot more ...
(edited after thinking some more about this ...)
Anything written by Toni Morrison, Audrey Niffeneger, Haruki Murakami, Jeffrey Eugenides, Alice Sebold, Jane Austen. Also a fan of Stephen Baxter.
Fen, I'm glad you like Toni Morrison. She's terrific! Have you read The Bluest Eye yet?
No! I am reading Paradise at the moment. I read both Sula and Jazz a couple of weeks ago. I loved Sula, have been thinking about that a lot.
I've actually read a lot of the books on your list recently. Jude the Obscure, Love in the Time of Cholera, Bonfire of the Vanities, Beloved. Jude the Obscure I couldn't finish. Not sure why because I enjoyed Far From the Madding Crowd and the few other Thomas Hardy books I have read. Perhaps I was just in the wrong mood.
What are you reading at the moment, Califmom?
I am about to start A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. I love the Anna Karenina inspired cover. Hope the book lives up to it. One of the grandest failures I've read recently is A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe. It has some of the best stuff in it that I've read in a long time, and I love the riffing off of King Lear. It doesn't really work (needed aggressive editing!), but it's definitely worth a read.
Bluest Eye is a dark, difficult read but mercifully short and wildly satirical. I think it's one of Toni Morrison's best. Sula was very good. I did like that one and Jazz as well (love that scene where she sits down in the street), was not as fond of Paradise. Beloved was amazing.
I have started Paradise twice now and put it back in my TBR pile. I will get it finished eventually but this week it has been ditched for Get Shorty (Elmore Leonard), which was okay but not really my kind of book. Then I picked up A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and was drawn into the plot.
Tom Wolfe - Bonfire of the Vanities was excellent but I started to read I Am Charlotte Simmons and couldn't get through it. I have terrible insomnia at the moment and some things I just don't have the patience for.
I keep trying to mooch Bluest Eye but haven't managed to get hold of it yet, not many people willing to post to New Zealand. :-) Might actually go purchase it.
Charlotte Simmons sure is bleak stuff! I'm having trouble getting through that one as well. I'll have to check out A Fine Balance.
.... ya know, it's never really a good idea to ask an English major and someone who obsesses over stories, like myself, to list her favorite books....
gosh, where should I start?
.... my entire library?
Tell us what's on your TBR (to be read) shelf then, Corina.
I can't do faves, I have difficulty with that!
in my giant pile of books I'm in the middle of, though, I have some Howard Zinn, a Joe Shapiro, a book on cat behavior (that had a blurb about Temple Grandin in it! :D :D :D the author was saying that cats appear to think the same way autistics do, with sensory thinking rather than NTish thinking), selected plays by Wilde, and so on. I have a couple of fiction book I'm reading, City of glass and Liar, but haven't been in the mood for it recently.
I usually reread Jane Erye once a year. I also go through my collection of Austen's works, and will read a lot of things written in that time period of english lit.
Savannah Nicole Logsdon-Breakstone Director of Advocacy 
You know, I actually loved Black Beauty. I also know many American authors don't get published in Australia. Don't know why. I read a lot and don't really have favourites. I was brought up on The White Man's Garden, and, The Meeting Pool, both by Matcham Skipper. They are tales of Borneo. I was also brought up on the works of Rudyard Kipling. I've read The Brothers Grimm in German and believe me they're not 'nice' fairy tales! Also, I've read Aboriginal myths and legends.
My favorite book has got to be: Women Who Run With the Wolves-Clarissa Pinkola-Estes.
Currently I have 12 books either on the go or waiting to be read.
The three on the go are: Cruel and Usual Punishment-author too lazy to go and look right now!
Al-Qaeda by Jason Burke
The relationship between America and Saudi Arabia-author (see above 
)
Some of my favorites are The Time Quintet by Madeleine L'Engle (starting with "A Wrinkle in Time"), The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, Stardust and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, Momo by Michael Ende, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jane Eyre, and many books by Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and retellings of fairy tales. Though I read a lot:-) A book a day if I can.
I just finished "Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" by Mark Haddon. I am surprised how well the author told a believable first person story about someone with autism. The book cover only says he worked with Autistic kids in his past.
Captain Correli's Mandolin
The Power of One
Things Fall Apart
Blink
I Can Jump Puddles
Can I get there by Candlelight
I think that sums up my favourites...
Most novels by Anne McCaffrey, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Robert Jordan and Spider Robinson. :)
Some of the books that I have read several times (and must count as my favourites) are:
* Twinkle twinkle - Kaori Ekuni
* Kamikaze Girls - Novala Takemoto
* The Deverry Series - Katharine Kerr
* The Dragonlance Chronicles and The Dragonlance Legends - Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis
* The Otaku Encyclopedia - Patrick Galbraith
* A historical novel series for teens written by a sweidhs author named Kim M. Kimselius
* Lizard - Banana Yoshimoto
* Tithe, Valiant and Ironside - Holly Black
* Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
* Vampire Kisses Series - Ellen Screiber
* Harry Potter Series - J K Rowling
* Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls Series, The Mediator Series and The Princess Diaries - Meg Cabot
Most books I read are kids or teens books. I find most adult books boring and I can't relate to them. I prefer fiction over fact, even though I do read fact-books too. I love to read but it takes time for me to read since I have to read the same page several time (or the same book several times) to get what I read. This could be due to my lack of focus/concetration and bad workmemory.
Ooh, I like this topic. ^_^ I have a hard time picking favorites, as I read so much...but this is my current list of books I'd want to take if I were stranded on an island somewhere:
-Evolution by Stephen Baxter (all of these are highly recommended, but this book is just fantastic, especially if you like science.)
-the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien
-The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
-The Time Traveler's Wife by Audry Niffenegger
-WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin
-The Life and Death of Planet Earth by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee
-A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
-I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg
-Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel
-Lilith's Brood/the Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia Butler
------------
"Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere."
--J.R.R. Tolkien