Tell us about your favorite book today!
Favorite Book:
Bleak House by Charles Dickens Why I Love this Book: Dickens is at his best in Bleak House, offering powerful insights into the inequities of Victorian England through a richly diverse cast of well-drawn characters and a suspenseful plot worthy of a thriller. While a few of the principal characters may be idealized, they are still appealingly human. The numerous secondary characters, as always, regale us with their hilarious idiosyncrasies even as they elicit our sympathy, all the while enriching and advancing the plot. Favorite Book: The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles Why I Love this Book: Simple beauty. Favorite Book: Dark Tower Series by Stephen King Why I Love this Book: The Dark Tower books are full of adventure and interesting characters. King writes them so well. Favorite Book: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison Why I Love this Book: It's a fantastic story that spans about as wide as the imagination gets. The writer brilliantly wrestles with social themes in a personal and yet epic story. Favorite Book: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien Why I Love this Book: It is a great story! You can imagine the characters living in your own backyard (if you didn't live in NYC and you HAD a backyard). You can relate to the characters. It is subversive. It's lovely. Favorite Book: Don Quixote by M. Cervantes Why I Love this Book: Although it's loooooong, Cervantes has thousands of great ideas that make this book highly enjoyable. While the first part of the book is basically a parody on the romance of chivalry and knight errantry, the second part is some kind of a parody of the first part (at least I think so). The second part also makes a big turn towards modern literature (I mean, its 400 years old!), as Don Quixote himself becomes a figure in a novel and fiction and reality are getting more and more complicated to distinguish... Favorite Book: The Great Good Thing by Roderick Townley Why I Love this Book: I love it because it gives a different point of view, to the readers. Favorite Book: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Why I Love this Book: Because it shows how a boy has to face growing up by giving up something he loves very much. Favorite Book: The Guest of Honor, by Nadine Gordimer Why I Love this Book: Gordimer twines together politics, history, love, and the sheer accidents of fate into one complete story Favorite Book: If You Don't Dance They Beat You by Jose Quintero Why I Love this Book: Jose Quintero, director of O'Neill plays, describes with heart and soul his struggles and success in the Thespian world. His love for the theater is expressed so beautifully that it made me laugh, cry and want to know him...and that was only in the first chapter! I'm thrilled that his memoirs live to inspire the artist in me as well as the many generations yet to come. Favorite Book: Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling Why I Love this Book: Beautiful characterizations, a wonderful plot, and a good pace. Favorite Book: The Cases That Haunt Us by John Douglas Why I Love this Book: I am very interested in real-life so far unsolved mysteries. The book I mention explores some of them from a Profiler's point of view... Favorite Book: To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee Why I Love this Book: I love the beautiful and haunting language and the complex portraits Lee paints of white and black Southern men and women. I love the example of the struggle to seek justice. Favorite Book: El Libro de Osito Why I Love this Book: I taught a mixed group of toddlers. This book appealed to the children who spoke English only and the ones who spoke Spanish and English. And as someone who is desperately trying to teach herself Spanish this book was like finding a rare jewel. Favorite Book: The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot Why I Love this Book: I love this series because they are sooo nice and easy to understand. I also looooove it because it's like reading a note from my best friend!! Favorite Book: Complete Works of William Shakespeare Why I Love this Book: Every lesson for cultivation and liberty will be found Favorite Book: The Watchmen by Alan Moore Why I Love this Book: I love "The Watchmen" because it's an intricate, imaginative story about the end of the world. It's a beautiful combination of text and images. Favorite Book: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas Why I Love this Book: Adventurous, romantic, suspenseful, witty Favorite Book: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Why I Love this Book: It is witty, clever, romantic, feminist, and enduring. Favorite Book: The Lost Queen of Egypt by Lucile Morrison Why I Love this Book: It's a lovely children's book about Ankhsenapaaten, King Tut's wife. It's historical fiction and Ms. Morrison imagines a fascinating life and the consequences of the lost queen's life. Favorite Book: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Why I Love this Book: Dickens is so tragic - can't get enough of the twisted tales Favorite Book: Holes by Louis Sachar Why I Love this Book: Because it is really interesting Favorite Book: City of God by E.L. Doctorow Why I Love this Book: Doctorow's examination of human life and faith is *amazing* and ultimately optimistic, without relying upon trite recapitulations of traditional expressions of faith and belief. And, of course, his prose is outstanding, nuanced, and creative. Favorite Book: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle Why I Love this Book: So imaginative Favorite Book: The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer Why I Love this Book: The House of the Scorpion is the most wonderful science fiction book I have ever read! The detailed characters and plot twists kept me engrossed until the very end. Favorite Book: Mandy and The Last of the Really Great Whandoodles by Julie Andrews Why I Love this Book: Because they keep your imagination go and you don't want to put the book down. Favorite Book: The Stand by Stephen King Why I Love this Book: It's a beautifully crafted tale of good triumphing over evil, but not in a fairy-tale way. It's real, it's unpleasant at times, it makes you yearn for better, and it leaves you feeling like there's hope for the world. Favorite Book: Villette by Charlotte Brönte. Why I Love this Book: I love Lucy Snowe's independent, practical, yet sensitive nature as she struggles and succeeds in making a career for herself as a teacher while trying to maintain her feelings for M. Paul Emmanuel and her friendship with John Bretton. Also, her being on her own and surviving in a foreign land also attracted me to this book. Favorite Book: Life in the Fat Lane by Cherie Bennett Why I Love this Book: I like this book because her friends always used to tease an over weight girl at their school. so know they're going to know how it feels to have a friend that is over weight, and they might stop teasing other people because of their weight. Favorite Book: All the books written by Sheldon Siegel. Why I Love this Book: He is a different kind of writer, his books are full of humor, interesting stories about law and a personal touch of his own life in San Francisco. Favorite Book: Annapurna by Maurice Herzog Why I Love this Book: A true life adventure story of facing fierce weather conditions, fear, harsh survival means Favorite Book: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle Why I Love this Book: The story features a strong, smart girl heroine - someone I could identify with when I was a girl since I was strong, smart and a tomboy. She had younger brothers (also like me), one of whom she had to save. There's even a little romance. Favorite Book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceby Robert Pirsig Why I Love this Book: The book takes us on a wonderful journey in a 'moving' way! Favorite Book: Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom Why I Love this Book: It's got lots of adventure Favorite Book: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry Why I Love this Book: Wonderful characters and a story that I wished wouldn't end. Favorite Book: The Book of Five Rings by Musashi Miyamoto Why I Love this Book: It was a gateway into Japanese Culture. It opened up a way of thinking about the world, and about personal power. Without reading it, I might not have become an anthropologist. Favorite Book: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë Why I Love this Book: It is dark and sadly beautiful. "I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!" Favorite Book: A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes Why I Love this Book: Julian Barnes creates a frenzy of distinct stories in individual styles, but they all speak in a unified voice. Plus, it's just wacky! Favorite Book: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett Why I Love this Book: A timeless classic with some of the best illustrations ever drawn. Favorite Book: Max The Mighty by W.R Philbrick Why I Love this Book: I love it because it has lots of stuff to figure out what really happened. Favorite Book: Piper In The Night by Dave Smeds Why I Love this Book: A bizarre and grotesque tale during the Vietnam War. Picked off of the shelf without any knowledge of the author or the book, I was floored by the intense tale of mythology of the old world trespassing into the war torn island of the contemporary. Favorite Book: Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism by Georgia Byng Why I Love this Book: It has a funny plot and the charecters are funny. I like Rocky, professor Nockman, and Edna. Favorite Book: Alice in Blunderland by Alice Reynolds Naylor Why I Love this Book: It's funny! Favorite Book: The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil Why I Love this Book: Though written about life in Austro-Hungary just before the collapse of the monarchy, it is startingly contemporary: it cleverly weaves together questions about social mobility, race, sex roles, and the increasing power of the mass media. Perhaps the essence of the story lies in the murder subplot involving the character Moosbrugger--in this it recalls Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities or the public spectacle the O.J. Simpson trial. Favorite Book: Gifts from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindgerg Why I Love this Book: Gifts from the Sea helped me as a woman and mother to see the beauty in my children and their mistakes, as well as mine. Favorite Book: Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller Why I Love this Book: Bridges of Madison County taught me about love. Favorite Book: What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones Why I Love this Book: Because I like the way the author writes Favorite Book: Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn Why I Love this Book: Simultaneously charming and dramatic, this book is a compelling parable about the gift of language, the power of speech & writing, and the perils of censorship, fundamentalism, and totalitarianism. All that wrapped in a brilliantly and beautifully written, progressively lipogrammatic, epistolary novel. (You learn a few linguistic tricks along the way, too!) Favorite Book: Franny and Zooey J.D. Salinger Why I Love this Book: It's an amazing introspective collection of two stories on the human condition |
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