Thirty favorite books |
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manifestlynot
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 02 Jan 2018 Status: Offline Points: 4480 |
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If I make a list of 30 books, it will become 130 very quickly, lol. But when my writing is struggling, these ten books inspire me for different reasons.
1. Catch 22 - for tone, irony, and political satire. 2. The Nightingale - for historical fiction and flashback structure. And strong female characters. 3. Lonesome Dove - for descriptive prose that doesn’t lag and characterization. 4. The Stand - for big picture plotting and development. 5. Beloved - for unconventional structure. 6. We Need to Talk About Kevin - for audience manipulation. 7. Middlesex - for character backstories and development. 8. The Virgin Suicides - for narrative perspective and tone. 9. Under the Banner of Heaven - for historical fiction/nonfiction 10. Anything by David Sedaris - for authentic voice.
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Rhyming R1: Lionheart (Hist fic)
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dashesndots
NYC Midnight Groupie Joined: 31 Jan 2017 Location: New Hampshire Status: Offline Points: 132 |
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It's both hilarious and demented! I stumbled on it back in college and the premise was so intriguing I had to buy it. It didn't disappoint!
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kcraven
NYC Midnight Newbie Joined: 22 Jan 2017 Location: Oshawa Status: Offline Points: 24 |
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My list is more than 30, but the books I would never get rid of are the books I've had signed, or the books I've had since I was a little girl. Here they are (kids books first) Wrinkle in Time Narnia Chronicles Everything by LM Montgomery The Hungry Thing The Sesame Street Busy Book (okay, it has a GREAT cookie recipe) Blind Assassin Warlight The Clay Girl Girl Mans Up Women Talking Dogs at the Perimeter The Night Stages
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Briana Una
NYC Midnight Addict Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Status: Offline Points: 525 |
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In no order, really:< ="WebKit-mso-list-quirks-style">
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier 2. The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir 3. The Complete Works of Plato – Plato 4. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 5. The Velveteen Rabbit - Margery Williams 6. Pride & Prejudice – Jane Austen 7. Uprooted – Naomi Novik 8. IT – Stephen King 9. Cujo – Stephen King 10. The Shining – Stephen King 11. Wizard and Glass – Stephen King 12. Rage – Richard Bachmann 13. How I Live Now – Meg Rosoff 14. The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chboksy 15. Blankets – Craig Thompson 16. The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand (As a shy, submissive, terrified teen I needed someone like Howard Roark to show me I was allowed to take up space in the world; this is not an endorsement of Ayn Rand. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.) 17. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky 18. Hatchet – Gary Paulsen 19. The Emotional Craft of Fiction – Donald Maass 20. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 21. Vaclav & Lena – Haley Tanner 22. The Trees – Ali Shaw 23. The Phantom of the Opera – Gaston LeRoux 24. Dragonwyck – Anya Seton 25. The Ocean at the End of the Lane – Neil Gaiman 26. A Dangerous Fortune – Ken Follett 27. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – J.K. Rowling 28. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – J.K. Rowling 29. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J.K. Rowling 30. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – J.K. Rowling Edited by Briana Una - 08 Apr 2019 at 9:49pm |
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alpaca_shearer
NYC Midnight Regular Joined: 24 Jan 2019 Location: Arkansas Status: Offline Points: 503 |
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Harry Potter is repping hard on this thread!
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2FF R3:
">Where the Lilies Bloom |
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Lookit There
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 20 Feb 2014 Location: Portland, OR Status: Offline Points: 3920 |
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It seemed like a daunting task, but it was surprisingly easy (especially when I stopped trying to put them in order).
The Top 12 are in order: 1. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy 2. Rabbit, Run, John Updike 3. The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington 4. The World According to Garp, John Irving 5. McTeague, Frank Norris 6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee 7. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren 8. Earthly Possessions, Anne Tyler 9. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers 10. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley 11. Atonement, Ian McEwan 12. The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson The remaining 18 are not: 13. Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh 14. Bleak House, Charles Dickens 15. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott 16. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe 17. My Sunshine Away, M.O. Walsh 18. Ragtime, E L Doctorow 19. The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy 20. Ghost Story, Peter Straub 21. The Heart's Invisible Furies, John Boyne 22. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville 23, The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles 24. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte 25. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen 26. The Color Purple, Alice Walker 27. The Lost Language of Cranes, David Leavitt 28. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler 29. Charming Billy, Alice McDermott 30. ??? - I like to think I haven't read it yet 12 13 17. 27. Edited by Lookit There - 08 Apr 2019 at 11:11pm |
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FFC1 12 Gay-ngry Men
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justmel
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 25 Jan 2015 Location: Wisconsin, USA Status: Offline Points: 2114 |
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This was HARD. My husband and I sold our house last year and are currently spending the winter in our RV in Texas, and all our belongings, including the many, many boxes of books I kept after The Purge, are in storage in Wisconsin. So I not only had to do this blind (without the books), but I'm having real problems remembering what I kept or didn't keep. I do know I kept more than thirty, ha ha. But anyway my list starts with kids, mg, ya, and then kind of loses any particular order or focus:
1.
The Big Orange Splot Daniel Manus Pinkwater
2.
Harriet the Spy/The Long Secret Louise Fitzhugh
3.
A Wrinkle in Time Madeleine
L’Engel
4.
By the Great Horn Spoon Sid Fleischmann
5.
Nightbirds on Nantucket Joan Aiken
6.
The Egypt Game Zilpha Keatley Snyder
7.
Up a Road Slowly Irene
Hunt
8.
The Outsiders SE
Hinton
9.
Harry Potter series (yes, all 7. It’s all one story.) JK Rowling
10.
On Writing Stephen King
11.
The Writer on Her Work ed. Janet Sternburg
12.
Writers at Work (Paris Review series—I can’t remember which
one I have, but I’d have them all if I could)
13.
The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle
in Transition Maggie Dunn
and Ann R. Morris
14.
Love Medicine Louise Erdrich
15.
Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
16.
Frankenstein Mary Shelley
17.
The Historian Elizabeth
Kostova
18.
The Dante Club Matthew Pearl
19.
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
20.
Four Quartets TS Eliot
21.
The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath/Arial
22.
The Kite Runner Khaled Husseini
23.
Life of Pi Yann
Martel
24.
Things Fall Apart Chinua
Achebe
25.
Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman
26.
Collected Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne
27.
The Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
28.
Walden/The Journals of Henry David Thoreau
29.
The Riverside Shakespeare OR The Norton Shakespeare
Stephen
Greenblatt
30.
Everything by Dick Francis (this is about 35
books, but who’s counting?)
TBR: The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
All the
Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
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RichmondRoad
NYC Midnight Addict Joined: 26 Jan 2018 Location: Australia Status: Offline Points: 639 |
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I’m always surprised when, in these sort of polls amongst a predominantly American group, Henry Miller fares so badly when he is, in many circles, regarded as one of the cornerstones of American literature. Kurt Vonnegut hasn’t fared as well so far amongst his country folk either. So here’s a vote for Nexus/Sexus/Plexus by Henry Miller and The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. At the top of my list would be One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. and I need to put some Australians in the list so .... Bliss by Peter Carey and A Fraction of The Whole by Steve Tolz and I cannot leave out Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson As someone else has said, though, any list I made might be different tomorrow. |
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Alex Grey
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 27 Jan 2019 Location: UK Status: Offline Points: 2012 |
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All of Terry Pratchett's Discworld Novels (which is probably more than 30!) Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy and a volume of very clever short stories - Asimov's Mysteries There will be more - I love reading, mainly sci-fi/fantasy, but these are the ones that jumped to the forefront :-)
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nod1v1ng
NYC Midnight Black Belt Joined: 26 Jul 2016 Location: ChillybytheSea Status: Offline Points: 12497 |
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This seems impossible, and I imagine on another day (or if I were at home in front of my bookshelves) some of the list would stay, others would not. In no particular order except ABNW will always be my #1: 1: A Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley 2: Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories, by Henry James 3-8: The Sevenwaters series by Juliet Marillier 9: Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley 10 & 11: Illium and Olympos by Dan Simmons 12: The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (I know it’s a play :P) 13: The Martian Chronicales by Ray Bradbury 14-19: The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K LeGuin 20: 2001: A Space Odessey by Arthur C Clark 21: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde 22: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (I wanna by SJ when I grow up) 23-25: Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Dragondrums by Anne McCaffery (all the Pern books were great but these were by far my favorite) 26: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (subsequent 2 books were also great) 27: Contact by Carl Sagan 28: The Handmaiden’s Tale by Margaret Atwood 29: The Thrall’s Tale by Judith Lindbergh 30: The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan & concluded by Brandon Sanderson (I know that’s 15 books thhbt.) Bonus: right now my current favorite book on writing is Story Genius by Lisa Cron, because how can you not like this tag line: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere) Edited by nod1v1ng - 09 Apr 2019 at 9:58am |
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