Bold means I read it completely, italics mean I started it. Underline means it’s retarded and I refuse to be bothered with it. I won’t get into what this lacks, but I will list a few quick life-changing books:

• Suttree, Cormac McCarthy
• All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
• East of Eden, John Steinbeck (better than the examples below)
• The Golden Age, John C. Wright
• Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John Le Carré
• Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
• Perelandra, CS Lewis

Each of these above was shockingly excellent. They either opened new regions of thought in my mind or broke my heart with sweetness and sorrow. Add to the list above tons of really good SciFi and Fantasy stuff that isn’t quite “literature” but is way more awesome than, say, Harry Potter. (Not to rag on Harry Potter. There’s a place for escapist fiction. Harry Potter is not a bad place to start a journey into reading, but an awful place to get stuck. Meaning if that’s the apogee of your reading experience, that’s a cause for sorrow.)

1  Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2  The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (including all appendices!)

3  Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling  (Couldn’t get past book 5)

5  To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6  The Bible (Only once cover-to-cover)

7  The Divine Comedy—Dante

8  Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (Not interested in the slightest. I find the anti-religious to be insufferably dull)

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare  (As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Henry V, Richard III, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet.)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot*

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (One of my all-time favorites)

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

We have recently discovered his Elephant and Piggie first reader series which is a collection of silly books where the main Characters are “an optimistic (and sometimes reckless) pig and a cautious, pessimistic elephant.” (copied from Amazon.com Editorial Reviews). I really like this easy reader series because Mo Willems is able to provide an amusingly silly story with a small amount of simple vocabulary.  Most beginning reader books are very dull in my opinion, so Mo Willem’s collection has been a great find!

Anyway, if you’re looking for a good easy reader, I recommend Mo Willem’s Elephant and Piggie Series.

I think most of us are familiar with the strategic victory of the Israelis, with their lightning pre-emptive strike on Egypt’s air power.  What’s amazing are some of the diplomatic details.  When it became clear Israel was going to smash the united Arab nations, the Israeli goal was to seize as much territory as possible before the UN forced a cease-fire.  Early in the conflict, the US government presented a cease-fire plan to the UN security council, and the Israelis, for diplomatic reasons, pretended to be pleased with the plan (while hoping that they would have a few more days to consolidate their gains).  Nasser, on the other hand, in desperate need of a cease-fire, was forced (somewhat due to his own propaganda – "We’re in Tel Aviv!") to reject the cease-fire.  The result was more time to secure the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Old City of Jerusalem, and the Sinai peninsula. 

Anyway, I found the book very readable and actually very balanced.  Nasser and Amer are given equal time with Eshkol and Dayan.  I would recommend it to anyone interested in a better understanding of the situation in the Middle East.

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East

For a guy like me who isn’t necessarily into movies, it’s a look at the interactions between producers, writers, directors, actors, and the guys doing the grunt work on the sets. 

The book also helped me crystallize what makes a good film.  I’m notoriously picky about what I like, and wind up keeping my opinions to myself.  I’ve been told I don’t make much sense in the movies I don’t like (example: Forrest Gump) and the movies I do like (example: Starship Troopers).  Well, I know what I like, and now I know a little better why I like what I like. 

Anyway, great read.  Pick it up using the link below.

Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business (Vintage)

Anyway, you can tell from the paragraph above that I’m a little scattered on this one.  The series consists of four books: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion.  It’s more like two pair than a real series; the events of the second two books are separated by nearly three hundred years from the first two, so you can take a breather in between and read something else.

I guess some of my problem with this is religious.  SciFi a lot of times tried to present answers to the flaws in our lives, and does a pretty miserable job at it.  The author’s characters have no belief in any life after death, and the way they deal with it seems empty.  I know some folks would call me deluded to think about life after death, but I get a very hollow feeling when I read some of these attempts to deal with grief and loss.  "They live on in their loved ones and memories."  Pretty weak.  There’s something so vital and vibrant in each person, that having it just quit at death doesn’t feel right to most people.  Dan Simmons makes a very vibrant and powerful personality in the second two books, and the belief that nothing but memories is left after death feels sad and wrong to me.  I guess that’s my main complaint against the books, and others may not have the same issues.

Hyperion