Favorite Books for Pleasure
Reading
Compiled by Elizabeth Brunner
|
| The Good Children by Kate
Wilhelm. Wonderful psychological portrait of four children with a haunting
secret. Gentle and realistic. One of my favorite authors currently. |
| Kingfishers Catch Fire by
Rumer Godden. Unconventional British woman building a life in rural India.
Beautiful language and a surprising plot. Strange trivia: Demi Moore and
Bruce Willis named one of their daughters after this author because they
so admire her work. |
| Literary Novels: Any
book by Alice Hoffman. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.
Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Anything by Ernest Gaines.
Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Laurence Sterne's 18th century
novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. A.S. Byatt's
Possession. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
Don DeLillo's White Noise. David Guterson, Snow Falling
on Cedars. |
| Literary Nonfiction:
John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil about New
Orleans. Kendall Hailey's The Day I Became an Autodidact.
Any collection of letters written by poet Emily Dickinson. MFK Fisher's
essay collections. Janet H. Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck: The
Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. |
| Literature in Translation:
Jostein Gaadier's Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy.
Patrick Suskind's Perfume. |
| Mysteries: Daniel
Easterman (scholarly espionage), Sharyn McCrumb (set in the Appalachians),
Sara Paretsky (best of the feminist detective genre), Jonathan Kellerman
(written by child psychologist), Charlotte Armstrong (great plots and characters),
Kate Wilhelm (genre crossing with science fiction). |
| Children's Books:
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis,
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle |
| Brain Storm by Richard Dooling.
Mystery that incorporates inside look at law and neurological research. |
