Must Read List

The Color Purple - by Alice Walker

It's probably my favorite book. The passage where Shug tells Celie about how God creates all these beautiful things on earth for us to enjoy sums up my religious philosophy better than anything else I've ever read.

I also think that everyone ought to read:
Winnie The Pooh by A.A. Milne.
Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers

And of course Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling.

 

anything written by alexandre dumas
anything written by voltaire
the scarlet pimpernel by the baroness orczy
siddhartha by hermann hesse
at least one version of faust or doctor faustus
spartacus by howard fast

and poetry! any and all poetry!

 

My favorite books are;

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
The Divine Comedy by Dante
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

Some of them (Woolf/Dante) are kinda hard going, but I would recommend them all.

 

okay this isn't high brow but Scott Pilgrim vs the World, I know it's a graphic novel but it is one of the few books that I have ever really fallen in love with. The characters are all deeply flawed but each is oozing with their own unique style of cool.

 

If you are a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, you should diffinately read Kelly Creagh's "Nevermore."

 

This. very much and the movie was a pretty decent adaptation.

Since I know most people will recommend regular old prose novels I'm gonna go ahead and make some graphic novel suggestions and maybe enlighten or enrich some folks

Watchmen: there's a reason it's never gone out of print in 25 years. the movie was just ok, the GN is a masterpiece

Scalped: slightly tough to describe. my quick description is "Deadwood set in a modern indian reservation" but it is so much more

Locke & key: written by Joe Hill, a pseudonym for Stephen King's son. beautifully illustrated by gabriel rodriguez. it tells the story of a family trying to recover from the death of their father/husband, moving back to his ancestral home of Key house in Lovecraft, massachusetts, where they discover the many secrets of the house and his past

the walking dead: there's a reason this got turned into a TV show that's been a huge success. as good as the show is, the comics are even better

Y the last man: remember when lost started to kinda suck then it got a lot better? Brian K vaughn is a big part of why, and Y the last man is probably his best series. It details the story of Yorick and his pet monkey ampersand, the only 2 surviving beings on earth with a Y chromosome.

 

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, because of its beautiful portrait of a changing America (and because the protagonist happens to be gay, but it's never mentioned).

1984 by George Orwell, because it's the quintessential dystopia and it's awesome.

Candide by Voltaire, because it's hilarious.

Harry Potter by JK Rowling, because no other book has had such a deep and lasting effect on my life.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, because they are endlessly badass and extremely readable.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, because I laughed and cried at the same time.

King Lear by Shakespeare, because the most tragic thing is death from natural causes.

Room by Emma Donoghue, because I could not stop reading.

 

Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series. If you loved the LOTR movies and enjoy fantasy, then you can be no more epic than this series. Don't be intimidated by the amount of books in the series, or size of the books; the story is really just that big.

AND the last book comes out this next January ... which is like 4 years after the author died of cancer. So, that's also kind of awesome ... I mean, who gets 3 new books onto the New York Times bestseller list AFTER kicking the bucket?

 

Walden

 

Perfume by Patrick Süsskind (originally Das Parfüm)

The Hogfather by Sir Terry Pratchett (all discworld actually)

 

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Just...powerful. And spare, and simple and tragic. But beautiful.)

Kushiel's Legacy Series by Jacqueline Carey (Lots of people don't take fantasy seriously, but this has so many important themes about what it means to be human, to be flawed, to love, to be good...)

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (A whole new approach to how we look at ourselves as human, the world, and our place within it. I shut the book after I finished it and cried.)

Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Or Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan. Or really anything by Carl Sagan, especially if you can get the audiobook where it's read by the author. WHAT a voice.

 

Not really a book but still - The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Animal Farm & 1984 - George Orwell
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
The Narnia books
The Demonata series - Darren Shan

 

Of course, the really hot S&M sex scenes don't hurt this series! These books actually made me contemplate looking into this in the future ... we'll see though. :eusa_doh:

 

I just finished reading Will Grayson, Will Grayson - it's a collaborative book by John Green and David Levithan, two amazing authors.

 

George Orwell, "1984"
Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World"
Erich Maria Remarque, "All Quiet on the Western Front"
William Golding, "Lord of the Flies"
Terry Goodkind, 'Sword of Truth' series
Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Center of the Earth"
Jules Verne, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea"
H.G. Wells, "The War of the Worlds"
Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cockoo's Nest"
Harper Lee, "To Kill a Mockingbird"
Dalton Trumbo, "Johnny Got His Gun"

 

this is my favorite book series. I was so disappointed when the last book didn't come out in november!

 

The Bible. I haven't read much of it myself, but since religion is such a big force in this world, I think more people should educate themselves about it, whether they're religious or not.

Also:
Catcher in the Rye
The Giver

And of course:
The Hunger Games
Harry Potter