I am seconding two of these books - The Elegance of the Hedgehog and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

I am also recommending one more - Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. If you like historical fiction and science fiction you should appreciate this one.

Most of my favourites don't meet your requirements, but I asked Creative Writing major husband what he would recommend - he says that Flannery O'Connor is super and that you're in for a treat if this is your first time reading her stuff!

His recommendations:
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (some sex, not a lot, certainly not gratuitous)
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (also some sex, not gratuitous)
Anything by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Anything by Henry David Thoreau with Walden being a good start
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (non-fiction, obviously)

He said that he liked the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series by Tad Williams when he was younger - fantasy stuff with believable characters. Also Otherland by Tad Williams, which is more sci-fi.

Husband also wanted to warn you that while 'The Color Purple' (recommended above) is amazing it may not meet your requirements - lots of explicit talk about sex including rape, a sub-plot about genital mutilation, etc.

Two of my all time favourites without lots of sex/violence/swearing are Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller - both science fiction, both somewhat disturbing on other levels. I'm reading Born to Run by Christopher McDougall right now which is a really fun, quick read and very inspiring for fitness/weight loss if you enjoy narrative non-fiction at all.

This is the summer reading list for our house, so these are all things that caught our interest but we haven't read and cannot recommend yet! Also, obviously, I don't know if any of these meet your requirements:

- James Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems
- Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore
- St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
- Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields
- The Song of Percival Peacock by Russell Edson
- The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
- Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
- Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice by Paul Kivel
- Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
- The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo
- Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker
- Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
- Orwell: The Lost Writings
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- Short Cuts: Selected Stories by Raymond Carver
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth
- Black Power by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton
- I Married a Communist by Philip Roth
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner
- Go Down Moses by William Faulkner
- Pylon by William Faulkner
- Tenth of December by George Saunders
- Garner's Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
- Here We Are in Paradise by Tony Earley
- No More Prisons by William Upski Wimsatt

Thanks! Those weren't really 'requirements', they were just an idea of what I liked so people wouldn't recommend Harlequin romances. :P Like I said, I'll try anything once. I really need to expand my reading list so a variety of suggestions is good. And I have heard that about The Color Purple--maybe I can just skip or skim those parts. I don't mind some sex/language as long as it is essential to the story and character development, but if it is too explicit it bothers me to the extent that I'm drawn out of the story--which ruins the purpose for reading it in the first place.

Also, 1984 is brilliant, albeit depressing. It made me depressed for like a solid week after I read it (yeah, I'm sensitive when it comes to books)! After you read it, I recommend reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and The Giver by Lois Lowry. They are also dystopian fiction, but the worlds they depict are vastly different. It's just really interesting to compare/contrast those three.

I've read both Brave New World and The Giver - I'm not a fan of Brave New World, but I've loved The Giver since childhood! I'm a big, big Orwell lover who has never read 1984 - embarrassing! I saw the movie with John Hurt several years ago thinking it would be an uplifting revolutionary flick - surprise, nightmares for months instead.

If you don't mind plot essential violence, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is mind blowing.

Merilung, I may steal half of your and your husband's list. I know I haven't read everything, but I've rather exhausted most of my usual interests (American lit... more specifically southern), and I'm having trouble compiling my list this year. You've got a few on the list that I have read and highly recommend (Go down Moses, 1984, Watchmen and Gravity's Rainbow), but you have a ton of books I've never even heard of. I'm going to have to do a lot of Amazon synopsis reading now. :D

Hmmmm. What an interesting thread! Lots of old friends among the titles here.Reading helps me get through the night when I shouldn't be eating.

shepherdgirl: Flannery O'Connor is a huge favorite of mine! My all time top novel as a Catholic is Father Elijah by Michael O'Brien. Also JRR Tolkien's everything, of course.

The last best thing I've read lately is Seamus OHeaney's translation of Beowulf [amazing when read by Seamus as an audiobook]. I followed it up with the modern title Grendel by John Gardner just to get the other side of the story(!)

I can't stomach romance but am re-reading all of the original Sherlock Holmes stories after being inspired by the BBC series with Benedict Cumberbatch.

Next on the list is the Hunchback of Notre Dame along with Ender's Game (an odd mix, I realize....)

Some old favorites: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem, and The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. I see merilung has tapped a couple of these too.

I'll be checking out some of the titles here to load up on my Kindle!

OMGosh! I totally LOVED Beloved! One of my all time faves!!!!!

To OP, I am half way through "The Shack" and it is Christian and amazing! I really recommend it!!!

I would definitely second Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (not an easy read but so very good) and The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Also, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude is great. Love in the Time of Cholera is even better.

merilung - St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is delightfully quirky. Hope you enjoy it!

I have a friend who is a HUGE fan of Tad Williams and would quickly recommend all of his work. I have only read one of his books - War of the Flowers - and I really enjoyed it.

And I thought of a few more I should have mentioned the first time:
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
The Earthsea trilogy by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Liveship Traders trilogy by Robin Hobb

Have you read Rick Bragg? I haven't but my brother, who is a huge fan of Southern lit, loves his books and is always pushing them on me. This may be the summer I finally read them. I think they're a series of memoirs.

Speaking of memoirs, if anyone hasn't read David Sedaris, now's the time! My Favorite is still Me Talk Pretty One Day.

Ha, you and my husband could be literary buddies! He wants to be a Creative Writing/American Literature professor, so we go through a LOT of American Lit in this house!

I thought of another excellent novel. The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, it is called this in Canada and other countries, but in the US it is called Someone Knows My Name. It follows the life of an African female, from her capture through her ordeals as a slave. Very moving, and impossible to put down.

I'm not a huge fan of Brave New World...it's probably been 15 years since I read it, but I thought it was kind of boring. I love 1984 though.

So many great books I've read on these lists and I would definitely say The Hunger Games trilogy is you're looking for something fun and easy - I read them with my niece last summer. Ken Follet is an amazing author who writes a lot of historical fiction that I really enjoy. Anything Hemmingway and I'm sold.

I was thinking about rereading The Great Gatsby again before going to see the movie.

My favorite book is Watership Down by Richard Adams, it's about anthropomorphic rabbits & it's wonderful! It has everything: humor, romance, adventure, allusions to classic literature & mythology, drama, heros, villains, mystery, etc. The rabbits have their own language, folklore, legends, & gods so it's an immersive story along the lines of Lord of the Rings. I first read it about fourteen years ago & I've read it countless times since.


Have you ever read any Christian romance novels? Some of them are horribly cheesy with awful dialogue but there are rare gems like Jenna's Cowboy by Sharon Gillenwater, ya know, if cowboys are what you're in to ;)

I was going to suggest Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, but it seems it doesn't compare to the other suggestions lol

If you can find it, I suggest Lenore Divine by Jean Devanny. However, it was published in NZ/Australia so I don't know if it will be available. I was hooked on this story from the first paragraph. It's written and set in 1920's New Zealand and about a female character (Lenore Divine) and the choices she makes.