Calling all bookworms: book recommendations?
 

So I'm compiling my summer reading list and I'm sure there's quite a few of us fellow bookworms out there. Do you have any reading suggestions for me or anyone else?

To give you an idea of what I like: I gravitate towards literature (mostly classic) . I enjoy well-written, thought provoking books. I especially enjoy juvenile literature. Also I'm a Christian, so I don't like anything with gratuitous sex/language, etc. in it. It's not that I'm a prude, it just makes me feel uncomfortable and ruins the rest of the book for me. I enjoy drama, mystery, fantasy (fairy tale and magic kind, not the other stuff), historical fiction and so on. I'll try anything once! My favorite book is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It is closely followed by The Giver by Lois Lowry . . . those are my two recommendations for you. :)

Currently on my summer reading list:
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie
A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor
The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

:book2:

Check out Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins. It's a teen lit novel. It's very cute. John Green's vlog with his brother Hank led me to check out the book. I've read The Fault in Our Stars, it was amazing.

As long as it's not a typical romance. :p Don't get me wrong, I love romance, just not the majority of romance books. To me, they mostly fall into two categories: 1)the trashy Harlequin romance type and 2) the inspirational cheesy Amish romance type. No judgement on those that might enjoy them, but to me they make me want to throw the book against the wall and cuss out the characters (and I don't cuss)!

I've heard nothing but good things about The Fault in our Stars. It sounds really sad, but I'm a sucker for a book that can make me cry (is that weird?)! I also recently started following the vlogbrothers--they are awesome!

No it's not a typical romance, feels very real and innocent.

I also enjoyed "The Giver" when I read it (years and years ago). I would recommend:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (classic)
The Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer (go on, make fun of me if you like, but they're fun! And no gratuitous sex)
The Ender or Shadow Series by Orson Scott Card (sci-fi/fantasy)
The Redwall Series by Brian Jaques (fantasy)
The Color Purple by Alice Walker (classic)
The Diary of Anne Frank (classic)

I once tried to make a list of books that I love and would recommend to others. The most I could limit it to was 100 (but it could have easily been about 1,000!). I'm not going to share that whole list, so here are a few random ones:

Moonheart by Charles de Lint (fantasy)
Spirit Walk by Charles de Lint (fantasy)
The Art of Disappearing by Ivy Pochoda (literary fiction)
Snake Ropes by Jess Richards (literary fiction)
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (literary fiction)
Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda (literary fiction)
Witch Light by Susan Fletcher (historical fiction)
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks (historical fiction)
The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall (historical fiction)
Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (historical fiction)
Everything that Virginia Woolf wrote (classic lit)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (classic lit)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (classic lit)
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (classic lit)
Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson (ya)
The Sunflower Forest by Torey Hayden (ya)

ETA: One more that I particularly think you might like: The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

Ooh, I like your suggestions! I've already read Jane Eyre and Anne Frank--they are two of my favorites! And Alice Walker and Brian Jacques is already on my to read list. I haven't read much sci-fi stuff, so Orson Scott Card sounds interesting. Unfortunately I'm a Twihater . . . but I'll forgive you since your other suggestions were great. :)

Haha--don't you love being a bookworm? I said TKAM was my favorite, but there's a ton that could hold that honor . . . how do you just pick one? I also have a spreadsheet on my computer that is my 'to read' list. It's currently 250 books long and grows daily!

I've only read three books on your list: The Great Gatsby, Jacob Have I Loved and Their Eyes Were Watching God. I really enjoyed all of them. I haven't heard of the rest--I'll have to head over to amazon and check them out.

And lest you people think I hate romance, here's some of my favorite romance novels:
-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (classic, also suggested by Missy Krissy)
-Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine (juv/teen fantasy)
-The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery (classic, L.M.M. wrote Anne of Green Gables, but she also wrote some great books for adults)

Have you read Life of Pi? I read it recently and really liked it.

I recently read The Orchardist. Historical fiction set in Washington state at the turn of the 20th century. Now I'm reading Running the Rift, historical fiction set in Rwanda. Both fit your criteria of no sex or language, and both ave high Amazon reviews and are a bit off the beaten path.

Jacob, Have I Loved is one of my favorites. Lately, I have been into YA books.

One book I read that really touched my heart was Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. It definitely is one of those YA books that is written for a younger crowd just because of vocab and dialogue but young boy's weight loss issues and what it would mean to his friend is really interesting and his his realization that there are worse things than being fat.

The book does deal heavily with abuse and other issues that might be upsetting just to put that out there!

The new edition of Anne Frank is worth a read if you haven't done so. I read it in high school and college but it was the old edition.

The Key of Elyon by Charmain Brackett. It s a nice Christian influenced theme.
Elyon's Cipher by Charmain Brackett, sequel to the above.

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy (I hated this one ended!)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Hunger Games Trilogy

The Host by Stephenie Meyer

:)

I have a couple thousand To Read books on my Library Thing shelf! Plus a couple hundred unread books lurking about my home. :D

I adore books. :book2:

I love a good book list. Mine is several pages long at the moment! Here are a few of my absolute favorite books.

Siddhartha -Hermann Hesse
The Hounds of The Morrigan -Pat O'Shea
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
The Silmarillian and all the Histories of Middle-earth -JRR Tolkien
Lord of the Rings -JRR Tolkien
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev

If you're looking for something to conquer, I would recommend Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. There is one scene of violence, but it's a meditation on justice and morality. It's a giant book (like all Russian novels), but it really left me feeling... strange. The same for The Brothers Karazamov. I absolutely fell in love with one of the characters in that one.

But uh, I've recently been going through a phase of reading giant Russian novels, but here's some of my faves that fit your list:

Beloved (lit fiction) - Toni Morrison (My whole African American lit. class was crying when the professor read a passage midway through this book.)
As She Lay Dying (classic) - William Faulkner (If you like Flannery, Faulkner is her male counterpart during the same movement in southern lit.)
The Color Purple (lit fiction) - Alice Walker (I second the above recommendation)
I also second the recommendation of anything by Virginia Woolf.
Frankenstein (classic) - Mary Shelley
1984 (Sci-fi) - George Orwell
Brave New World - Alduous Huxley (Sci-Fi)
The Road (lit fiction) - Cormac McCarthy (There is some disturbing violence here, but I wouldn't call it gratuitous.)
Wuthering Heights (classic) - Emily Bronte
The Awakening (classic) - Kate Chopin
Cold Mountain (lit fiction) - Charles Frazier
Walk Two Moons (YA lit) - Sharon Creech
The Hunger Games Trilogy (YA lit) - Suzanne Collins
The Coquette (classic lit) - Hannah W. Foster
The Secret Life of Bees (coming-of-age) - Sue Monk Kidd
Running with Scissors (hilarious memior but has some more adult subjects) - Augusten Burroughs
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Marquez

And my favorite two books that don't really fit your list, but I think everyone should read before they die:

Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

Yay! Hooray for all us well-read bookworms. :D I'm going to have to come back later and go through these when I don't have a final exam to study for. 'Cause if I start, there's no stopping me! Anyways, you guys have great recommendations. There's a lot I've read already, but a lot more that I haven't even heard of.

If any of you like reading book blogs (I do), I'm a big fan of Robert Bruce's 101 books blog (just google it--can't post the link here). He's reading through Time magazine's 100 greatest novels and reviewing them and is very entertaining.

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.

Keep Moving Forward--Did you ever read Richard Adams Plague Dogs? Another one of his awesome books.

spanky

It's been sitting on my shelf for ages! Just haven't taken the time to read it yet, but I definitely plan on it.

That's a funny coincidence...that's my favorite book too. I read it the first time when I was ten and I've probably read it a dozen times now and I get something different out of it everytime I read it it. And you're absolutely right...it has a little bit of everything in it! Have you read the forward from I think it's the 20th anniversary edition that Adams wrote? He had set out to write a children's story...but it's so much more.