Recommended Books of 2009!

[elanor_x]

Feel free to ask questions about any of them and I would appreciate to hear your opinions and recommendations too!

 

 

Favorite recommended books of 2009:

 

1) The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield

2) "The Pillars of the Earth" ~ Ken Follett

3) "World Without End" ~ Ken Follett [Those 2 books are utterly different from his other work, which I didn't want to read. Political games were even more interesting than love subplots.]

4) "The Courilof Affair" ~ Irene Nemirovsky ["In 1903, Leon M - a devout terrorist - is given the responsibility of 'liquidating' … Courilof, the notoriously brutal and cold-blooded Russian Minister of Education, by the Revolutionary Committee…Posing as his newly appointed personal physician, Leon M takes up residence with Courliof in his summer house in the Iles and awaits instructions."] 

5) Several George Orwell's essays – "Such, Such Were the Joys…" [his childhood at boarding school], about Jack London, etc. Most of them are on-line Don't remember reading "King Lear", but, if you had, the essay "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool", examining the reasons behind Tolstoy's pamphlet attack on the play, seemed very interesting.
 

6-7) "Emily of New Moon" & "Emily Climbs" ~ L.M. Montgomery [YA]

8) Yevgeny (or Evgeny) Schwartz's plays : "The Shadow" (1940), "The Dragon" (1943), etc. [His plays "are brilliant, imaginative satires of corruption and tyranny, disguised as fairy tales for adults". They're really funny too.]

9) "Boy. Tales of Childhood" ~ Roald Dahl [for children, but the style was suitable for adults too, imo. Pity the book was so short.]

10) "Going Solo" ~ Roald Dahl [continuation of his biography about his years as a pilot in WW II]

11) "Immortals" edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois

[short stories' collection dealing with immortality. My favorites: "Death Do Us Part" by Robert Silverberg and "Learning to Be Me" by Greg Egan]

12) "Cousin Phillis and other tales" ~ Elizabeth Gaskell [Probably due to not reading much from that period, her stories were new and original to me. I especially loved the focus on brother-sister ["Half a Life-Time Ago"] and parents-son relationships ["The Crooked Branch"] and enjoyed her trying psychologically explain & make the reader feel the atmosphere of the Salem Witch Trials in "Lois the witch"]

13) "Marriage, a History From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage" ~ Stephanie Coontz

14) "Thud!" ~ Terry Pratchett

15-19) "The Science of Discworld II: The Globe", "Men At Arms", "The Fifth Elephant", "Night Watch", "Guards! Guards!"  ~ Terry Pratchett

 

 

Good Books I liked:

 

20) "Snow in Autumn" ~ Irene Nemirovsky

21) "The Forsyte Saga" ~ John Galsworthy [only from "The Man of Property" to "To Let", without the second tome of continuation]

22) "One More For The Road" ~ Ray Bradbury

23) "Teacher Man" ~ McCourt

24) "Looking Through The Years" ~ Anatoly Aleksin

25) "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and six more" ~ Roald Dahl

26) "Krabat" or "The Satanic Mill" ~ Otfried Preußler

27) "A Walk in the Woods" ~ Bill Bryson

28) "The Princess Bride" ~ William Goldman [The best parts were Inigo and Fezzik's travel through the Zoo of Death and Westley's confinement . Was I the only reader to read the entire book with anticipation to find S. Morgenstern's full Internet version? I didn't know anything about this book, prior to opening it, thus believed the "editor". The missing scenes of Buttercup's training at the court and of Inigo Montoya's life sound exciting.] 

29-30) "Jingo", "Feet of Clay" ~ Terry Pratchett

 

 

Fine books at the moment of reading, but not excited about now:

 

31) "Wuthering Heights" ~ Emily Bronte [some passages were emotionally moving, but on the whole it was a tale of a sadist, intent on destroying innocent people's lives till his last breath. The trouble was probably in the style of writing & in the utter defenselessness of Heathcliff's victims. There is only so long I can read about his wife's suffering and then about the next generation being cowered by him too. Btw, can anybody explain what has he been thinking by torturing Cathy's, his supposed love's, daughter? I wondered how he didn't think she would spit on him in afterlife for that at the meeting he craved so much. But this quote stayed with me after closing the book:

"And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!'"]

32) "The Tales of Beedle the Bard" ~ JKR

33) "Once I was a Princess" ~ Jacqueline Pascarl ["told how her marriage to a Malaysian prince from the Islamic state of Terengganu, went horribly wrong"]

34) "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" ~ Mark Twain

35) "I know why the caged bird sings" ~ Maya Angelou

36) "The Last Lecture" ~ Randy Pausch

37) "The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia trap" ~ Stephanie Coontz ["Marriage, a History" alone would've been enough and was much more interesting]

38) "Maurice" ~ E.M. Forster

 

 

Books, which weren't for me, after all (the ones I wouldn't read had I known in advance):

 

39)"Far from the Madding Crowd" ~ Thomas Hardy

40) "Fire in the Blood"~ Irene Nemirovsky

41) "The Naked Ape" ~ Desmond Morris

42) "Saint's Progress" ~ John Galsworthy

43) "The Great Fair" ~ Sholem Aleichem [autobiography]

44) "Ethan Frome" ~ Edith Wharton

45) "The Book of Kings" [short stories about kings] edited by Richard Gilliam and Martin H. Greenberg