Apologies for slacking off – our puppy grabbed ahold of my laptop cord and chewed through it, so unless I’m at school I’m computerless until I get a new one. As one of my professors pointed out, this is the modern version of “the dog ate my homework.” Ah, well.
So today I thought I would make a list of my fifty favorite books, in no particular order because, let’s face it, this is so true:
Here are my fifty favorite books. It’s an eclectic list, I grant you.
- Gone with the Wind
- The Little Prince
- Prodigal Summer
- The Bean Trees
- Artemis Fowl: Time Paradox
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, particularly the chapter entitled “Snape’s Memories,” which is my favorite chapter in the entire series.
- Chains, which has a sequel, which I did NOT realize when I was reading it, and so when I got to the end and Laurie Halse Anderson was like, “read more about Isabel in the next book,” I was like, NOOOOOOO!
- The Fault in Our Stars, which gave me the most emotional trauma that I have experienced at the hands of fictional characters since Sirius Black died in HP5.
- The Hobbit
- Walk Two Moons
- Holes
- Pride and Prejudice
- Notre Dame de Paris (in English commonly called “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”) EXCEPT FOR the chapter entitled “A Bird’s Eye View of Paris.” 50 pages listing where EVERY BUILDING IN PARIS IS, followed by 12 pages of SUMMARIZING WHERE EVERY BUILDING IN PARIS IS. (Note: I still have no idea where every building in Paris is. A map would’ve been more helpful, Monsieur Hugo.) But after that it’s really good.
- Julie and Julia
- Me Talk Pretty One Day
- Naked
- When You Are Engulfed in Flames
- American on Purpose
- Poisonwood Bible
- The Last Battle
- Cold Mountain
- The Five People You Meet in Heaven
- Skulduggery Pleasant
- A Wrinkle in Time
- A Swiftly Tilting Planet
- Howl’s Moving Castle
- Castle in the Air
- Life of Pi
- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
- A Fine Balance
- Power of One
- Memoirs of a Geisha
- The Phantom of the Opera
- Scrambled Eggs at Midnight
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
- The Secret Life of Bees
- The Secret Garden
- The Lovely Bones
- Animal Farm
- Wuthering Heights
- The Sleeping Beauty Proposal, which is basically the only chick-lit book I ever really got in to.
- Peter and Wendy
- A Christmas Carol
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower
- Elmer Gantry
- Man without a Country, which I only read once but remember enjoying immensely.
- Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
- Bridge to Terabithia
- Tuck Everlasting
I’ll probably get home and realize I left some amazing book off this list, but oh, well.
Did any of your top books make the list? What about books you love that you didn’t see here? Any books on this list that you hate? (Although I warn you, I may defend such books tirelessly.)
Tossing in my 50 cents about The Hunchback of Notre Dame:
The original novel is just called Notre Dame, and Hugo’s intent was to glorify classic Gothic Parisian architecture and bemoan the way old buildings were being treated during his era. Which pretty much explains the chapter you hate.
Nah, it more explains all his tangents throughout the early book about how modern architecture was ruining Gothic architecture…this chapter really did just tell you where every building in Paris was.
But after that chapter, he pretty much stopped doing that (except for an occasional sentence about architecture) and got into the story and the characters, and then it’s really good.