This list doesn’t have to be huge, for me. I was really looking for classic detective fiction after teaching Victorian Gothic to my students and Poe twice. I’m also a fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories and covered The Hound of the Baskervilles. Then with a new Agatha Christie movie just around the corner, I…
It has occurred to me that as a blog that has spoken to self- and indie-publishing over the years and written largely about its pros, its bright side, I do not read very many self- and indie-published books. Years ago, I did that on purpose because I didn’t want to read and get stuck giving…
Well, we’re working our way around the calendar. We’ve now had Easter ham nuggets at our own, quiet Easter tables surrounded by homemade sanitizer and either a mountain of or a lack of toilet paper, birthdays consisting of only people in our “bubbles,” masked and in open parks despite the weather, Halloween picking sanitized bags…
I really believe, this time, that this is the last reading list I am going to give you. It’s just that I recently read a short story collection (The Martian Chronicles, which snuck in there as a “novel,” just like Olive Kitteridge), and it got me thinking that I didn’t have any short stories on…
I wasn’t going to make a best books list for philosophy or for classics, but then I received a comment on my last best books list (religion and Christianity) that got me thinking. Philosophy books and classics—genres that I have read a lot of—were included in the very first best books list that I did,…
There are some books below that are on the wrong list, but I think I got most of them in the right spot. As always, I haven’t read these books and am not recommending them, per se (though if it has a link attached to it, I have read it and you can follow that…
Not everyone reads plays, or at least after the required reading in high school and college. I do. (And more than Shakespeare, though I do love Shakespeare.) I enjoy them the same way I enjoy novels. Not that I read them like crazy, because I just don’t encounter them as much. Well, with this list…
I’m on a roll here with the blog. I have been meaning to “complete” the lists of Best Books for years, and I am almost there! I have two more lists left (religion and plays), but they are in sight, during this stay-at-home order. I am an avid list maker, and I will admit that…
So, turns out lists of literary fiction are not that easy to find, unless you are looking for results from a particular year. That, however, is a list that I am not yet making. So I did my best. (Honestly, it’s not the easy to categorize literary fiction, anyhow. I’m pretty sure some of these…
Woah, this list took me a long time to scrape together. Please don’t make too much of it (as I have not read the vast majority of the books), but I wanted a place to start with titles that didn’t appear in my largely American- and Western European-heavy best books lists. This list is not…
Continuing to list the Best Books and breaking it up by genre, we have now made our way to nonfiction and journalism. (Then later I added science, because honestly I love to read in this nonfiction category more than most the others.) Actually, I compiled this one long ago, but the length of the list…
I have long been intrigued by graphic novels. I have many times wandered to their section in the bookstore and run my finger along their spines, wondering which one I might like, pulling them out and flipping through the intense illustrations. But I have so little exposure to them, I really wouldn’t know where to…
Yes, I absolutely had to combine the three into one post. It was just too hard to find lists that accurately distinguished between children’s, middle grades, and young adult reads. In fact, there may be no accurately distinguishing between them. See post HERE to get an idea of what I mean. And on top of…
the starving artist 