<p>Trying to fill my room up with books! :) Ok so I am planning to buy some new books.
My current list of books to buy:
*Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake
*How to Win Friends & Influence People
*Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
*The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
*The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Teens
*The Kite Runner</p>
<p>Any suggestions?</p>
<p>The Girl w/ the Dragon Tattoo series is AMAZING! You should also get Hunger Games, Ender’s Game,</p>
<p>Try reading Going Bovine (best book ever). I swear, I was a changed person when I put it down.</p>
<p>From the titles of the second, third, and fifth book, I doubt you and me have similar tastes, but Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde are always good to have (ok, yeah, you can get read their works online, but isn’t it just so much better having the books in print?). If you’re looking for YA lit, John Green is pretty awesome (I do love Looking For Alaska). And if you’re getting The Kite Runner (I hope you’ve been warned it’s heartbreaking), you might also want to get A Thousand Splendid Suns. I’ve heard that the Hunger Games and Game Of Thrones are both good, but I haven’t read either, so don’t take my word for it.</p>
<p>But what exactly are you looking for? You need to narrow it down if you don’t want to end up buying books you find uninteresting.</p>
<p>Also, Goodreads.com is awesome. They have lists of books for virtually any topic.</p>
<p>Try Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.</p>
<p>If you are trying to make your room (and therefore yourself) look like that of a literati, get tons of huge books that nobody has read but have vaguely heard of. Try the following, getting leather bound if possible:</p>
<p>FICTION:
In Search of Lost Time
Ulysses
Finnegan’s Wake
David Copperfield
War and Peace
Crime and Punishment
Don Quixote
Gargantua and Pentagruel
Complete Works of Borges</p>
<p>POETRY:
Flowers of Evil
The Divine Comedy
The Iliad
The Odyssey
The Aeneid
Orlando Furioso
Paradise Lost
Ezra Pound’s Cantos, complete
Il Canzoniere
Jerusalem Regained
Don Juan/Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Leaves of Grass</p>
<p>DRAMA:
Complete Works of Shakespeare/Jonson/Marlowe
Racine/Esther
Waiting for Godot
The Misanthrope
Oedipus Rex
Prometheus Bound</p>
<p>PHILOSOPHY
Nichomachean Ethics
The Republic
Descartes’ Discourse/Meditations/Principles
Spinoza’s Ethics
The Critique of Pure Reason
The Phenomenology of Spirit
The Communist Manifesto/Das Kapital
Fear and Trembling
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations</p>
<p>Get a bookshelf that requires one of those ladders with wheels at the top</p>
<p>The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Harry Potter books
Sherlock Holmes stuff
The Da Vinci Code
Angels and Demons (I love Dan Brown)
Catch-22
Tropic of Cancer (some parts of this book were gross but i like the ideas in it)</p>
<p>Ender’s game/Speaker for the dead, slaughterhouse 5, catch22, the odyssey</p>
<p>The Crucible and Frankenstein! Two of my favorites. I also really like The Little Prince. It’s not a heavy read at all but I think it’s really beautiful.</p>
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<p>This times 10000000. Incredible book. Have not heard good things about the movie though…</p>
<p>Also, anything by Jonathan Franzen or Haruki Murakami if you want something contemporary.</p>
<p>Man, I really wanted to contest that quote in the title of the thread</p>
<p>Elsewhere - by Gabrielle Zevin
The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie - by Jaclyn Moriarty</p>
<p>I will come up with more another time. These are the only “not-so-typical-English-class-but-still-an-amazing-read books” I could think of right now.</p>
<p>@maplesurrup Haha, don’t be a prat. Most of those are books everyone knows about or can find out about easily. In fact, all of the books you listed in fiction are in the list of 1001 books you should read before you die (well, obviously not all of Borges’ works, but Labyrinths and Fictions did make the list). You could’ve at least chosen some of the less well-known writers in the list like Stein or Forster. And who hasn’t heard of Shakespeare, Plato, and Homer?</p>
<p>Not to mention you can find all of those books for free in the Internet. Yeah, I just said it’s always nice to have Woolf and Wilde in print, but how much would buying all of the books you listed cost? Their respective authors are dead, and I’m pretty sure most of those books have entered the public domain; no one should feel guilty getting them for free.</p>
<p>Also, lists of books lacking in women writers make me cringe, but maybe that’s just me.</p>
<p>^ haha of course they are. If you want to show people you’re a pedant, you’re going to get books by Homer and Descartes rather than Catullus and Berkeley. fwiw, I don’t put Forster in the same league as Stein, Pound, or Borges, although A Passage to India is a perfectly charming book. Having the books in the flesh, as it were, is just as valuable, I think, as reading them. It’s not like indie rock where you show that your taste is better by knowing more obscure artists, you show that your taste is better by perhaps being picky about them, but mostly by understanding them. Saying I like d’Annunzio or Mickiewicz will never have the same clout in literary taste as saying I like James Blake or Mogwai will for music (or at least doesn’t now)</p>
<p>At least that’s my opinion. I’m not trying to be a prude, just open some dialogue lol</p>
<p>back to the original question…
I also reccomend Elsewhere, but my favourite books are: Birdsong, by Sebastien Faulks. It’s the most moving book I’ve read and I don’t think I’ve ever cried as much on both a book and film adaptation before.
Also The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman, which is over-the-top graphic violence in some places, but very good, and scary.
And if you’re into Dystopia I can reccomend you a load more, including Divergent, Bumped, Matched etc
Also WW1 books, I’m obsessed with that period.</p>
<p>I think the drinkyoupretty/maplesurrup debate has great potential and should continue.</p>
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<p>if the list lacked women writers but contained a substantial number of gay male writers would you cringe less? I don’t think it’s just you because I had a teacher who expressed the same thing. but she seemed to value adding novels by gay male writers into the curricula as much as she did women writers curiously…</p>
<p>Adding books by any non heterosexual cisgendered white men is a good idea - but the presence of one minority author doesn’t really “make up for” the absence of others.</p>
<p>Back to OP: Anything by Stephen King and Orson Scott Card is great. Also Lord of the Rings, the Game of Thrones, and Malazan Book of the Fallen if you’re into epic fantasy.</p>
<p>All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy! I wouldn’t advise you to fill your room up with only classics and the like (though I am indeed fond of them). I think that you might want to add less heavy headed or strong non-fictional and fictional works. For one, I’d recommend Jamie Zeppa’s Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A journey into Bhutan. It’s a pretty okay-lightish memoir and creative travel non-fiction. We’re doing it at this time in a Travel Literature unit in AP Language/Composition, and it’s proving to be a nice and enlightening read!</p>
<p>^The aformentioned Book Thief is also nice. It’s a good read indeed. You might also want to try, say… The Odyssey in all of its unabridged glory. It’s actually a good book.</p>
<p>Oh, and if you have an iPad, Marco Polo’s The Travels of Marco Polo is also as good as it’s huge. Try reading in parts.</p>
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<p>heh I missed the first quote the first time around and I agree, though to comment on the comment, there happen to be a number of gay male writers in that list, Proust and Tasso among them. I probably ought to have added Sappho, Emily Bront</p>