<p>Homer and Langley - E. L. Doctorow (fiction/narrative)</p>
<p>I highly recommend Wild Fire by Nelson DeMille. Fascinating and wittingly hilarious.</p>
<p>I also recommend The Book Thief. It remains my favorite book…ever. It was the first time I ever found literature meaningful.</p>
<p>I’d also recommend Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, and People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. All great.</p>
<p>Moneyball by Michael M. Lewis</p>
<p>The Inheritance Cycle (currently composed of Eragon, Eldest, and Brisngr with the fourth and final book to come) by Christopher Paolini</p>
<p>Currently reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book “Nomad”. Start with “Infidel” in softcover. Compelling, elegant, and terrifying stuff. She is an ex-muslim with at fatwa on her head. One of my heroes. </p>
<p>Going waaay back: if you like the Odyssey and the Iliad and psychology/consciousness studies get Julian Jaynes’ “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. Nominated for the Pulitzer in '79. He’s either a genius or a complete dreamer but it’s definitely thought provoking stuff!</p>
<p>The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy (as well as his other short stories)
Basic Writings of Nietzsche and The Portable Nietzsche translated by Walter Kaufman
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami</p>
<p>Will be starting War and Peace after I finish all the short stories.</p>
<p>I would advise reading Kant or Nozick if you’re interested in heavy reading. I’d recommend Wolfe for lighter fare. Wolfe’s “I am Charlotte Simmons” is about the culture of elite universities, so I imagine someone on CC might find it interesting. </p>
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<p>Yeah, if you’re willing to look beyond the racism, there is definitely an interesting thesis in the book. Murray gives a refreshing and insightful look into how education has shaped American life and class structure.</p>
<p>@mafool–I LOVE “Madonnas of Leningrad” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany”!! :D</p>
<p>I am currently obsessed with the Stieg Larsson trilogy. I read the first one, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”; it was phenomenal! I don’t even know how to give a brief synopsis of this. It’s set in modern day Sweden touching on topics of murder mystery, family secrets, economics, sex perversion, and history. It’s a hard book to put down. </p>
<p>I recently purchased “The Book Thief” and “Cellist of Sarajevo”. I absolutely cannot wait to delve into these after reading the comments on here.</p>
<p>Dean koontz books ftw</p>
<p>The Book Thief is a great, great book.</p>
<p>I also recommend the Book Thief- GREAT book. Another of Zusak’s books that I enjoyed (though not quite as much) was called I Am The Messenger.</p>
<p>I can’t believe no one has mentioned these yet (or maybe I just missed them) but The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns are both wonderful. Excellent insight into another culture.</p>
<p>Also, a book I read when I was in middle school always comes back to me when giving recommendations- Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech.</p>
<p>I’m currently midway though this one, but so far it’s pretty good- Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet by Joanne Proulx.</p>
<p>Catch 22 is always a good read as well.</p>
<p>For more fun reading, I like anything by Jodi Picoult, although I think her books may be geared more towards girls. All her books that I have read revolve around controversial court cases. Another series I have found that I really liked is the Hunger Games trilogy- yes, I know, it’s written as young adult fiction, but it really is a gripping story. Quite good.</p>
<p>Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Beautiful Short Stories.</p>
<p>Many people probably have read these already, buuut! (Sorry. I can’t recall the authors’ names.)</p>
<p>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - fiction with realistic portrayal of social evolution in Brooklyn</p>
<p>Brave New World - cutting-edge science fiction, VERY recommended, I had a blast reading this. :)</p>
<p>Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - Short read, social commentary</p>
<p>—> Waiting for Godot - Yea… This… I didn’t understand this play AT ALL. It made absolutely no sense to me. If anyone wants to read this (it’s short) and tell me what happened, it’ll be greatly appreciated!</p>
<p>To do list:
The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene - strongly recommended by many friends; easy-to-understand string theory</p>
<p>Les Miserables - heard a lot of references back to this, sounds like a must read</p>
<p>Pride and Prejudice - not a fan of Jane Austen, but again, heard a lot of references to this book</p>
<p>No Exit - about hell, that’s gotta be interesting :)</p>
<p>Midsummer Night’s Dream - Yeaaa… So we’ve done Shakespeare every year, but somehow we’ve never touched this play</p>
<p>Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Howl’s Moving Castle, etc… - Seen animations, but never read actual books</p>
<p>Ah, I second Jhumpa Lahiri. Her short stories are beautiful and I enjoyed her novel, The Namesake, as well, though perhaps not as much as her short stories.</p>
<p>I just read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and definitely recommend it. It’s written in an interesting style and is part novel, part philosophy. Modernist novels always make me depressed, in a good way. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is one of my favourites, but requires lots of patience. </p>
<p>The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is an easy, well written and thought provoking read.</p>
<p>Model Home by Eric Puchner is quite good, a well written novel about an upper-middle class family facing financial ruin. Eric Puchner was my creative writing instructor at Claremont McKenna College, and a talented writer! </p>
<p><3 books.</p>
<p>I just finished the “Big Three” Hemingway novels, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, along with his most famous work, a novella, Old Man and the Sea. Not to mention, I also read A Movable Feast. As a middle and high school student, I had already read some of these works. But now, coming back as a college student, a little more wiser and little more inquiring, I found his works to be quite moving. Some have simply dismissed Hemingway as a hack who writes at a 5th grade level. Do not let his simplistic prose fool you. His language flows with a biblical grandeur (quoting a wiki article) that, at its time, was unprecedented.</p>
<p>I’m reading World War Z at the moment. Need a break from serious reading. </p>
<p>On my recent trip to the library I also picked up</p>
<p>The Road by Cormac McCarthy
A Crichton book about pirates (sorry can’t remember the title)
Aeneid
Godless: How a Baptist pastor became one of the nation’s leading Atheists.</p>
<p>Asset Pricing by John H. Cochrane</p>
<p>Winner of the prestigious Paul A. Samuelson Award for scholarly writing on lifelong financial security, John Cochrane’s Asset Pricing now appears in a revised edition that unifies and brings the science of asset pricing up to date for advanced students and professionals. Cochrane traces the pricing of all assets back to a single idea–price equals expected discounted payoff–that captures the macro-economic risks underlying each security’s value. By using a single, stochastic discount factor rather than a separate set of tricks for each asset class, Cochrane builds a unified account of modern asset pricing. He presents applications to stocks, bonds, and options. Each model–consumption based, CAPM, multifactor, term structure, and option pricing–is derived as a different specification of the discounted factor.</p>
<p>The discount factor framework also leads to a state-space geometry for mean-variance frontiers and asset pricing models. It puts payoffs in different states of nature on the axes rather than mean and variance of return, leading to a new and conveniently linear geometrical representation of asset pricing ideas.</p>
<p>Cochrane approaches empirical work with the Generalized Method of Moments, which studies sample average prices and discounted payoffs to determine whether price does equal expected discounted payoff. He translates between the discount factor, GMM, and state-space language and the beta, mean-variance, and regression language common in empirical work and earlier theory.</p>
<p>The book also includes a review of recent empirical work on return predictability, value and other puzzles in the cross section, and equity premium puzzles and their resolution. Written to be a summary for academics and professionals as well as a textbook, this book condenses and advances recent scholarship in financial economics.</p>
<p>i like this thread…it’s gives me idea what to read…thanks so much</p>
<p>My favorite recent book is Death of a Nationalist by Rebecca Pawel, set in Madrid in 1939.</p>
<p>I also enjoyed The Book Thief, which several people have already mentioned.</p>
<p>I read The Secret Life of Bees with my book club in Switzerland, which mentions grits. None of the other members were Americans, and none had ever heard of grits, so the next time I travelled to America I brought grits back in my suitcase. I made brunch and served grits, but they turned out lumpy, and I was so disappointed because it was my only chance to introduce grits to my friends!</p>
<p>I recommend Tinkers by Paul Harding. It is a beautifully crafted first novel, which won the Pulitzer last year. The back story about the author and how this novel even got published is fascinating. I read this book straight through in one day, then read it all over again.</p>