15 Books

Don't take too long to think about it or you'll second guess yourself and your memory. What are 15 books you've read that will always stick with you? First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
2. On Beauty
3. Appetites
3. Let Your Life Speak
4. The Feminine Mystique
5. Composing a Life
6. A Problem from Hell
7. My Traitor's Heart
8. The Bluest Eye
9. Native Son
10. Bird by Bird
11. The History of Love
12. The Souls of Black Folks
13. Bowling Alone
14. In the Time of the Butterflies
15. Pearl

Tags: Inspiration

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Permalink Reply by Yael Harlap on August 11, 2009 at 8:24am

1. Bridge to Terabithia (Katherine Paterson)
2. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
3. Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
4. The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald)
5. 1984 (George Orwell)
6. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
7. Stones from the River (Ursula Hegi)
8. The Last Unicorn (Peter S Beagle)
9. Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
10. Black Swan Green (David Mitchell)
11. The Outsiders (SE Hinton)
12. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
13. The Hotel New Hampshire (John Irving)
14. Still Life with Woodpecker (Tom Robbins)
15. On Beauty (Zadie Smith)

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Permalink Reply by Kate S. on August 12, 2009 at 7:21pm

Alright, I'm going to rapid-fire this and attempt to not pause while typing until through #15. Here we go:

1. The Bell Jar
2. The Virgin Suicides
3. Bushido
4. Siddartha
5. Closely Watched Trains
6. Birds, Beasts and Flowers
7. Vita Nuova
8. Brave New World
9. The Grapes of Wrath
10. The Picture of Dorian Gray
11. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
12. The Female of the Species
13. The Eye in the Door
14. Teahouse of the Almighty
15. Sonnets from the Portuguese

(*note: Really took 'books' to heart, as my list encompasses a pretty wide range of genres)

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Permalink Reply by Anne Manyak on August 14, 2009 at 12:42am

1) A Tent of Miracles, by Jorge Amado
2) One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
3) Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, by Jorge Amado
4) Daughter of Fortune, by Isabelle Allende
5) Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty, by Muhammad Yunus
6) Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
7) For Your Own Good, by Alice Miller
8) House of the Spirits, by Isabelle Allende
9) Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, by Jon Lee Anderson
10) Notes on Love in a Tamil Family, by Margaret Trawick
11) Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, by Jorge Amado
12) Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
13) The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level, by Gay Hendricks
14) Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad (okay, okay it's a long short story!)
15) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman

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Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Diskin on November 3, 2009 at 9:12pm

This is so random...but it's funny. I wouldn't say these were "best", but they definitely stayed with me. The problem too is that even at 40, I feel like I have early on-set alzheimers...I can barely remember things I read 3 weeks ago!
Old Souls
The Firm
Memoirs of a Geisha
War, Inc.
Seabiscuit
Reading Lolita in Tehran
A Thousand Splendid Suns
She's Come Undone
Jurassic Park
Wolf at the Table

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Permalink Reply by Brittany Shoot on November 9, 2009 at 1:10pm

1. Aftershock: Confronting Trauma in a Violent World: A Guide for Activists and Their Allies by pattrice jones
2. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
3. The Women’s Room by Marilyn French
4. Making A Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights by Bob Torres
5. Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
6. White Noise by Don Delillo
7. How To Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen
8. Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
9. Appetites: Why Women Want by Caroline Knapp
10. Unbearable Weight by Susan Bordo
11. The Autobiography of Malcolm X
12. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
13. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
14. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
15. Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

Forever by Judy Blume is also burned into my brain, but not so much in the good way...

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Permalink Reply by Leilani Clark on November 13, 2009 at 10:30am

1. Jane Eyre
2. Anna Karenina
3. All About Love
4. To the Lighthouse
5. Housekeeping
6. Jane Emily
7. Bastard Out of Carolina
8. Sag Harbor
9. After the Rain
10. The Autobiography of Red
11. Assata
12. Song of Soloman
13. Dreamboy
14. The Ecology of Fear
15. The Passion

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Permalink Reply by Shira Engel on November 13, 2009 at 10:53am

1. The Red Tent
2. Little Women
3. Full Frontal Feminism
4. Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters
5. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
6. Black Boy
7. A Thousand Splendid Sons
8. The Other Boleyn Girl
9. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
10. The Secret Life of Bees
11. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
12. Commencement
13. My Sister's Keeper
14. The Bluest Eye
15. Colonize This!

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Permalink Reply by Millicent O'Reilly on November 14, 2009 at 6:26pm

In no real order:

Gaudy Night (Dorothy Sayers)
A Wrinkle in Time (Madeline L'Engle)
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Anne Fadiman)
Ex Libris (Anne Fadiman)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion)
Light in August (William Faulkner)
The Feast of the Goat (Mario Vargas Llosa)
Consider the Lobster (David Foster Wallace)
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino)
Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco)
That Night (Alice McDermott)
Blue Angel (Francine Prose)
Stories (T.C. Boyle)
Ficciones (Borges)
Paradise Lost (Milton)

Ramona books and Blume Books and Narnia too. Eep.

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Permalink Reply by Lavinia Andrei Jennings on December 27, 2009 at 2:40pm

1.Naghib Mahfouz' Trilogy
2. War and Peace,
3.Don Richardson's Lords of the Earth,
4.Tar Baby
5. Brothers Karamazov
6.Jane Eyre
7.Wuthering Heights
8.The Kite Runner
9.If, by Amy Carmichael
10. Les Miserables
11.One Hundred Years of Solitude
12. The Little Prince
13. The Magic Mountain
14. Narciss and Goldmund
15. Mere Christianity

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Permalink Reply by Judi Pattison on January 6, 2010 at 6:08pm

1. Emma (Austen)
2. Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery)
3. Jane Eyre (Bronte)
4. Handmaid's Tale (Atwood)
5. The Weather Makers (Flannery)
6. Atlas Shrugged (Rand)
7. Weaveworld (Barker)
8. The Diviners (Lawrence)
9. A Bed of Red Flowers (Pazira)
10. Life of Pi (Martel)
11. Wuthering Heights (Bronte)
12. Ender's Game (Scott Card)
13. Jurassic Park (Crichton)
14. The Kite Runner (Hosseini)
15. A Christmas Carol (Dickens)

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Permalink Reply by Sarah Melamed on July 1, 2010 at 12:19pm

fun topic!

1.100 years of solitude
2. The Blue Mountian (Meir shalev)
3. Life of Pi
4. The Shadow of the Wind
5. Far from the Madding Crowd
6.The Mill on the Floss
7.The Red and the Black
8.Guns, Germs and Steel (Jared Diamond)
9.My Father's Paradise (Ariel Sabar)
10.Farenheight 451
11.The Poisonwood Bible
12.Couscous and other good food from Morocco (Wolfert)
13.The Giving Tree
14.Daisy Miller (Henry James)
15.Septembers of Shiraz

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Permalink Reply by Adrian Ruiz on July 6, 2010 at 9:53pm

Absolutely fun! My top favorite is listed and the rest in no particular order. Lucy Grealy was an absolute beauty in many ways in both her writing and struggle. Ann Patchett follows up Lucy's memoir wonderfully with Truth and Beauty. Tinkers; well.. that was something else.. guess I am not as cerebral as I thought ha! (but I read all 700+ pages of Einstein's life story!)

Autobiography of a Face
Truth and Beauty
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Gather Together in My Name
The Heart of a Woman
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas
Liar's Club
Cherry
As I Lay Dying
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
On Writing
Einstein
Dog House
Chosen by a Horse
Tinkers (Pulitzer Prize winner novella,, and I could barely get through all 4 chapters..)