The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
The Cosmic Trilogy by C.S. Lewis (made up of Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength)

I thought Shadowmancer was kind of decent, everything after that was terrible. Also, why do people insist writers need to be the next C. S. Lewis? Why can't they just be the first [insert their name here]?

Book Suggestions: Beyond the Western Sea, by Avi. It was published in two volumes, The Escape from Home and Lord Kirkle's Money. They follow the adventures of an Irish brother and sister immigrating to America, as well as the runaway son of an English lord and his disagreeable older brother. The same author also wrote The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, which is also a sea story about an American girl sailing from England, and involves a mutiny and a mad captain. It was a Newbery Honor.
Also seconding Howl's Moving Castle, as well as the sequel, Castle in the Air. They're hilarious!
Hope this helps.

Have you read Howl's Moving Castle yet? Because I'm getting close to finishing it now, and it's amazing.

Till We Have Faces is another great one, and it's by C.S. Lewis.

I'm not sure which books you've read, or what kind of genre you're looking for

I'm not really a genre person, I tend to look more at the book than the genre. If I like the book and agree with what it written there, then it doesn't really matter what genre it is. I do generally prefer Historical Fiction though, but thats only because I'm a die hard history fan.

Who's the author of 'Howl's Moving Castle'? The title sounds pretty cool
I remember there was a reading group on Till We Have Faces, I was thinking of getting it then, bu then it slipped my mind

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
The Cosmic Trilogy by C.S. Lewis (made up of Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength)

The Great Divorce I read and enjoyed it very much indeed
The Cosmic Trilogy, I completely forgot about those books, my friend was ranting and raving about how awesome they were and I made a mental note to read them, but then, me being myself, I completely forgot. Thanks for reminding me about them

Book Suggestions: Beyond the Western Sea, by Avi. It was published in two volumes, The Escape from Home and Lord Kirkle's Money. They follow the adventures of an Irish brother and sister immigrating to America, as well as the runaway son of an English lord and his disagreeable older brother. The same author also wrote The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, which is also a sea story about an American girl sailing from England, and involves a mutiny and a mad captain. It was a Newbery Honor.
Also seconding Howl's Moving Castle, as well as the sequel, Castle in the Air. They're hilarious! Hope this helps.

Thanks, those sound really interesting. Hopefully I'll be able to drag someone with me into town (not very easy in the summer) where there is a really large bookstore and they have books in different languages, English included, though of course I could always get the Russian translations, which I don't mind, provided they are translated well

This morning I finished The Hunger Games #3: Mockingjay. It was much better than Catching Fire, but not as good as The Hunger Games. The book dragged tremendously for the first 2/3rds (Collins could've easily written 2 novels, instead of 3), then finally kicked into gear. The last 3rd was exciting, exhausting, depressing and thought-provoking. Some major conflicts were glossed over/rushed, which seems a bit strange, since everything had been building up to those moments. The HG series is a cautionary tale revealing the futility of war.

I didn't find the ending disappoint or incredibly depressing. It was sad, yes, but there was a certain realism about how it ended.

Diana Wynne Jones is the author of Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Air. I'd also recommend another book of hers called Dogsbody, which is about the star Sirius who gets transformed into a dog. It was good, but the ending was kind of sad.

I have a question concerning Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. Do they have to be read in order? Or are they more like the Narnia books, where each one kind of stands on its own?

I was wondering because I just bought two at a thrift store. Problem is, they're the two last ones. I'm wondering if I should wait to read them until I get the three before it.

~Riella

Ithi, the Prydain books are a little more linear than the Narnia books, in that each one follows the other. That said, you could probably enjoy Taran Wanderer and The High King without having read the first three. I would recommend waiting until you have the first three, however, especially The Book of Three since that is where you meet everyone. I don't think the last two books will have as much impact if you haven't grown close to the characters.

What a fun list! I feel like I have not read anything now.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I think this list needs Picture of Dorian Gray added to it and The Little Princess and Caddie Woodlawn.

I agree that it's an imperfect list Ruby. For example, The Complete Works of Shakespeare!? Who has read every single one? I've read about 9, but that somehow still doesn't count. And LLW and CoN are both on there. I also can't believe that there's no Faulkner at all. It's also very British-biased. I've read 39. That's what an English major will get you, I guess. It's also a super white ethno-centric list. Toni Morrison should definitely be on there. According to this list, Spanish, Russian, Spanish, and French are the only languages worth reading. And Don Quijote should definitely be on there. I've read 39 of these though. That's what an English major will get you, I guess.

Since I was last in here, I graduated and went on an (almost) strict current fiction diet. I learned to enjoy recent fiction in college, but had little time to read it.

I started with Major Pettigrew's Last Stand which was provincial and English, but disappointing and forgettable. I did enjoy the perspective into an older person's life. Then the end was a bit off-putting. Not really recommended.
Then I moved on to Gaiman and Pratchett's Good Omens which was very humorous and clever, but rather irreverent. Very smart apocalyptic humor. If you like your apocalypses to be Biblically-accurate, then take a pass on this one.
Then I read Othello for the first time. It didn't really capture my mind the way I was hoping. I do love the gravity of it.
I also read Lev Grossman's The Magicians. It was surprisingly great, but lots of objectional material. Very, very smart but depressed guy who loves Narnia writes a story about a very, very smart and depressed guy who loves "Fillory" and ends up going to "Brakebills" (Hogwarts- but college). The added benefit of reading this was that Grossman writes as a book critic for Time and has lots of fun fantasy and book recommendations. We have very similar taste (He loves JSMN, Wodehouse, and Brideshead Revisited).

Then hit a very disappointing series of books. Geraldine Brooks' March was terrible (about Mr. March of Little Women fame). And now I'm reading Karen Russell's Swamplandia! and I'm bored. Very bored.

I am just over halfway through The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I think I have a copy of the original paperback version published in 1974. (Given to me to keep by a friend some years ago.) So it would be Volume 1 (of 3), parts 1 and 2 (of 7).

Definitely not light reading or for the faint of heart. But obviously an important work about the forced labor camps that existed in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956. Anybody could be arrested for anything or nothing at all during those dark times.

Conditions, treatment of prisoners, and sentences were harsh and if there were any trials they were pretty much a joke. If the powers that be had to turn and twist things or manufacture them, they would. And even if you had not done anything "you might have". So the fact that you could have done something was enough to find you guilty and sentence you.

The best way to sum it up to this point is that the poor Russian people went from the frying pan under the Tsar/Czar) into the fire under the Bolshevik party which was later renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Glad I was born where I was after reading what I have thus far.

I've been reading the Aubrey/Maturin series. Amazon had a sale on their kindle books. I am really loving the books. Granted I've only read two:
Master and Commander and Post Captain. I'm taking a small break before reading the third: HMS Surprise.

I just finished reading The Long Earth, a novel Terry Pratchett co-wrote with Stephen Baxter. It was disappointing to say the least. Honestly, I really question how much involvement in the writing Pratchett had since the book doesn't even feel like one of his novels. I've read non-Discworld Pratchett novels before, so I wasn't expecting Discworld set in a multiverse of alternate Earths, but there really was no trace of his signature style.

The premise of the novel, which is the development of technology that allows humans to travel from one alternate Earth to another and the effect that has on society, is an interesting one and the actual world-building is quite well done. The characters are fairly interesting as well, especially the quirky nuns and the female police officer. However there is almost no real plot to be had.

The novel skips from one vignette to another, relating scattered pieces of the various characters' lives in an utterly meandering fashion. It's actually difficult to discern what elements of the story take place in the present day and which are flashbacks due to the way in which the novel is written. There is an attempt at a conflict that is resolved in an utterly tepid manner and then a sudden abrupt crisis flung into the story within the last twenty pages that leads to an abrupt, anticlimactic ending. Almost nothing is resolved, questions are not answered, and the entire mess feels like half-finished notes and background material for a novella strung out into a 300+ page novel.

I think Pratchett had the basics for The Long Earth down before he started Discworld, so that could explain the huge difference in feel and style (I haven't read it, this just word on the street at work )

And now I'm reading Karen Russell's Swamplandia! and I'm bored. Very bored.

Sad! I was going to try that, it looked good.
Also, only read 23 books off that list posted above...I do find it rather random. Like, Enid Blyton is on there? I think she's a wonderful author, but I don't really think she's up there on a "must read" list with Jane Austen...not to mention the only ones on the list were her "faraway tree" books...which I havent even read. I think Famous Five was the most popular...