[pink1e]

So I'm going to be horribly bored for my 1 month long winter break. I really want to read something interesting and not anything that's just rubbish fiction. I've read too many fiction novels that would never help me in college or in life. So what do you all recommend?

One of the books that I liked best was Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I often use this books in my exam essays.
Another would be One Hundred Years of Solitude (i forgot who the author was)


Some books I'm planning on reading:
1984
Brave New World
The Giver


I know 1984 and the giver are HS material but i never got the chance to read them. i have a couple of others that i bought but forgot what ^-^'
P.S. - I like books that I can use for essays and such.

[Tamago86]

Of Mice and Men
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Great Gatsby
The Catcher in the Rye

the classics basically

[missmayleecha]

The Country Under My Skin by Gioconda Belli, I'm reading that right now and it's pretty good.

--edit--

This book is about Gioconda and her involvement in the Sandinista movement.

btw, this is an autobiography.
However, I do recommend you this book even if you're not into autobiography.

[BloodPrincessShiroto]

If your into japanese history or even books that talk about japan, samurai ect. I recommend the last samurai (I don't know the author) and Shogun by James Clavell.

[pink1e]

Of Mice and Men
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Great Gatsby
The Catcher in the Rye
the classics basically

I read all those except "Of Mice and Men" but thanks for suggesting!

The Country Under My Skin by Gioconda Belli, I'm reading that right now and it's pretty good.

can you give me a little summary? ^-^

If your into japanese history or even books that talk about japan, samurai ect. I recommend the last samurai (I don't know the author) and Shogun by James Clavell.

can you give me a little summary too? ^-^

[Elysia]

I dunno if a lot of those are "college level", lol - I read The Giver, To Kill A Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby in 8th grade for school... they were all pretty good though =]

1984 was pretty good - try Wuthering Heights (Charlotte Bronte), Crime and Punishment, Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness, Beloved, Mrs. Dalloway, Pride and Prejudice... etc.

[chibi_chibi]

Haven't read this but a friend suggested it.

"Colors of The Mountain" ~ Da Chen.

[untungl]

I recommend:
Memoirs of a Geisha, The Life of Pi, Dune, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

You can try the books Elysia recommended, but holy SHAM they're boring. Beloved is about a crazy woman who finds a kid that slowly kills her, Crime and Punishment is about a crazy guy who kills some lady and the whole book is about him growing even more insane, and Pride and Prejudice... hoo boy. Might as well toss in The Scarlett Letter too. It'll be a big enough pile to sleep on!

One book I read in a Humanities class that I didn't think was TOO bad was called 'Invisible Man'. It sucked, but I didn't want to kill myself halfway through.

I prefer to read those big thick sci-fi/fantasy books, for entertainment mostly, but I could probably easily write about some of them if I had to. If you want to give some of those a try, check out George R. R. Martin's 'Song of Ice and Fire' (series name), Lyda Morehouse's books, and Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series.
The first is more entertainment, but the second two have some pretty provocative ideas.

Good luck!

[ginger]

I LOVE Brave New World...awesome book.

Good works to reference in papers (these have helped me in my 4 years as an English major):

-Paradise Lost (seriously, my English department jokes that every question can be answered with this or "the rise of the middle class")
-David Copperfield
-Lolita
-Heart of Darkness
-Jane Eyre
-short stories by Poe
-A Portrait of a Lady
-Wuthering Heights
-Gulliver's Travels
-essays by Emerson and Thoreau
-Finnigan's Wake
-The Sound and the Fury
-Absalom, Absalom
-Anna Karenina
-Mrs. Dalloway
-Moby Dick
-"Leaves of Grass" poetry by Whitman
-Shakespeare plays (notably Hamlet, King Lear, Henry V, Midsummer's, Othello, All's Well, Julius Caesar, Richard II, The Tempest)

Yes, some of them are boring. But trust me--they are GREAT to reference in essays. When professors realize you are synthesizing the material and relating it to other works, they are really pleased.

-ginger

[sunshine4ever]

Try these books:

Burro Genius by Victor Villasenor
The Wedding by Dorothy West
In the Name of Salome by Julia Alvarez

I can recommend more, but for now, I think those are good.

[tuxed0sam]

Of Mice and Men
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Great Gatsby
The Catcher in the Rye
1984
Brave New World
The Giver

these books are generally read in junior high and high school. although i would say this is a good backbone to have in books read thus far in a college students life i would start reading books that are more college level based books. stay away from books that imply "educated in american school system" about you. i'm not saying don't read them....but as we get older its good to branch away from what we're taught and told to read in school and then use them in articles/reports.

You said hundred years of solitude...thats a great one.


Here's a list of book that were classified as the Hundred Greatest Books of All Time by a english newspaper.

on Quixole Miguel De Cervantes
Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan
Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
Tom Jones Henry Fielding
Clarissa Samuel Richardson
Tristram Shandy- Laurence Sterne
Dangerous Liasions. Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
Emma. Jane Austen
Frankenstein. Mary Shelley
Nightmare Abbey . Thomas Love Peacock
The Blakc Sheep. Honore De Balzac
The Charterhouse pf Parma. Stendhal
The Count of Monte Cristo. Alexandre Dumas
Sybil. Benjamin Disareli
David Copperfield. Chalres Dickens
WutheringHeights. Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte
Vanity Fair. Willaim Makepeace Thackeray
TheScarlett Letter. Nathanial Hawthorne.
MobyDick Herman Melville
Madame Bovary. Gustave Flaubert
The Woman in the White. Wilkie Collins
Alice's Adcentures in Wonderland. LewisCaroll.
Little WOmen. Louisa M. ALcott
The Way We Live Now. Anthony Trollpe.
Anna Karenina. Leo Tolstroy
Daniel Derona. George Elliot
Brother Karamaov. Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Portrait of A Lady. Henry James
Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain
Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Robert Louis STevenson
Three Men in a boat. jeromek jerome
the picture of dorian gray. oscar wilde
the diary of a nobody. george grossmith
jude the obscure. thomas hardy
the riddle ofthe sands. erskine childers
the call of the wild. jack london
nostromo. joseph conrad
the wind in the willows. kenneth grahame
in search of lost time. marcel proust
the rainbow. d.j. lawrence
the good soldier. ford madox ford
the thirty-nine steps. john buchan
ulysses. james joyce
mrs. dalloway. birginia woolf
a passage to india. em. forster
the great gatsby f scottfitzgerald.
the trail. granx kafka
men without women. ernest hemingway
journey to theend oft he night. louis-ferdinand celine
as i lay dying. william faulkner
brave new world. aldus huxley
scoop. evelyn waugh.
USA. john dos passos
the big sleep. raymond chandler.
the pursuit oflove. nancy mitford
the plague. albert camus
nineteeneghty four . george orwell.
malone dies. samjuel beckett
catcheri nthe rye. j.d. salinger
wide blood. flannery o'connor
charlotte's web. e b white
the lord of the rings. jrr tolkien
lucky hjim. kingsley amis
lord of theflies. william golding
the quiet american. graham greene
on the raod. jack kerouac
lolita. vladmir nobokov
the tin drum. gunter grass
things fall apart. chinua achebe
the primeof miss jean brodie. muriel spark
to kill a mockingbird. harper lee
catch-22 joseph heller
herzog. saul bellow
one hundredyears of solitude. gabriel garcia marquez
mrs. palgrey atthe claremont. elizabeth taylor
tinker tailor soldier spy. jon le carre
song of solomon. toni morrison
the bottle factory outing. beryl bainbridge
the executioner's song. norman amiler
if on a winter's night a traveller. italo calvino
a bend in the river. vs naipaul
waiting for the barbarians. hm coetzee
mousekeeping. marilynn robinson
lanark. alasdair gray
the new york trilogy. paul auster
the bfg.r roald dahl
the periodic table. a prose poem about the delights of chemistry
money. martin amis
an artist of the floating world. kazuo ishiguro
oscar and lucinda. peter carey
the book of laughter and forgetting. milan kundera
haroun and te sea of stories. salman rushdiie
la. confidential james elroy
wise children. angela carter
atonement. ian mcewan
northern lightrs. philip pullman
american pastorla. philip roth.
austerlitz. wg. sebald

now..i do realized that some of the books i labeled as highschool/junior high are in the list of 100...i am in no way saying that those books aren't great. i personally love all those books.


its become one of my life missions to read all those books.

[azzer]

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

Oh, and not fiction, but maybe read some Foucault... particularly Discipline and Punish. Panopticism has come up in completely different classes in all 3 years I've been at university.

[Andante]

There are some great suggestions above, a few others:

Old School, by Tobias Wolff
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder
The Beautiful and the Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (I risk contempt for this, but I like it so much better than Gatsby)

[losborrachos]

some of the books i've read in college that i actually liked:
candide - voltaire (fiction/comedy, also a social commentary on religion, my favorite piece of literature ever)
silence - shusaku endo (two missionaries in the early days of christianity in japan)
frankenstein - mary shelley (you know the story, gothic novel)
divine comedy - dante alighieri (renaissance, blends classical greek ideals with religion, like most people purgatorio was my favorite)
the three-cornered world - natsume soseki (it's about art, art, art... i loved it but i heard "i am a cat" and "botchan" are easier to swallow)
invisible cities - italo calvino (i haven't read "winter night" yet, but i liked this one... post-modernism, really short but interesting)
i'm not a big fan of non-fiction literature (or documentaries, for that matter), but i've enjoyed quite a bit of freud and nietzsche... not in one sitting, though, definitely...

[playtoe]

A light reading in philosophy, perhaps?

-- Machiavelli's "The Prince" which is about government/politics, maintaining power.

-- Plato's "Symposium" which is about love. Socrates goes to a drinking party, and 7 people, including Socrates, gives a speech on what love is.

They're both about 40-50 pages long, and both are available online.

[Tami]

The Count of Monte Cristo. Alexandre Dumas

candide - voltaire (fiction/comedy, also a social commentary on religion, my favorite piece of literature ever)

Very fun and interesting reads. The Count of Monte Cristo stands as my favorite novel. It's very engaging and fun.

Candide is very funny if you can handle the satire.

[brian032]

Non-fiction right? These will help out with general knowledge. So if you have time try these. If you want information I'll give you a little. Or you could look it up on Amazon.com. These are all excllent by the way.

The End of Faith by Sam Harris
Collapse by Jared Diamond
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
Fabrics of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

[pink1e]

thanks for all the suggestions!! i'll definately go through them all.



any other good plato books out there? i've heard so much about him in the past 2 years of my college life but i have yet to discover the books ToT

[itz_n_obsession]

I dont know if this helps or not but usually sparknotes.com is a site I use to help me out on some essay. Its great help especially with non-fiction novel that needs to be read and understand the deep meaning