My Top Five Favorite Books from 06
January 17, 2007 | Filed Under activities
I didn’t mention this in my last post, but I finished “War and Peace” at about 11:15pm on New Year’s Eve. It was the one New Year’s resolutions that I actually kept. And this year I’ve resolved to not come up with resolutions. They are silly things.
As much as I enjoyed the experience of reading it (yes, Ashley, I did enjoy it,) “War and Peace” is not one of my favorite books from 2006. I managed to read several really entertaining and illuminating books this year, but “War and Peace” was neither illuminating nor generally entertaining. Here are my top five favorite books from 2006. I’ll give a quick summary of what the book is about, but I’m not going to bore everyone with reviews… that would take way too much effort. But I would love to hear what books everyone enjoyed last year.
- “1491” by Charles C. Mann – North and South America before Columbus. It’s an incredibly complex look at the people who were here before the Europeans
- “No god but God” by Reza Aslan – a well thought out and rational introduction to Islam.
- “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer – the fictional story of a boy who lost his father on September 11
- “Island in the Center of the World” by Russell Shorto – the Dutch founding of New Amsterdam. It’s part of my self taught New York history course.
- “Motherless Brooklyn” by Jonathan Lethem – a detective story with a tourettic narrator. What a great way for an author to use language to convey subtle meaning.
OK, your turn.
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Well, I haven’t read any “recent” books because my life revolves around children’s literature, but here are my favorite childrens literature (chapter) books I have read this year:
“Monster” -Walter Dean Myers
IT’s really good, I recommend it to ya. It is written in the perspective of the protagonist, who is in jail awaiting trial for murder, and in his perspective he is thinking about his life like it is a movie. So it is written like a script and it has camera angles and all other movie-type directions like “stage left” etc. It is definitely for upper middle or high scholers but its really great.
The Watsons go to Birmingham-Christopher Curtis
This is a hilarious story of a dynamic family set in 1963. Really, I laughed out loud. Then the story kind of takes a twist when the family drives down to Alabama to visit family and the youngest child ends up being a witness to the bombing of a church in Birmingham. it’s really really good and if you don’t read it then you’re missing out.
I was going to write more, but I am tired of doing lit reviews. READ THESE BOOKS! They’re CHEAP on AMAZON!
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand – Long on my list of to-dos, finally read this monster this past year. If you have communist leanings, you won’t enjoy this one.
The Beleaguered City, Shelby Foote – No one writes about the Civil War in such inspired fashion. Foote makes you feel like he was there (in this case, Vicksburg and the preceding campaigns).
The Silmarillion, Tolkein – Because I pretty much read something Rings-related every year.
Current: A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
I hear that The Silmarillion is rather dull because most of it is spent recounting lineages and introducing all of the different tribes, races, languages, etc.
But I really enjoyed Atlas Shrugged except where it opposed my communist leanings….
Yeah, if you’re looking for plot/story development, the Silmarillion is not for you. It’s a development of all the mythology hinted at in LOTR. The story of Beren and Luthien (the precursor to Arwen and Aragorn), the creation of the world (which is an AWESOME piece of writing), the story of Numenor, stuff like that.
Of course, I LOVE all that stuff.