Lusting for Literature | Summer Break Reads Courtesy of Book Lust 101

Compiled by Joyce Hansen, MLIS

Has your self-imposed ban on leisure reading finally been lifted now that summer's here? Give your weary, weary brain a rest with these suggestions, bibliophiles. Thanks to Nancy Pearl's Book Lust 101 class, winter quarter, for this list of some of their all-time favorite books and writers, and use the comments section to add your own treasured must reads.

1. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
4. Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks
5. Upstate by Kalisha Buckhanon
6. The Bebb series (Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast, and Treasure Hunt) by Frederick Buechner
7. Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
8. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
9. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
10. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
11. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
12. Murder inMesopotamiaby Agatha Christie
13. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
14. The Girl I Left Behind by Shusaku Endo
15. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
16. Independence Day by Richard Ford
17. The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
19. Naked in Baghdad by Ann Garrels
20. Do the Windows Open? by Julie Hecht
21. The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer
22. Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
23. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz
24. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
25. A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana by Haven Kimmel
26. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
27. Biggest Elvis by P.F. Kluge
28. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
29. The Girls by Lori Lansen
30. Absolutely, Positively Not by David LaRochelle (YA)
31. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
32. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
33. Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
34. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
35. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
36. Beloved by Toni Morrison
37. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
38. Never in a Hurry:Essays on People and Places by Naomi Shihab Nye
39. The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience by Celeste Olalquiaga
40. The Loved One by Catherine Palmer
41. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
42. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
43. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
44. Empire Falls by Richard Russo
45. Educating Alice: Adventures of a Curious Woman by Alice Steinbach
46. The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
47. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: a Study in Terror and Healing by Michael T Taussig
48. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
49. Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain
50. Night by Elie Wiesel
51. I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolff
    

Anything by Walter Mosley
Anything by Alice Munro
Anything by Ruth Reichl
Anything by Nora Roberts
Anything by John Steinbeck
Anything by Anne Tyler
Anything by Eudora Welty
Anything by P.G. Wodehouse

Almost a book a week for a year here, iSchoolers. Lordy, I'm on cloud nine!

People say life is the thing, but I prefer reading. -- Logan Pearsall Smith

Book Junkie | iSuggestions for Books & Other Whatsis Along the Way

Greetings! I trust you're having a merry new year. To help muddle through whatever else winter may have in store for us here in the Pacific NW, I’d like to offer up a selection of books (& one DVD) that I enjoyed in 2006, and hope you have time to read one or two.

Escaping the Delta. Elijah Wald. This book will change the way you listen to the blues. Although a scholarly work, it reads like a novel. The core figure is Robert Johnson, yet he remains the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. If you had asked any of Johnson’s contemporaries about him, with the exception of the very few that lived in his small part of the Delta, your questions would be met with a resounding, “Who?” This book also has a lot of information on women in the blues.

Moby Dick. Herman Melville. This was my summer project. Whew! Everyone thinks they know that this book is about the obsessed sea captain and the white whale. It is, but out of 650 pages, only about 50 pages are spent on that story. Instead, you learn everything about whales and whaling. And the language! All told from the viewpoint of a 19^th century sailor who has read all of Shakespeare and is trying to write like the immortal bard himself. You keep turning pages just to see if Melville can keep it up. And he does.

Chronicles. Bob Dylan. Bob is sort of like Starbucks these days; he seems to be everywhere. I enjoyed this book. But then again, I like Bob. He seems to write from the persona of a really smart guy pretending to be a regular Joe pretending to be a really smart guy. Tiresome part: The “fame and fortune is such a drag” song and dance. If fortune and fame is a drag, then give all your money away and go bag groceries. I mean, look, Gary Coleman did, and he became governor of California. Didn’t he? This leads us to:

Masked and Anonymous. DVD. Written by Bob Dylan and Larry Charles (Seinfeld director). Directed by Larry Charles. I think this film, which made many critics' lists of worst movies of 2003, is really misunderstood! And not just because I like Bob. Instead of putting the story into the context of Dylan's songs, I think he was trying for the magic realism style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Like most of Garcia Marquez, it takes place in a mythical South American country. John Goodman, Luke Wilson, and Bob himself play a sort of holy trinity of Bobness. Plus Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange. What's not to like?

Of Love and Other Demons. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This novella or long short story is so achingly beautiful it doesn't need to be a page or a word longer. As in many of his stories, characters seem to shift through time, so that a character struck by lightning (literally), pops up later. Dreamlike.

Well, I'm off to cram in some leisure reading for "Book Lust 101." If I come across something racy or particularly adventuresome, I'll pass it along.

Cheers,

Joyce Hansen, MLIS
Editor Silverfish,'06-'07
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