<p>Any suggestions? Figured I won’t have time to read for leisure in the next 6ish months so I better start building a reading list.</p>
<p>Are you thinking in terms of light reading? Or filling in with classics? Or the best of each genre? I could make you a million reading lists!</p>
<p>For an overview of human history and pre-history, which actually is kind of handy to know about, * Guns, Germs and Steel *. It’s surprisingly readable.</p>
<p>If you are looking for classic novels, here are some 19th and early 20th century novels/ novellas that I think are very enjoyable. You’ve probably already read some of these:</p>
<p>Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice;
Emma</p>
<p>Charlotte Bronte,
Jane Eyre</p>
<p>Emily Bronte,
Wuthering Heights</p>
<p>George Eliot,
Middlemarch</p>
<p>Charles Dickens,
Great Expectations
Bleak House
David Copperfield</p>
<p>William Thackeray
Vanity Fair</p>
<p>Honore Balzac
Old Goriot</p>
<p>Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary
Sentimental Education</p>
<p>Anthony Trollope
The Way We Live Now</p>
<p>Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone
Woman in White</p>
<p>Henry James
Portrait of A Lady
Turn of the Screw
Aspern Papers</p>
<p>Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina</p>
<p>Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes From Underground
Crime and Punishment</p>
<p>Ivan Turgenev
First Love</p>
<p>Oscar Wilde
Picture of Dorian Gray</p>
<p>Edith Wharton
Age of Innocence
House of Mirth</p>
<p>James Joyce
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses (if you are up for a challenge)</p>
<p>Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse</p>
<p>Thomas Mann
Death in Venice</p>
<p>Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D’Ubervilles</p>
<p>This is a very Eurocentric list; I could give suggestions from other parts of the world if you’d like. I could make lists like this all day long; let us know what you are particularly interested in and we can provide suggestions.</p>
<p>I don’t think you will have much time for leisure reading in college - keeping up with reading for classes will be more important - I do recommend this book for any kid entering college:</p>
<p>The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter–And How to Make the Most of Them Now by Meg Jay </p>
<p>Read it over the summer before you start to get perspective on the coming years</p>
<p>I recommend a lot of fantasy and science fiction- I even took an upper level lit course in it (P/F) so I’d have an excuse to read the genre. Just go to your local public library and check out books that appeal to you. Some intriguing titles can be found on the new book shelf and in the stacks- nonfiction as well as fiction. This comes from two different states.</p>
<p>So I’m going to make a few lists…</p>
<p>Fun to read classics:
Jane Austen (Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice are my favorites), Bronte-Jane Eyre, George Elliot- Middlemarch, F.Scott Fitzgerald-This Side of Paradise, Edith Wharton-Age of Innocence,</p>
<p>Classic Sci Fi: Asimov - Foundation Trilogy and I Robot, Ursula LeGuin - Left Hand of Darkness, Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land, Herbert - Dune, </p>
<p>and not yet classic, but I love them Lois M. Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan books, Elizabeth Moon - Speed of the Dark</p>
<p>Classic Fantasy - CS Lewis - Narnia, Tolkein - Lord of the Rings, Peter S. Beagle -The Last Unicorn, Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising books, Diana Wynne Jones - Chrestmanci books and the Dalemark quartet</p>
<p>Children’s books you should read if you missed them: Grahame - The Wind in the Willows, Arthur Ransome - The Swallows and Amazons, Wilder - The Little House Books, Alcott - Little Women and Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. Gene Stratton-Porter - The Girl of the Limberlost, Jean Webster - Daddy-long-legs, Noel Streatfield - Ballet Shoes</p>
<p>Autobiographies; Boy and Solo - Roald Dahl, Vera Britain - Testament of Youth, Feynman - Surely you’re Joking Mr. Feynman</p>
<p>Fun science essays: Oliver Sacks -The Man Who mistook his wife for a hat, Lewis Thomas - Lives of the Cell, Stephen J Gould - The Panda’s Thumb</p>
<p>Books by non-Western writers that I’ve actually enjoyed: Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner, Isabelle Allende - House of the Spirits, Danticat - Claire of the Sea Light</p>
<p>How about the books and other readings that s/he has for the courses that s/he is taking?</p>
<p>I was thinking these would be books to read before school starts. One could get a jump on next semester’s reading if you have the reading lists, but I think this game is more fun.</p>
<p>here’s Wikipedia’s list of the best books of all time. You can quibble over some of the choices, but overall, i think it’s a great list <a href=“List of top book lists - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_Best_Books_of_All_Time</a></p>
<p>^Pippi Longstocking as the only kids’ book on a book of 100 best books? That seems out in left field, but that’s a nice list of things otherwise with lots of International choices.</p>
<p>The 100 best books since the start of TIME magazine (i.e 1923 or more recent) is a fun list to tackle: <a href=“Full List | All-TIME 100 Novels | TIME.com”>| All-TIME 100 Novels | TIME.com; (for fiction)
and <a href=“'The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas' by Gertrude Stein | All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books | TIME.com”>http://entertainment.time.com/2011/08/30/all-time-100-best-nonfiction-books/</a> (non-ficiton) The non-fiction list is a very uh… interesting collection!</p>
<p>How about some novels about college, academics, or college-like education?</p>
<p>Rabelais, Gargantua
Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot
Gustave Flaubert, A Sentimental Education
Owen Johnson, Stover at Yale
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Mary McCarthy, The Group (or any of its dozens of imitators)
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
Mario Vargas Llosa, Conversation in “The Cathedral” (or Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, or The Storyteller . . . Vargas Llosa has mined his college years quite a bit)
A.S. Byatt, Possession
Philip Roth, The Human Stain (or The Ghostwriter, or Goodbye Columbus – see Vargas Llosa, above)
David Lodge, Changing Places (or Nice Work)
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Dai Sije, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Lev Grossman, The Magicians
Javier Marias, All Souls
Rebecca Goldstein, 39 Arguments for the Existence of God
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah</p>
<p>I like to read banned books.
:x
One of my favorites is A Wrinkle in Time.
<a href=“http://www.fortheloveofwords.net/banned-books-week-a-wrinkle-in-time-the-time-quintet-1-by-madeleine-lengle/”>http://www.fortheloveofwords.net/banned-books-week-a-wrinkle-in-time-the-time-quintet-1-by-madeleine-lengle/</a></p>
<p>If I was starting college in the fall, I think I might reread my childhood favorites.
Some of my girls favorites were the Wren to the rescue series & Tamora Pierce.
<a href=“http://www.sherwoodsmith.net/WrensWorld/WrensWorld.html”>http://www.sherwoodsmith.net/WrensWorld/WrensWorld.html</a>
<a href=“http://tamorapierce.com/books.html”>http://tamorapierce.com/books.html</a></p>
<p>I also like graphic novels.
They arent comic books, ;), the art actually adds a great deal to the story.
( another banned book)
<a href=“Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi | Goodreads”>http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9516.Persepolis</a></p>
<p>I second kiddie’s suggestion:
The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter–And How to Make the Most of Them Now by Meg Jay</p>
<p>I heard an interview with the author and then read the book. I immediately forwarded it on to my twenty-something son and wished I (and he) had read it BEFORE college. I’ve also recommended it to my twenty-something daughter as well.</p>
<p>The other reading recommendations are wonderful, but THIS book is practical and highly relevant to these kids. The difficulty is that many of them probably just won’t realize it :)</p>