Books!

Books! My all-time favorite subject. The lovely Molly had a meme about books and very nicely agreed to let me steal it. So here goes:

The Five Most Recent Books I've Read:
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro
Patriots, James Wesley, Rawles (Don't ask- I read it as a favor to my husband. It was terrible. The author has a comma in his name, for Christ's sake. What more do you need to know?)
She's Not There, Jennifer Finney Boylan - Don't even get me started. It's about a man who gets married and has two children and then decides that he must pursue the knowledge he's had all his life that he should have been a woman. It's heartwrenching to imagine what his poor family went through.
The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls - I want to find someone else who has read this just so I can say that I'm gonna do something "Rex Walls-style".
Puppet, Joy Fielding

Five Books I Could Read Over and Over:
Babyville, Jane Green
Empire Falls, Richard Russo
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
Good in Bed, Jennifer Weiner

Five Books That Blew My Mind and Would Be On My Syllabus If I Were a Teacher:
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Peace Like a River, Leif Enger
Bel Canto, Anne Patchett
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

Five Authors With Whom I Would Like to Have Drinks:
Tom Robbins
Chuck Palahniuk
Richard Russo
Jennifer Weiner
Jodi Picoult

Five Books That Make Me Want to Have Kids Just For The Books:
The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Anne of Green Gables series, L.M Mongomery
The Chronicles of Narnia series, C.S. Lewis
Pat the Bunny, Dorothy Kunhardt

Five Non-Fiction Books I Am Evangelical About and Demand Everyone Read:
Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt
The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout - well, I don't demand everyone read it, just everyone who asks why I don't speak to my mother
And that's all I can think of....guess I don't read much non-fiction.

Five Books the Rest of the World Loved and I Sort of Hated:
Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin - but that was only because of my reading teacher. If I had read it on my own, I would have loved it.

Five Books I Just Could Not Finish, No Matter What:
Anna Kareninina, Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamozov, Dostoevsky
The Prince, Machiavelli
Cathch 22, Joseph Heller
Atonement, Ian McEwan

Five Books That I Am In Awe Of and Are Pretty Much Perfect Pieces of Writing:
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
Bel Canto, Anne Patchett
Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon
Peace Like a River, Leif Enger

Five Books That Make Me Weep Buckets:
The Year Without Michael, Susan Beth Pfeffer
Bridge to Terrabithia, Katherine Patterson
Tiger Eyes, Judy Blume
Bridges of Madison County, Robert James Waller
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving

Five Books Set in Africa That I Love:
Hmmmm...I think the only two books even partly set in Africa that I have read are The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and The Diamond Lane by Karen Karbo and I kind of hated both of them.

Five Things That Turn Me Off of a Book, However Unfair:
Unlikeable characters
Animals as main characters
Narrators with autism
Science fiction
Too many/ too detailed supernatural occurances

Five Things I am a Sucker For in a Book:
Strong female protaganists
Bad family relationships
Children
Strong male characters
Irreverent old people