I need book recommendations.

[bohemiangel]

I know I should do a proper update but being back at school has just turned my brain to mush and I'm not sure I could manage anything coherent right now. It's been intense to say the least for various reasons

Comments

[ladycatherina]

I loved to read as a teenager - I enjoyed Toni Morrison's Beloved and Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club, Hundred Secret Senses, etc. I also got into some of the classics - especially Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, which is a clever satire of soap opera-style romance novels of her day, and Jane eyre and Wuthering Heights. I enjoyed some very old works - the Odyssey and the Iliad, the language and poetry of long ago.

But then I'm a literary geek...not everyone would share my tastes. For modern teens I'd suggest you include some science fiction and clever fantasy. Gregory Maguire's fantasia on the Wizard of Oz, Wicked, is supposed to be very good...and many other people can recommend wonderful sci-fi or high fantasy books. Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale perhaps - that's a tale of a future society with a feminist bent. Also Asimov, the Lord of the Rings books, Dune, the Red, Blue, Green Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson are supposedly excellent. Science fiction often draws in people who wouldn't ordinarily read and can be literary if approached in the right way.

Khaled Khomeini's Kite Runner is phenomenal in the sense of being able to keep my interest, having well-drawn characters, suspense, pacing, action, historical and cultural detail along with themes of guilt and redemption, memory, pride in one's heritage, friendship and loyalty, etc. Highly structured as a Shakespeare play, but with so much suspense it's not noticeable.

If you include nonfiction there's Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything - a humorous look at what we know about different science fields and how we've discovered what we know in geology, nuclear particle physics, astronomy, etc. Not too technical but fun to read and I learned an awful lot.

Some people might like Tracy Chevalier and Susan Vreeland - fictionalized histories behind famous paintings. Vreeland's Passion of Artemisia is excellent, lovely, and heartwrenching.

Gary Paulsen's nature adventure books are also very good - tough minded descriptions of surviving out in the wild, nature is awesome and dangerous, not just pretty.

Are you still looking for recommendations? If you are, I have some very literary people friended to my journal. I could link to your post and they could leave comments here also.