Some Great Classics I Highly Recommend… and a few recent fiction releases…

I’ve read all of these books over the past few months and wanted to share my list of eclectic reads. I’ve delved back to the classics and found I rather enjoyed a lot of these stories. I won’t write reviews for each book, because Amazon has so many reviews for them already. I will tell you I loved The Stand, by Stephen King. It’s one of those books that I wish I could read over for the first time. I didn’t care for The Tommy Knockers. I loved Lonesome Dove, and read the other three in the series, but they weren’t quite as good. I loved The Thorn Birds. I did not like Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, but they were banned from some libraries and I wanted to know why. They were still worth reading for a peek into the times they were written. A Man Called Ove was humorous and sad, and I liked it a lot. I learned a lot about Russian culture and economics from the 19th C by reading Anna Karenina. Isaac’s Storm was like reading a weather report and bored me to tears, but it was for book club. Loved Tess of the D’Urbervilles, though not a happy story. I don’t think I finished The Comeback. The romcom just didn’t hold my interest. I liked Verity better than, It Ends with US. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was great. Wasn’t impressed by Amityville Horror, but now I can check it off the list. Fahrenheit 451 and The Fountainhead should be read by everyone, even if you don’t agree. I didn’t care for the Scarlet Letter, and frankly couldn’t understand why it was so raved about, but now I’ve read it.

All books are good, even if you don’t like what they have to say. They introduce you to new thoughts or old ideas, but they make your mind ponder right from wrong, what you might do if you had been the character, or if we, as a society, are headed in the same direction as the story depicted. I love reading, and I have been offended at times by the written word, but I would never ban a book or tell anyone not to read it. We all have different opinions, and we grow by assessing as much as we can from others and reflecting on our own values. My take on it all….Read more, argue less;)

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