List 1: ...that I like and recommend for everyone (alphabetical by title)
Airman, Eoin Colfer
“A monkey glances up and sees a banana, and that’s as far as he looks. A visionary looks up and sees the moon.”
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll
“‘The time has come’, the Walrus said,/ ‘To talk of many things:/ Of shoes--and ships--and sealing wax--/ Of cabbages--and Kings--/ And why the Sea is boiling hot--/ And whether pigs have wings.’” (TtLG)
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
“‘These’, he said gravely, ‘are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant.’”
The Chosen, Chaim Potok
“You can listen to silence, Reuven. I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.”
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis (esp. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; Prince Caspian; The Last Battle)
“Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” (LWW)
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“[I]f he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!”
Dune, Frank Herbert
“Mood? What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises--no matter the mood! Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It’s not for fighting.”
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
“From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose.”
The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that
self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
The Harry Potter series, JK Rowling (esp. The Sorcerer’s Stone (1), The Order of the Phoenix (5), The Half-Blood Prince (6), The Deathly Hallows (7))
“Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.” (CoS)
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
“What have I got in my pocket?”
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
Looking for Alaska, John Green
“That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom...I know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her.”
The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, T.S Eliot
“And would it have been worth it, after all,/ Would it have been worth while,/ After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,/ After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor--/ And this, and so much more?--”
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
The Princess Bride, William Goldman
“I’ve been saying it so long to you, you just wouldn’t listen. Every time you said ‘Farm Boy do this’ you thought I was answering ‘As you wish’, but that’s only because you were hearing wrong. ‘I love you’ was what it was, but you never heard.”
Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnette
“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done--then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.”
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
“What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.”
The Sherlock Holmes stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (esp. A Study in Scarlet, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Sign of Four, ‘The Final Problem’)
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” (The Sign of Four)
The works of William Shakespeare (esp. Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, King Lear,
Henry IV Part 1, A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
“In brief, since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it; and therefore never flout at me for what I have said against it; for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.” (Much Ado About Nothing)
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
“He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
“A proud heart can survive general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.”
A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
“Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
“They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions...but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
“After the torchlight red on sweaty faces/ After the frosty silence in the gardens/ After the agony in stony places/ The shouting and the crying/ Prison and palace and reverberation/ Of thunder of spring over distant mountains/ He who was living is now dead/ We who were living are now dying/ With a
little patience”
little patience”
List 2: ...that I like (and recommend for certain people/with reservations)
For more mature readers:
The Dark Tower series, Stephen King
A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin
For kids/young adults:
Airborn (et al), Kenneth Oppel *sci-fi/alternate history
Artemis Fowl series, Eoin Colfer *fantasy
The Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins *distopian/fantasy
The Infernal Devices series, Cassandra Clare *fantasy
Inkheart (et al), *fantasy
A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnette *appeals more to girls
The Mysterious Benedict Society *younger audiences
Percy Jackson series (et al), Rick Riordan *fantasy
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky *contains mature themes
Redwall series, Brian Jacques *fantasy
Special interest:
The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova *vampire lore, history
Hood (et al), Stephen R. Lawhead *history, Robin Hood mythology
