Share a Favorite Novel

For our first topic, please share with the class a favorite novel that you've read.

My favorite novel has got to be J.D. Salinger's THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. Salinger's novel is timeless, with its incredible capability of showing the humor and beauty of a young boys "coming of age".
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adam

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man will always remind me of the importance of personal identity. Consider being of so little relevance that society has given you no name, and you can understand the story of the protagonist. Just having to follow the Invisible Man's hardships as he travels the country in search of himself will develop yourself as an individual, as well as illustrate many issues that continue to be troublesome in modern society.

Stephen King's Pet Sematary is still my all time favorite. King in a fun way explores the idea of whether resurrecting a loved one is worth it if he/she comes back harming everybody else.

My favorite book of all times is most likely To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper E Lee. This book basically changed my outlook of life when I first read it in 9th grade. I just loved how Lee brings the characters to life and once you start reading it, it is difficult to put it down. I often used to revolt aloud to every character's personality, when I was alone in my room reading it.

Holes by Luis Sahcar or whatever him name is. First book i had ever read front to back, i think 7th grade it was...so it sticks with me.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was most definately a book that took me for a spin. Great if you want to explore the basics of the San Francisco hippie drug era. Great writing by Tom Wolfe.

I like 'Practical Magic' and the movie was great too - i almost cried xD 'The Vampire Armand' - oh. my. god. Those sex scenes were ... Nice. Haha. But recently speaking - I'm in love with 'The Unwanted'.

The Dress Lodge, the book I mentioned in class, is not my favorite novel, but its story has stayed with me most impertinently, like a thorn in the back of my mind. As Mr. Kelso would say, not in a Skippy way, but in a new connotation that we learned in class today, it is a "naughty" book.

It's a story about a prostitute; you could only expect it to be that way. Before you shut your mind out like I almost did, you must at least make the effort to skip the face-blushing parts to get to the real deep emotional level this book will take you on. It doesn't have a happily ever after, and everything that you would hope would become alright, actually took a twist and turn at every page with no hope of redemption.

I would thoroughly discuss it, but I very much want you all to read it. It is set in a gothic/romantic England. It is about a prostitute who rents the nicest blue dress when she is out "working". She has a child, and meets this wonderful doctor who throughout the book is her only hope of redemption. The doctor's intentions are more towards the child than her... you have to read it to find out why.

It's a depressing story, but it's so well told that it has stayed with me through all my years and I cannot forget it no matter how I try. To this day each time I think of it, it tears at my heart uncomfortably at how it ended so memorably.


My favorite book would have to be The First King of Shannara, I absolutely loved the characters and the plot, and Terry Brooks takes me to a new world of fantasy that is just so delightful getting lost into. I always like to unwind at the end of a long day by sitting in my reading chair and reading a good work by Terry Brooks. His best work is The First King of Shannara.

If I really think about it though, I will now saw my favorite group is The Samurai's Garden. I just loved how Gail Tsukiyama developed the main character, Stephen, and the other supporting characters. The most interesting things of the book were the setting and the time period. This book hit me even harder than my other favorite book, To Kill A Mockingbird.

This may sounds kind of cheesey, but my favorite book is the Guardian by Nicholas Spark. Unlike the typical Sparks books, this one was full of suspense, symbolism, and companionship. Out of all of his books that I have read, this was definitely the book that stuck with me.

In class, this question was a hard one for me to answer because I love to read and it is hard for me to choose a favorite, so I went with S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. I chose this book because when I read it in the fifth grade, it made me want to read other books. I also really like Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities. I loved this book. I can still remember the grotesque murder of a governor in France and the people parading throughout the streets with his head on a pike. There are so many more, including books that we read in class. Last year's reading I thought was one of the best. I really enjoyed reading The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, There Eyes Were Watching God, all of them. I am really looking forward to this year as well, especially with this forum!

Canterbury Tales by Chaucer is more or less a collection of smaller tales composed together collectively but with distinct variation. I actually read it in my freshman year, and everybody in the class wrote his/her own individual and unique tale which was a good way to get to know people and understand more or Chaucer's style and idea.

One of my favorite novel is Flowers for Algernon. I love Daniel Keyes's unique writing style and how the language became more complex as Charlie's IQ started to increase after the experiment. It's such a sad book and it makes me feel grateful of having the sense of awareness that Charlie didn't.

I know I said White Oleander was my favorite in class but has anyone else read Kissing Doorknobs by Terry Spencer Hesser? It's about the development of OCD in a young teenage girl as she is dealing with adolesence and being forced to grow up. As she holds on tighter to her "rituals" and obsessive mannerisms, her friends and family are slowly forced to slip away.

I have a lot of favorite books. My top 5 would probably be The Notebook, The Great Gatsby, A Walk to Remeber, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Handmaid's Tale. Even though The Handmaid's Tale is a degrading book towards woman, I though it was really interesting and creative. I like how Margaret Atwood made the tone of the book dark and depressing, but gave the main character Offred a very witty and humorous attitude.

mar89 wrote:

I have a lot of favorite books. My top 5 would probably be The Notebook, The Great Gatsby, A Walk to Remeber, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Handmaid's Tale. Even though The Handmaid's Tale is a degrading book towards woman, I though it was really interesting and creative. I like how Margaret Atwood made the tone of the book dark and depressing, but gave the main character Offred a very witty and humorous attitude.

Atwood wants to startle her modern readers into a reconsideration of men's treatment of women. While the women in the novel are degraded, I wouldn't say it's a degrading book. Many find it rather uplifting--in a dark sort of way.

I'd have to say my favorite novel is Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. Anyone that had Ebel last year I'm sure knows about this book: basically a woman gives up her son to her psychiatrist, and the novel tells the story of the boy's life. It was unlike any other book I had every read, for Burroughs was not afraid to cross boundaries which other authors might be hesitant to cross. Plus, the fact that it is a memoir made it that much more fascinating. The sequel, Dry, is also very very good. The movie is coming out sometime this fall; I'm kind of worried that it won't do the book any justice.

So this summer I read The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Greggory and I was hooked! We all learned about King Henry VIII's many wives, including Anne Boleyn who was beheaded for adultery, but I never knew historical fiction could be so interesting to read. This book really makes you understand what Anne and her sister Mary (who also had an affair and children with the king) went through. It puts history into a new perspective - way different than the way most of us usually look at it. I highly recommend this book and historical fiction in general to anyone who wants to see the people of the past as real people and not just part of a boring subject in school.

My favorites would surely have to be The Great Gatsby, The Killer Angels, Rainbow Six, Clear and Present Danger, 1984, and Animal Farm. Orwell really appeals to me, though his writing frightens me in a way, as it portrays life as it would be under a Totalitarian regime, and as I see myself as a social and economic conservative, this idea strikes me as one that I would never want to experience. Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels is a novel which touched me in a way that ot many novels have. The emotion of this book, the way that it shows the feelings of the officers on both sides of the war affected me in a unique way. I felt a part of the battle of gettysburg, and it even brought me close to tears, as each side was fighting for ideals they held to be true in their hearts. Conversely, Tom Clacy's Rainbow Six and Clear and Present Danger simply struck me as action-packed novels that held me to every page. As a person who venerates the armed forces and the honor they embody, I saw these novels as ones I would simply have to read, even though they are, of course, works of fiction.

Don't exactly have a favorite, but if I had to choose I would say Because of Romek. For me, I like to be able to see what I'm reading, BCR was filled with more imagery then I had ever read in any past book.

However I don't do much reading so I'm sure there are works out there with more imagery.

I also thought the book was rad because I will make a fatty movie based off it and win an Oscar.

B

One of my favorite books is Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt. Its a really easy and quick read. It opened up a whole outlook on common sense and the world. The author is a statistician that uses his analytic skills to explore other areas in the real world. It is interesting to see how two seemingly irrelevant things can be so related.

Although I have more then one favorite book, the one that comes to mind is Lucky by Alice Sebold. It is a true story about a college student who gets raped and abused. Like Mr. Kelso said "it's an ironic title"... \the meaning behind the ironic title, is the survival of the victim.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck is my favorite book of all time. There are so many memorable characters with strong personalities. I loved the character of Cathy. She is a whore who shoots her husband and abandons her family. I loved how Adam becomes a stronger person and a better father later in the book. I loved Lee in this novel and how he almost took the kids as if they were his own. The contrast between the twins Caleb and Aron's personalities is very interesting. The most intense part of the book is when Caleb learns of the existence of his mother and confronts her.

As I said so briefly in class, my favorite book is The Forsyte Saga. It’s a collection of three novels describing the life of a upper middle-class family and how relationships falter and gain. Law mingles with the drama as well.

I first saw the miniseries and immediately became entranced with the story. Damian Lewis and Gina McKee played their role perfectly. Later when I saw the paperback, I couldn’t resist. The book hardly left my hands that day; it was excellent.

Another one that I cherish is a book that I don’t even know the name of. I read it awhile back in sixth grade. It had no cover art. What was there instead was a distinctive red covering. The story followed a boy who was escaping a camp in Germany [?] and he had a dog with him who when shot, sent me crying. It was a lovely read and maybe anyone of you knows the title. If so, that would be wonderful.