Recommended Books and Authors

I love reading and learning on my own - much better than I ever did in school, in fact, where sometimes even the best books were hindered by dislike for the teacher who made me read them.  Here are books and authors I recommend.  The books are largely fiction, but some non-fiction as well.  The authors, sadly, are almost all fiction.  This reflects my reading habits.  They are (somewhat deliberately) listed in no particular order, except for the order I noticed them on my book shelves as I compiled this list.  Neither list is comprehensive, but they're good starting points.

Recommended Books

• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards
  This book teaches you to draw with a series of exercises and explains why most people in western culture stop drawing at about age 10.

• Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austin
  Possibly Austen's best work.  I recommend not reading it until you're in college at least.  I would not have understood, or even noticed, the type of humor it has if I had read it in high school.  (Mind you, you can try if you want.  If you don't like it, try reading it about 5 years later).

• What Color is Your Parachute - Richard Nelson Bolles
  This book helps you decide what it is you want to do and what you're good at.

• Beauty - Robin McKinley
  McKinley's first novel and first retelling of Beauty and the Beast.  The title also describes the lyrical prose of the book.

• Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones
  A fun romp, just like all of DWJ's books.

• A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens   
  No movie does justice to the light humor of this book.  Forget every adaptation you've ever seen, and read the book.

• Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery
  This book, and the series that follow it, may well be responsible for the change in attitude towards red hair, which used to be looked down upon and even despised.

• The Lady - Anne McCaffrey  
  Read this only if you love horses.  Otherwise, try Dragonsong, Dragonflight, or Crystal Singer.

• A Wrinkle in Time - Madeline L'Engle
  ....just read it, ok?

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
  James Joyce's (semi-?)autobiographical tale.  The narrator believes he has killed someone (he hasn't) and feels "destined" to break all of the ten commandments.  Unfortunately, he doesn't know what all of them mean.  I particularly love the scene of him "coveting his neighbor's wife".  How can he help it if she's 80 and he's pre-teen?

• The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien
  A very, very odd tale.  Remember while reading it that it was written just as atomic theory was being developed.  To most people, atoms were not logically possible.

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell
  This is one of the books that helped to shape the first Star Wars series.  George Lucas not only read with the book, he consulted with Campbell to find out what made heroes heroic.

• Hand Knitting Techniques - from Threads Magazine
  This is the best knitting book I've found.  Instead of giving specific patterns, it teaches the theory behind constructing your own patterns, and teaches the basic stitches you need.

• The Complete Stitch Encycolopedia - Jan Eaton
  This is a wonderful book to own if you do embroidery.  It gives ideas and teaches you more stitches than you probably dreamed existed.

• The House of the Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
  This is about as spooky a book as I like to read, ending with three pages of fluffy romance which I can only imagine the publisher insisted upon.

• The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
  A chilling tale that makes one re-think how we casually treat historical figures when discussing their lives.

• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis
  It is said that J. R. R. Tolkien converted C. S. Lewis to Christianity.  It is said that Tolkien always regretted it.  When I was young, it took me until the last book in the series to be absolutely certain that the Christian parallels were deliberate.

• Lords and Ladies - Terry Pratchett
  Terry Pratchett is a very subtle author.  His books are written on at least two levels - on one, it's a light and funny story.  On the other, it is a deep look at people and society.  I like all of his books.  I chose this one because of the theme of people only having confidence in themselves if they think someone else is in charge, and because of the tracing of the development of words like "terrific".  Elves are terrific.

• The Cartoon History of the Universe - Larry Gonick
  A fun way to learn about history in this very well researched high-level view history.  With pictures!

• Entrevistas: An Introduction to Language and Culture - Davis, Siskin & Ramos
  This is the very fine textbook used in the Spanish classes I took for fun.  There is a textbook, a workbook, a CD Rom and CDs with listening exercises.  This way, you get to hear how Spanish is spoken by native speakers all over the world.  One correction: a busy street is un calle transitada, not traficada.  That's something quite different.

• Grania - Morgan Llewelyn
  This book and Shaun Davey's Granuaile suite are what inspired me to write my honor's thesis on the use of Granuaile (Grace O'Malley) in literature throughout the centuries.

• Granuaile - Anne Chambers
  Here's the book I used as a source for the historical data about Gania Ni Maille (don't you love the non-standardized spellings of the 16th century?)

• Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
  Watch the BBC six episode miniseries of Pride and Prejudice.  Watch the movie Bridget Jones' Diary.  Then READ Bridget Jones' Diary.  Both movie and book have their fine points.  However, the character in the movie is an idiot, and the one in the book is not.  If you read the book first, you'll miss the good bits of the movie.  If you don't watch P&P, you won't get a lot of the jokes in both the movie and the book.  The casting of the movie was brilliant.  The man who played Darcy plays Darcy.  The man who played the villainous sweetheart in Sense & Sensibility (another Austin novel) plays the villain boyfriend in BJD.

• Long Hot Summoning - Tanya Huff
  Note that I haven't read this book yet, though I've enjoyed the other two books in the series.  However, I do make a cameo appearance on pgs 329-331, a thank you from the author for jump starting her truck at the end of a science fiction convention.

Recommended Authors

• Jane Austen
• Terry Pratchett
• Robin McKinley
• Diana Wynne Jones
• Anne McCaffrey
• Guy Gavriel Kay
• Raymond Feist
• Katherine Kurtz
• Patricia C. Wrede
• Robert Frost
• Ogden Nash
• WB Yeats
• Jim Borgman
• Madeline L'Engle
• L. M. Montgomery
• Nathaniel Hawthorne

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