Books+you+love

(( come ON, people, this part of the wiki's a great idea! join in! ))

Saul Williams: //Said the Shotgun to the Head// - (an amazing poet, and this is a brilliant text... //She// is equally awesome.) Chuck Klosterman: //IV// - (he's mostly known for essays on pop culture... high interest stuff.) Chuck Palahniuk: //Survivor// - (he writes some dark, dark stuff. read 'em all, like this one the most.) Salvador Plascencia: //People of Paper// - (experimental, surreal, gabriel garcia marquez type stuff. love it.) Rafi Zabor: //The Bear Comes Home// - (look it up on Amazon. strange premise, but a fascinating read.) Don DeLillo: //White Noise// - (i'm only 80% through at the moment, but it's a good read)
 * JOSH M DAUGHERTY**.......................

(i love books. don't we all?)

Carrie Gaffney Sue Monk Kidd: //Dance of the Dissident Daughter//

=Kelly Hannon =

//Surely, You're Joking, Mr. Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character// (Great physics stuff for non-science people!)
 * From Amazon.com: " A series of anecdotes shouldn't by rights add up to an autobiography, but that's just one of the many pieces of received wisdom that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918-88) cheerfully ignores in his engagingly eccentric book, a bestseller ever since its initial publication in 1985. Fiercely independent (read the chapter entitled "Judging Books by Their Covers"), intolerant of stupidity even when it comes packaged as high intellectualism (check out "Is Electricity Fire?"), unafraid to offend (see "You Just //Ask// Them?"), Feynman informs by entertaining. It's possible to enjoy //Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman// simply as a bunch of hilarious yarns with the smart-alecky author as know-it-all hero. At some point, however, attentive readers realize that underneath all the merriment simmers a running commentary on what constitutes authentic knowledge: learning by understanding, not by rote; refusal to give up on seemingly insoluble problems; and total disrespect for fancy ideas that have no grounding in the real world. Feynman himself had all these qualities in spades, and they come through with vigor and verve in his no-bull prose. No wonder his students--and readers around the world--adored him."

//The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman//
 * From Amazon.com: " Why do we do science? Beyond altruistic and self-aggrandizing motivations, many of our best scientists work long hours seeking the electric thrill that comes only from learning something that nobody knew before. //The Pleasure of Finding Things Out//, a collection of previously unpublished or difficult-to-find short works by maverick physicist Richard Feynman, takes its title from his own answer. From TV interview transcripts to his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, we see his quick, sharp wit, his devotion to his work, and his unwillingness to bow to social pressure or convention. It's no wonder he was only grudgingly admired by the establishment during his lifetime--read his "Minority Report to the Space Shuttle //Challenger// Inquiry" to see him blowing off political considerations as impediments to finding the truth."

//Life of Pi// // by Yann Martel // - //Interpreter of Maladies// // by Jhumpa Lahiri (short stories... she also wrote The Namesake ) //
 * From Amazon.com: " a magical reading experience, an endless blue expanse of storytelling about adventure, survival, and ultimately, faith. The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting 'religions the way a dog attracts fleas.' Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker..."
 * From Publishers Weekly: "The rituals of traditional Indian domesticity (curry-making, hair-vermilioning) both buttress the characters of Lahiri's elegant first collection and mark the measure of these fragile people's dissolution. Frequently finding themselves in Cambridge, Mass., or similar but unnamed Eastern seaboard university towns, Lahiri's characters suffer on an intimate level the dislocation and disruption brought on by India's tumultuous political history..."

//The Glass House: A Memoir// by Jeannette Walls
 * From Amazon.com: "In //The Glass Castle//, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity) that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar..."

//Jesus Land: A Memoir// by Julia Scheeres
 * From Publishers Weekly: " Journalist Scheeres offers a frank and compelling portrait of growing up as a white girl with two adopted black brothers in 1970s rural Indiana, and of her later stay with one of them at a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. The book takes its title from a homemade sign that Scheeres and the brother closest to her in age and temperament, David, spot one day on a road in the Hoosier countryside, proclaiming, 'This here is: JESUS LAND.' And while religion is omnipresent both at their school and in the home of their devout parents, the two rarely find themselves the beneficiaries of anything resembling Christian love..."

//A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail// // by Bill Bryson //
 * From Amazon.com: " The Appalachian Trail trail stretches from Georgia to Maine and covers some of the most breathtaking terrain in America–majestic mountains, silent forests, sparking lakes. If you’re going to take a hike, it’s probably the place to go. And Bill Bryson is surely the most entertaing guide you’ll find. He introduces us to the history and ecology of the trail and to some of the other hardy (or just foolhardy) folks he meets along the way–and a couple of bears. Already a classic, //A Walk in the Woods// will make you long for the great outdoors (or at least a comfortable chair to sit and read in)."

- anything David Sedaris! - anything Kurt Vonnegut!