OMG! 20th Post!

Not really a highlight but it's all good.

Someone asked that I post my recommendations up. So, here they are, without my descriptions or reasons for why. :) Next post might have them!

• Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose
• Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
• Coin Locker Babies, Ryu Murakami
• American Gods, Neil Gaiman
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami
• Suppli, Mari Okazaki
• What Dreams May Come, Richard Matheson
• Atonement, Ian McEwan
• Unabridged fairy tales, Hans Christen Andersen
• Ramayana

Sorry about the fairy tales, but there's one version of it with these beautiful pictures. It'd be an oversized book at a bookstore. Personally, I read this when I was much younger and took it out again for one more read from the Fort Hamilton Brooklyn Public Library Branch, before moving from Bay Ridge to Bensonhurst. I don't think I'll ever forget it.

Been a month and all I have is a list

I'm serious about this list. It's a big list.

I'm in the middle of cleaning my living space, and lo and behold, I come across papers of some importance. But, before I chuck all of these papers that were on the left side of my desk, I'm typing up the book titles that I have highlighted on them. The deal with these papers is that they were from classmates in a fiction writing class I took last year. They contain book recommendations that our professor said we should bring in on the last day of our class. I looked at them again just about an hour ago and decided I should write down the highlighted ones for my own future reference. Hey, you can use them, too. If you have a review of the stories behind the titles, please feel free to comment. I'd be more than glad to see opinions from you.

• Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz
• Geek Love, Katharine Dunn
• Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
• Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews, & Manifestos, Anne Waldman
• Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
• The Writing Class or anything else, Jincey Willett
• A Colour Out of Space, H.P. Lovecraft
• No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July
• House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski (This has been recommended to me by those outside of the class.)
• I Capture the Castle, Dodi Smith
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
• The Stranger, Albert Camus
• The Trial, Franz Kafka
• Dune, Frank Herbert
• The Godfather, Mario Puzo
• A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews
• All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
• The Mystery Guest, Gregoire Bouillier
• The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
• Ham on Rye, Charles Bukowski
• The Complete Poems of Edgar Allen Poe (Really, do I have to put an author?)
• Hazmat, J.D. McClatchy
• Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer
• The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
• A Spot of Bother, Mark Haddon
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon
• This Way for the Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen, Tadeusz Borowoski
• Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
• Factotum, Charles Bukowski
• Women, Charles Bukowski
• Fortress of Solitude, Jonathen Lethem
• American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
• Less than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis
• The Cold Six Thousand, James Ellroy
• American Tabloid, James Ellroy
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
• Tenderness, Robert Cormier
• Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson
• Drown, Junot Díaz
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
• The Friends, Rosa Guy
• The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
• Love Medicine, Louis Edrich
• Anthem, Ayn Rand
• Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee
• I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg
• Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
• The Liars' Club: A Memoir, Mary Karr
• The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (Though I think my brother hates this book? What? Maybe I have that information completely wrong?)
• Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
• The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
• Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse
• The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
• The Girl Who Owned a City, O. T. Nelson
• The House at Riverton, Kate Morton
• The Art of Fiction, John Gardner
• Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Tom Berendt
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond
• Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hoffstadter
• Ishmael, Daniel Quinn
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
• Sherlock Holmes, Assorted short stories, Arthur Conan Doyle
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
• At the Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft
• Salem's Lot, Stephen King
• Good Omens, Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
• The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers
• The Road, McCarthy
• 1984, Orwell
• Various Novels by Sarah Waters
• The Passion, Jeanette Winterson
• Native Son, Wright
• To the Lighthouse, Woolf
• Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison
• Desperate Characters, Fox
• The Price of Salt, Highsmith
• Song of Solomon, Morrison
• Othello, Shakespeare
• The Color Purple, Walker
• The Age of Innocence, Wharton

Really, back to cleaning now.