A blogger I follow requested recommendations of books to read for her reading challenges. She has a lot of categories to fill, so I decided to do a post instead of a way-too-long comment.
Note: I only included books that I've read and gave 4 stars or higher to on Goodreads.
2. True Crime
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt
Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing But the Truth - Tim McLoughlin (editor)
5. Nordic Noir
The Man Who Smiled - Henning Mankell
Faceless Killers - Henning Mankell
6. Novel based on a real person:
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Junky - William S. Burroughs
8. Time of Day in the Title
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt
Long Midnight of Barney Thomson - Douglas Lindsay
Blue of Noon - Georges Bataille
9. Villain or anti-hero:
Darkly Dreaming Dexter - Jeff Lindsay
The Collector - John Fowles
The Talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
My Friend Dahmer - Derf Backderf
13. Play
Six Degrees of Separation - John Guare
Copenhagen - Michael Hayn
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Macbeth - Shakespeare
14. By an author of a different ethnicity (the requester is white)
The Man in My Basement - Walter Mosley
Grace Notes - Rita Dove
American Smooth - Rita Dove
There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyonce - Morgan Parker
Scandal - Shusaku Endo
69 - Ryu Murakami
15. Feminism
Final Girl - Daphne Gottlieb
A Working Girl Can't Win - Deborah Garrison
27. Set on a different planet:
Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina - Kevin Anderson (editor)
Tales from Jabba's Palace - Kevin Anderson (editor)
3. Classic of Genre Fiction
The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler
A Coffin for Dimitrios - Eric Ambler
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold - John Le Carre
7. Western
Hombre - Elmore Leonard
12. Celebrity Memoir
A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway
15. A one-sitting book:
Last Chapter and Worse - Gary Larson
18. Graphic novel not published by DC, Marvel, or Image:
Tamara Drewe - Posy Simmonds
Cairo - - G. Willow Wilson
The Fate of the Artist - Eddie Campbell
Thank you! I’ve read some of these, but I’ll look up the ones I haven’t. I also Tweeted a link to your post because there are a lot of people looking for books to fit the challenge prompts. This might help them.
ReplyDeleteAj @ Read All The Things!
I'd recommend Ursula K. Le Guin for "set on another planet" as well. Left Hand of Darkness being my favorite, but in a whole group of novels she wrote, the Haimish Cycle.
ReplyDeleteI recognize Le Guin as a big name, but all I've read from her is a poetry collection.
DeleteThe Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury, would have been an obvious pick, but I read it a long time ago and don't remember it as 4-star worthy.
Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape would qualify, but I only gave it 3 stars. I remember it as 3 1/2 though. So if you're feeling bold...
Dropped over from AJ—and I see that Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil made a couple of categories. I read that 20 years ago or so when I had no idea I’d be living on an island SE of Savannah. I need to reread it for people are always talking about “the Book”. For true crime, I’d recommend Erik Larson’s “The Devil in the White City”
ReplyDeleteYeah. I tend to give a lot of books 3 1/2. So by restricting this list to 4 stars or better, I bumped a lot of candidates. Midnight fit a couple categories that were kind of sparse.
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