Books I Will Not Live Without
1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
3. Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos
4. Harry Potter & the Half Blood Prince (& etc.) by JK Rowling
5. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (& etc.) By CS Lewis
6. Anne of Green Gables (& etc.) by LM Montgomery
7. Fellowship of the Ring (& etc.) by JRR Tolkien
8. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
9. The Wellspring by Sharon Olds
10. Romeo & Juliet tied with A Midsummer Night’s Dream
I’m too embarrassed to actually add this to the above list, but I’ve inexplicably reread these
books a dozen or more times and have difficulty loaning them out (in case I want to read
them again): Twilight (& etc) by Stephenie Meyer
Charmers
1. Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos
2. Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen (her other book, The Sugar Queen is just o.k.)
3. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Armin
4. I Wish I Had Red Dress and What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl
Cleage (strong black female protagonists)
5. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
6. Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife by Linda Berdoll (more bodice-ripper than charmer)
7. Amalee by Dar Williams
8. A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel
9. Why I’m Like This by Cynthia Kaplan (especially “A Dog Loves a Bone”)
10. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Charmers I fully expect to be charmed by but haven’t read yet
1. Olive Kitteredge by Elizabeth Strout
2. Your Roots are Showing by Elise Chidley
3. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson
This summer I’ve really enjoyed
1. Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
2. Female Chauvinist Pigs Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy
3. The Red Leather Diary by Lily Koppel
Non Fiction that’s Changed My Life
1. Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 and Animal,
Vegetable, Miracle* by Barbara Kingsolver
2. Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Zoe Francios and Jeff Hertzberg
3. Kids are Worth It by Barbara Coloroso
4. Playful Parenting by Lawrence J. Cohen
5. The Food Revolution by John Robbins (another embarrassing title; he writes with more
exclamation marks than content, but it did its job for both David and I as we have been
committed vegetarians since)
6. Loving Across the Color Line by Sharon Rush
7. There Is No Me Without You by Melissa Faye Green
8. Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace by Jonathon Kozol
9. Born for Liberty by Sara Evans (a women’s history of the US)
10. Educating Esme by Esme Raji Codell
Poetry (of the contemporary kind)
1. The Wellspring or The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds
2. Neon Vernacular by Yusef Komunyaaka
3. Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser
4. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
5. Rose or The City In Which I Love You by Li-Young Lee
Meaningful books in my Christian journey
1. Dakota and Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris (I prefer Cloister Walk)
2. A Circle of Quiet (and the other Crosswicks Journals, Summer of the Great-Grandmother
and The Irrational Season) by Madeleine L’Engle
3. Healing Prayer and Restoring the Christian Soul by Leanne Payne (though attending a
PCM conference is better than slogging through her badly edited, poorly organized
writing)
4. A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson
5. Mudhouse Sabbath and Real Sex by Lauren Winner
My very short sci-fi list: The Ender Series (beginning with Ender’s Game) and the Bean series
(beginning with Ender’s Shadow) by Orson Scott Card (I prefer the Bean series, personally)
Books I Love and get to teach
1. Romeo and Juliet tied with A Midsummer Night’s Dream
2. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
3. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
4. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
5. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
6. Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
7. Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
8. To Kill a Mockingbird by Lee Harper
The ending makes me cry because it’s so relentlessly perfect: The Old Man and the Sea by
Earnest Hemingway
The prose is crystal or the voice is captivating but I probably won’t re-read:
1. When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otuska
2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
3. Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
Jane Austen from absolute favorite book of all time to slightly less favorite in her cannon:
1. Pride & Prejudice
2. Emma
3. Sense & Sensibility
4. Northanger Abbey
Memoir (mostly listed above in various categories, but deserving a list of its own)
1. Educating Esme by Esme Raji Codell
2. There Is No Me Without You by Melissa Faye Green
3. Loving Across the Color Line by Sharon Rush
4. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
5. A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel
6. Why I’m Like This by Cynthia Kaplan (especially “A Dog Loves a Bone”)
7. Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
8. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson
9. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (best read alongside a general history of iran
and the books she and her students read—Lolita, Gatsby, etc.)
10. The Good Women of China by Xinran Xinran