I became a book reader when I was in 3rd grade, and our teacher started a “book club” to get everyone excited about books and reading in general. I don’t quite remember the details, but I believe that she talked to all of the parents and passed the hat around to buy the first books for our class. The first book I was assigned to read was Treasure Island by Robert L. Stevenson, which was a perfect match for an 8-year-old boy with a wild imagination and thirst for adventures.
My second book, O Cachorrinho Samba by Maria José Dupré, taught me to appreciate my own feelings and that it was okay to get emotional about books too. For the next four years, wherever I went, I carried a book with me, and my parents were more than happy and willing to support my voracious reading habits. It was only when I hit puberty and started noticing girls that my reading habit was affected, slowly decreasing to a complete halt when I turned fourteen.
I’m embarrassed to say that between the ages of 14 through 35 if it wasn’t for school or work, I barely looked at a book until a friend gave me a copy of Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Once again, I was bitten by the “reading bug” (a book worm?), and I’ve been reading non-stop ever since I picked up that book, averaging about 60 completed books a year. Selecting my Top 5 Favorite Books is not something easy to do. I’d guess that my selection would probably change depending on many factors, but since I voluntarily put myself into this position, my Top 5 Favorite Books are:
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, my very first Steinbeck! His description of human plight against the adversities that life, real life, threw at the Joads and their many failures and small successes was as close to the real world as you can get. His description of the process by which the Joads had to slowly get rid of their possessions, seeing their memories and lifehood sleeping away into the hands of total strangers really resonated with my own experience of packing everything I owned and moving to the US a couple of decades ago. I’m really glad it took me all these years to read this masterpiece as it allowed me to grow up and really appreciate it.
This book single handedly shaped a lot of what happened in my early childhood. Just as the Paul Street Boys formed their “army” to defend their grund, I too, influenced by the book, formed my own club together with a bunch of schoolmates to “fight” against an “opposing army”. I was barely 10-years-old when I read this book and the story stayed with me for much of my childhood and onto my teenager years as well. It has been about 30 years since then and it was such a great surprise when I was able to find it at the University’s library! If you ever dreamed up about battlefields, fighting for justice alongside your best friends and the meaning of true honor as a child, then I highly recommend this book to you!
One of the best books I have ever read! Makes you stop and think about your childhood and old friends, long forgotten stories and places and faces… and count your blessings and enjoy the today and now!
Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole’s tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. (“Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius’s quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso–who mistakes him for a vagrant–and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
Honorable Mentions:
- Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak
- High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck
- The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
- The Nightmare Factory by Thomas Ligotti
- The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang
