Favorite Books

I. Favorite Fiction

• Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise (perfect works)
• Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (my favorite in the last 10 years)
• Chuck Palahniuk: Survivor, Fight Club, Choke (so original)
• Ken Follett: Pillars of the Earth
• Alice Walker: Color Purple
• Harper Lee: To Kill A Mockingbird
• JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez: 100 Years of Solitude (perfect)
• Frank McCourt: Angela’s Ashes
• William Faulkner: Sound and the Furry
• Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
• Jack Kerouac: On the Road
• John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
• JD Salinger: Catcher in the Rye
• Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God (perfect)
• Annie Proulx: The Shipping News
• Walter Mosely: The Complete Easy Rawlins Mystery Series
• Daniel Silva: The Unlikely Spy (the best spy novel)
• Philip Roth: American Pastoral
• Richard Ford: Independence Day
• Charles Frazier: Cold Mountain
• Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
• Michael Cunningham: The Hours: A Novel
• Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex
• Jonathan Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn
• Dan Brown: The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons (just because they are popular does not mean they are not FUN reads!)

Favorite Writer : Toni Morrison

Favorite Fictional Book: 100 Years of Solitude

II. Non-Fiction (General)

• Jon Krakauer: Into Thin Air (my all-time favorite non-fiction)
• Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything (by my favorite non-fiction writer)
  • Also check out "Walk in the Woods," "Mother Tongue" & "Made In America"
• Gordon Wood: The Radicalism of the American Revolution
• David Halberstam: The Summer of 1949 (about the Yankees and DiMaggio)
• Jared Diamond : Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (the smartest book I have ever read)
• Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
• John Thorn (Editor): Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball
• Joseph J. Ellis: Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
• David McCullough: John Adams
• Oliver Sacks: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat : And Other Clinical Tales
• Shelby Foote: Stars in Their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign June
• The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Ed. Lester J. Cappon)
• Taylor Branch: Parting the Waters (on Dr. King’s life)
• Nicholas Basbanes: A Gentle Madness (a book on books)
• Douglas Brinkley: The Magic Bus (a study in education)
• Susan Bergman: Anonymity: A Family’s Fight With Aids
• Roger Kahn: The Boys of Summer (about the Brooklyn Dodgers)

III. Non-Fiction (Disciplinary)

• Bill Bryson: Mother Tongue & Made In America (great pair)
• Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves To Death
• Quentin Skinner (Ed.): The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences
• James R. Grossman: Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration
• Cornell West: Race Matters
• John McWhorter: Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
• Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann: The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge
• Thomas S. Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Basic Political Writings
• Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
• Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels: The Marx-Engels Reader ( Robert C. Tucker , Editor)
• Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
• Michel Foucault: Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume III (all three volumes are wonderful)
• Michel Foucault: The Birth Of The Clinic
• Roland Barthes: Mythologies
• Hans Georg Gadamer : Philosophical Hermeneutics
• Joseph Campbell: The Power of Myth
• Jean Kilbourne: Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel
• Michael Spikes: Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory
• Leo Strauss & Joseph Cropsey (Eds.): History of Political Philosophy
• Robert McChesney: Rich Media, Poor Democracy
• Richard Harland: Superstructuralism
• Jean-Francois Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition
• George Lakoff & Mark Johnson: Metaphors We Live By
• Erving Goffman: Asylums
• George Ritzer: McDonaldization of Society
• Jean Baudrillard: America
• And, of course, Inside Greek U!