Start here for a current list of bestsellers: http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/overview.html
Choosing a Book
for Leisure Reading
Choosing a Book
for Leisure Reading
The Basics:
1. Read the title and look at the cover illustration. Also read the first few pages and see if it grabs you.
2. Read the first page and use the five finger rule
(If there are five or more words on the page that you don’t know or cannot read, the book is probably not for you.)
3. Look at the size of the print.
4. Choose a book that is about a theme, topic, or subject you are interested in.
5. Look at pictures, length of book, author’s background and previously published stories. What interest you?
6. What genre suits you (action/ comedy/ biographical/ romance/ mystery/ fantasy/ short story/ investigative).
Also:
* If you liked the book you chose, it can be a good guide when getting other books. Often, if you look up a book on a website, it will give you a
list of books that are similar. For instance, go to the Amazon listing for one of you favorite books, and scroll down to the section titled
“Customers who bought this item also bought”.
* Keep your own reading list. When a book has been recommended to you, write it down immediately.
* Don’t think you have to read or like a book just because everyone else does. If you are reading a book that you don’t like or can’t get through,
it’s okay to abandon it for something else.
* Insert your hobbies into your library catalog search and set it to “keyword.”
* Search your house. Often times good books will be quietly collecting dust in your own house. Maybe you forgot about one or someone
who is living with you has a couple good books.
* Ask someone to recommend a good book. You can ask you older sibling, your mom, your dad, your best friend, English teacher, etc. friends
or family with whom you have things in common can often make excellent book recommendations. Local, small bookstores have
recommendations, and when they get to know you, it’s even better!
* Read book reviews in newspapers and magazines. Read the bestseller lists published in most newspapers or weekly magazines. Find out which
new books are making headlines, and why.
* At a bookstore, skim though the shelves in the section your interested in. If you see anything that looks appealing, pick it up and read the back
of the book. Skim over the back of the book or the inside flap, wherever the summary is. If that holds your attention, read the first page or so.
If it still holds your attention, then it’s probably a good book for you. The subject might be interesting to you, but the writing style can be key
to enjoying it. If it looks interesting, put it in your pile. Keep doing this until you have a few books.
* Who are your favorite authors? List your 5 favorite books. List your 5 favorite movies. Read the books for these movies. What was the last
book you enjoyed and kept a copy of? What books in a series would you like to read?
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
100 Must Read Books (Time Magazine Poll)
A - E
A - E
- The Adventures of Augie March (1953), by Saul Bellow
- All the King's Men (1946), by Robert Penn Warren
- American Pastoral (1997), by Philip Roth
- An American Tragedy (1925), by Theodore Dreiser
- Animal Farm (1946), by George Orwell
- Appointment in Samarra (1934), by John O'Hara
- Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (1970), by Judy Blume
- The Assistant (1957), by Bernard Malamud
- At Swim-Two-Birds (1938), by Flann O'Brien
- Atonement (2002), by Ian McEwan
- Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison
- The Berlin Stories (1946), by Christopher Isherwood
- The Big Sleep (1939), by Raymond Chandler
- The Blind Assassin (2000), by Margaret Atwood
- Blood Meridian (1986), by Cormac McCarthy
- Brideshead Revisited (1946), by Evelyn Waugh
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by Thornton Wilder
- Call It Sleep (1935), by Henry Roth
- Catch-22 (1961), by Joseph Heller
- The Catcher in the Rye (1951), by J.D. Salinger
- A Clockwork Orange (1963), by Anthony Burgess
- The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), by William Styron
- The Corrections (2001), by Jonathan Franzen
- The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), by Thomas Pynchon
- A Dance to the Music of Time (1951), by Anthony Powell
- The Day of the Locust (1939), by Nathanael West
- Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), by Willa Cather
- A Death in the Family (1958), by James Agee
- The Death of the Heart (1958), by Elizabeth Bowen
- Deliverance (1970), by James Dickey
- Dog Soldiers (1974), by Robert Stone
- Falconer (1977), by John Cheever
- The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), by John Fowles
- The Golden Notebook (1962), by Doris Lessing
- Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), by James Baldwin
- Gone With the Wind (1936), by Margaret Mitchell
- The Grapes of Wrath (1939), by John Steinbeck
- Gravity's Rainbow (1973), by Thomas Pynchon
- The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- A Handful of Dust (1934), by Evelyn Waugh
- The Heart is A Lonely Hunter (1940), by Carson McCullers
- The Heart of the Matter (1948), by Graham Greene
- Herzog (1964), by Saul Bellow
- Housekeeping (1981), by Marilynne Robinson
- A House for Mr. Biswas (1962), by V.S. Naipaul
- I, Claudius (1934), by Robert Graves
- Infinite Jest (1996), by David Foster Wallace
- Invisible Man (1952), by Ralph Ellison
- Light in August (1932), by William Faulkner
- The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), by C.S. Lewis
- Lolita (1955), by Vladimir Nabokov
- Lord of the Flies (1955), by William Golding
- The Lord of the Rings (1954), by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Loving (1945), by Henry Green
- Lucky Jim (1954), by Kingsley Amis
- The Man Who Loved Children (1940), by Christina Stead
- Midnight's Children (1981), by Salman Rushdie
- Money (1984), by Martin Amis
- The Moviegoer (1961), by Walker Percy
- Mrs. Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf
- Naked Lunch (1959), by William Burroughs
- Native Son (1940), by Richard Wright
- Neuromancer (1984), by William Gibson
- Never Let Me Go (2005), by Kazuo Ishiguro
- 1984 (1948), by George Orwell
- On the Road (1957), by Jack Kerouac
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), by Ken Kesey
- The Painted Bird (1965), by Jerzy Kosinski
- Pale Fire (1962), by Vladimir Nabokov
- A Passage to India (1924), by E.M. Forster
- Play It As It Lays (1970), by Joan Didion
- Portnoy's Complaint (1969), by Philip Roth
- Possession (1990), by A.S. Byatt
- The Power and the Glory (1939), by Graham Greene
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), by Muriel Spark
- Rabbit, Run (1960), by John Updike
- Ragtime (1975), by E.L. Doctorow
- The Recognitions (1955), by William Gaddis
- Red Harvest (1929), by Dashiell Hammett
- Revolutionary Road (1961), by Richard Yates
- The Sheltering Sky (1949), by Paul Bowles
- Slaughterhouse Five (1969), by Kurt Vonnegut
- Snow Crash (1992), by Neal Stephenson
- The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), by John Barth
- The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner
- The Sportswriter (1986), by Richard Ford
- The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1964), by John le Carre
- The Sun Also Rises (1926), by Ernest Hemingway
- Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston
- Things Fall Apart (1959), by Chinua Achebe
- To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee
- To the Lighthouse (1927), by Virginia Woolf
- Tropic of Cancer (1934), by Henry Miller
- Ubik (1969), by Philip K. Dick
- Under the Net (1954), by Iris Murdoch
- Under the Volcano (1947), by Malcolm Lowry
- Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
- White Noise (1985), by Don DeLillo
- White Teeth (2000), by Zadie Smith
- Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys
- Berlin: City of Stones (2000), by Jason Lutes
- Blankets (2003), by Craig Thompson
- Bone (2004), by Jeff Smith
- The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002), by Kim Deitch
- The Dark Knight Returns (1986), by Frank Miller
- David Boring (2000), by Daniel Clowes
- Ed the Happy Clown (1989), by Chester Brown
- Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), by Chris Ware
- Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories (2003), by Gilbert Hernandez
- Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons