More All Time Favorite Books

First, a confession: I just discovered the last several posts to the blog. Now I'm posting two of my own (plus a comment) in my extra hour this weekend . . . What's funny is that I was walking with Elizabeth and commented that no one had posted on this blog for a long time, and she said she had just urged people to write what they were reading. I remembered a post of hers a couple of weeks back and said I had commented, but she said no. I was confused. Well, it turns out that when I was refreshing the blog (I left a tab open with it) I was just refreshing the October page, so I didn't get any of the November posts. Argh!

My all-time favorite book is East of Eden, by John Steinbeck. Rachel put Grapes of Wrath up as one of her all-time favorites. I read that in high school, and it started my Steinbeck phase. I read most of his books then. About two years ago I was looking for a book to read at the library, and decided to look on the Oprah's Picks shelves. I found East of Eden, and realized there was a Steinbeck book I had never read. I loved it (well, at least after the first few hundred pages where not much seemed to happen). It really made me think about what's important in life.

Some other favorites:

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. I love everything about this book.

The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin. Another author I fell in love with in high school.

The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls. A fascinating memoir of life as a child of parents who were a bit crazy, lived a very poor lifestyle, and ran from one place to the next to escape debt or other trouble.

Leaving Mother Lake, by Yang Erche Namu and Christine Mathieu. See other post about this one. No, I don't read a lot of memoirs, but they do seem to number among my favorites.

Hmmm . . . interesting . . . all of these authors, except Steinbeck, are women . . .