For the love of reading
I love reading..it gives me the sense of being a well-read intellectual and thats just great! But..if truth be told...I love reading because it is satisfying to my soul..I feel enriched and at peace with myself when I'm reading..but for that you need to open your heart and mind and digest the lovely literary quality in books..reading..as is true for any art form..becomes nothing but a mundane chore if it's done for some ulterior motive..instead of simply for its own sake.
I've written about this before...but now..I won't go on about the many benefits of reading. Instead I'll do what I usually look forward to all the time...recommendations on good books! Here is my personal list. But feel free to give me yours..=)
Books for the Soul
These aren't self-help books. They are heartwarming and I can never have enough when it comes to reading them.
1. SMALL MIRACLES by Yitta Halberstam & Judith Leventhal
2. CHICKEN SOUP SERIES (For me, chicken soup has been my Enid Blyton, considering that for all my love of it, I actually began reading quite late)
3. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
4. Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsh
5. Joy Peace Pills by JP Vaswani
The Best Dramas & Absolute must-read classics - before & after
1. Pride and Prejudice (the unedited version) by Jane Austen - Mrs Bennet is a fantastic comic
2. Wuthering Hieghts by Charlotte Bronte
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
4. Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
5. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
6. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
7. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
8. Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence
9. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
10. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
11. Brick Lane by Monica Ali
*Actually this list quite endless so I'll just terminate it here
Chick-lit entertainment
Just go and sieve through the shelves...there are plenty of such novels to entertain a loaded mind and scheduled life...something by Sophie Kinsella or Shobhaa De perhaps?
Collected Stories
1. Collected stories of Paul Theroux
2. Collected stories of Oscar Wilde
3. Collected stories of R.K. Narayan
4. Collected stories of Rudyard Kipling
5. Collected stories of Anton Chekhov
Popular Fiction
HARRY POTTER...does it even need a recommendation?? It's like recommending Cindrella and Little Red Riding Hood to the kids..wonder why I'm still recommending it..perhaps to those who live under a stone and happen to just bump into my internet space...
Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Biographies
Personally, I found the biographies of Roald Dahl (books like Going Solo) Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler the most fascinating...the auto-biographies...are the best ofcourse ;)
Lastly...because there are so many books and so little space...or want to keep penning them..I'll end here..with my..
..Favourite Authors
1. Roald Dahl - I dunno what I find more enticing about him, his writing, the illustrations in his books courtesy of Quentin Blake or merely the fact that I have a sort of crush on the man himself...
2. J.K. Rowling - Cliche...but I adore her style
3. Jane Austen - If someone etches characters in a most memorable fashion, it's Jane Austen, ofcourse Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot have their own goods to deliver as well..in this genre 4. R.K. Narayan - Call it the brotherhood...but I quite like Narayan. Talking of Indian Authors...Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Chetan Bhagat have their own..and not forgetting Kiran Desai..but I haven't really read her booker prize winning 'The Inheritance of Loss'.
5. O'Henry
*Actually lets stop this entry for now...I'll leave it to you...the few genuine readers of my internet space to go over and possibly leave some suggestions for me!
thanks...and keep reading..because books are companions for life!