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I love to read. It's my way of traveling to different places and even to different times. In many ways, I view a book as a conversation with a writer who I will never meet. I have author heroes, which are the writers who I look up to and read all the works they've written that I can get my hands on. These include Ursula Le Guin, Sherri Tepper, Patricia McKillip, Richard Feynmann, J.R.R. Tolkien, Douglas Adams, George Eliott, the Dalai Lama, Joseph Campbell, Marian Zimmer Bradley, and Thomas Hardy. Obviously, there are people on my list I will never meet, at least not while I'm alive, but there are others I hope to at least hear speak at a lecture.
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Not being among my literary heroes doesn't mean that I don't love a book or a writer. It just means I don't own a complete collection of their works, although I do have lots of books. I am what you might call a bibliophile. A book hoarder. Some of my current (and all time) favorite fiction books are listed below. |
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- Deadline, Chris Crutcher
- Repossessed, A.M. Jenkins
- Abhorsen, Lireal, and Sabriel, Garth Nix
- The Road, Cormac McCarthy
- Poison Study, Magic Study, and Fire Study, Maria V. Synder
- Boy Proof, Cecil Castelluci
- The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt, and the Miles Vorkisigan series, Lois McMaster Bujold
- A Room on Lorelei Street, and The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Mary Pearson
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
- A Dirty Job, Christopher Lamb (really anything by him)
- Wind Rider, Susan Williams
- A Long Way from Chicago, Richard Peck
- Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
- Tithe, Valiant, and Ironside, Holly Black
- The Big Easy, Jasper Fforde (and his other mysteries)
- The Discworld Series, Terry Pratchett
- His Dark Materials series, Philip Pullman
- Double Helix, The Rules of Survival, and Impossible, Nancy Werlin
- Feed and Burger Wuss, M.T. Anderson
- How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff
- Fever, Laurie Halse Anderson
- The Schwa Was Here, Neil Shusterman
- Love, Ruby Lavender and Each Little Bird That Sings, Deborah Wiles
- The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, Alexander McCall Smith
- George MacDonald's orginal fairy tales such as The Princess and the Goblin
- The Sea of Trolls, Nancy Farmer
- and one of my all time favorites from my childhood: The Weirdstone of Brissingamen: A Tale of Alderly, Alan Garner. I read this book more times than I can count growing up. I did the same thing with Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
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I also love nonfiction books. Essays intrigue me. The more obscure the better, and I love to steal glimpses into another person's life that some essayists give you. I don't mean memoirs so much as those writers who aren't claiming to remember word for word conversations from the time they were three. The writers who are recording parts of their lives to illustrate a point they're making, or just for fun as in David Sedaris's hilarious books. This is where I'd put Feynman's books and the books about Feynman, such as Tuva or Bust, Richard Feyman's Last Journey.
- Enough, Bill McKibben
- The World Without Us, Alan Weisman
- Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
- The End of Nature, Bill McKibben
- The Wisdom of Forgiveness, The Dalai Lama
- The Assault on Reason, Al Gore
- The People of the Lie, M. Scott Peck
- Guns, Germs, and Steele and Collapse, Jared Diamond
- The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain
- Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, Mark Abley
- Harvest for Hope, Jane Goodall, Gary McAvoy, and Gail Hudson
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