Welcome to My Official Web Page!

Welcome to My Official Web Page!

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Beautiful Books

Don't forget to enter my Motherload Contest!  You can win three books AND an ancient Roman coin!  The contest ends April 11th!



I think we all know that literary fiction is getting a good and bad rap these days.  It's one of the slower-selling genres in this economy (at least that's what a number of agent blogs have been saying) and often people complain that the plot isn't fast enough to keep their attention.  However, from yesterday's post, it seems to me that a number of you enjoy reading beautifully written fiction chock full of figurative language.  


So I thought I would share my list of favorite literary fiction and we could all compare notes.  I was going to do my top ten, but my favorite number is 11 so we're going to go with that.  


Drum roll, please!


1.  Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd  (I actually love this one so much I'm having my students read it right now.)
2.  Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
3.  Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
4.  The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
5.  Little Bee by Chris Cleave
6.  The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
7.  The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini 
8.  The Book Thief by Markus Zusak  (Yeah, it's YA, but seriously... it's literary.)
9.  Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
10.  Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
11.  The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho


You all know I'm a sucker for history and my list reflects that.  Have you read any of these?  What did you think of them?  Are there any other literary-ish books that you think were super-fab?