12 March 2008

Your gift to me


At the risk of committing my own social scandal, I must humbly announce that today's my birthday! So if you're reading this, will you recommend a book to me? I love getting recommendations and I will happily add all the ones I haven't read to my Goodreads "want-to-read" list which I draw from all the time. Be as anonymous as you like; I promise to blog about it when I get around to reading it.

Photo: Garry Platt.

7 comments:

Elizabeth said...

I'll go with Machado de Assis' DOM CASMURRO.

Anonymous said...

My favorite book of late is Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen.

Happy Birthday!!

xox

Jess said...

Happy birthday! I hope it's a great one and I LOVE that photo!

Anyway, one of my favorite books at the moment is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Marjorie said...

Happy birthday! Let's see: Anne Fadiman's books of essays and Adam Gopnik's books about New York and Paris...A.S. Byatt's short stories (I recently read and loved Elementals)...How do you feel about fantasy? I'm reading His Majesty's Dragon, which is about dragons in the Napoleonic wars and very dear.

Or if you feel like giving a book a long time, there's Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March! Which almost no one in my book club finished, but if you make if through the first 200 pages, you might join the small devoted group calling it the Great American Novel. I wouldn't go that far, but I was quite glad I read it.

For total randomness there's All Will Be Revealed, which is about...um...a Victorian pornographer and a medium. It sounds like pulp, but it isn't really, just engagingly strange.

Liz said...

I know you're plugging your way through the Modern Library list, so allow me to recommend one of my favorites there - "The Sheltering Sky" by Paul Bowles. Three Americans go to Morocco and get absolutely destroyed by Africa! Who doesn't like a good post-colonial nightmare?

Unknown said...

Happy Birthday! The Secret River by Kate Grenville uses early Australian history to tell a fabulously written but disturbing story.

Anonymous said...

Happy Birthday complete stranger!