Reading
I like discussing books with people, but I always forget which ones I have read. Below is a list of all the books I can remember reading (most recent appearing first). † = in progress, * = favorite
| Title | Comments |
|---|---|
| Infinite Jest† (David Foster Wallace) | |
| Roadside Picnic (Arkady and Boris Strugatsky) | |
| A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller Jr.) | Read while sick with "The Great Sore Throat" of 2024. |
| Father, Son, and Soldering Gun (Steven V. Mycynek) | An Onshape coworker of mine wrote this about his dad. |
| Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe) | |
| The Dispossessed (Ursula Le Guin) | |
| A Borrowed Man (Gene Wolfe) | |
| Invisible Planets (Trans. Ken Liu) | A collection of contemporary Chinese science fiction stories. "Taking Care of Gods" was my favorite. |
| The Island of Doctor Moreau (H. G. Wells) | First book of 2024 and a suggestion from a dear friend. |
| The Fifth Head of Cerberus (Gene Wolfe) | Another head scratcher from Gene Wolfe, complete with the classic Wolfisms of wonky timelines, absurdly delayed payoffs, an ambiguous ending, and starkly naked violence. |
| The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) | A powerful book that I think will continue to lose its edge as society becomes more progressive, but will always remain relevant. Many of "shocking" plot points (suicide attempts, pre-marital sex, women's liberation) fall on less excitable ears in the 21st century as the taboo nature of these issues has decreased. What I think remains relevant is narrator's experience dealing with mental illness. As awareness of these issues becomes more mainstream, this book will become more appealing in its honesty. |
| Erewhon (Samuel Butler) | I think a lot of the satire in this book goes over my head because I do not know much about Victorian England. The later parts of the book about the Erewhonian's rejection of all machines was very interesting though. |
| Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) | |
| Candide (Voltaire) | |
| The Iliad*, The Odyssey (Homer) | I read the William Cullen Bryant translation (published 1870s). I came in to this with very little knowledge of what the Iliad was actually about (I assumed it was just the Trojan Horse), so I was surprised by many aspects of the story (the detailed violence, the meddling of the gods, the depth of the human relationships). Many characters have multiple names (Achilles = Pelides = Aeacides), so when we are introduced to Oilean Ajax and Telamonian Ajax, I assumed this was one person (they are distinct people: half brothers). As to whether or not the two books share an author, from a purely textual perspective, I have my doubts. My evidence would be the huge disparity in the amount of simile used. In the Iliad, nearly every fifth paragraph would start with a simile relating to nature. The Odyssey has relatively few of these. This might be due to the difference in narrator and structure, but it could also be a different author's style showing. |
| Vita Nostra (Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko) | (work scifi book club) |
| A Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe) | |
| Stoner (John Williams) | |
| Bagombo Snuff Box (Kurt Vonnegut) | Vonnegut's voice and style are so strong that this collection of short stories can be read unabridged without ever suffering tonal whiplash. Some favorites of mine in this collection are "2BR02B" and "Lovers Anonymous". |
| A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula Le Guin) | |
| Hiroshima (John Hersey) | |
| Red Rising, Golden Son (Pierce Brown) | (work scifi book club) |
| Moby Dick* (Herman Melville) | My favorite chapter is Chapter 58: Brit. |
| The Deep (John Crowley) | First book of 2023. |
| The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin) | (work scifi book club) |
| Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) | |
| Consider Phlebas (Iain M. Banks) | (work scifi book club) The Culture is a really cool civilization and the worldbuilding is great, but I think this book is held back by its "overly cinematic" nature. There are too many long action scenes that could really be summarized in a few sentences, but are drawn out over tens of pages. |
| Effective Modern C++ (Scott Meyers) | |
| Engine Summer (John Crowley) | |
| The Book of the New Sun*, The Urth of the New Sun (Gene Wolfe) | This is an absolutely astounding book. The two best parts for me were the archaic vocabulary used, and the meandering nature of the plot. Thinking about Urth of the New Sun fills me with a deep sense of melancholy. It is painfully nostalgic towards the first book, but in a hopeless way, as if Severian is chasing himself, but will never catch up. |
| Flatland (Edwin Abbott Abbott) | |
| Childhood's End (Arthur C. Clarke) | (work scifi book club) Really amazing story, I like the 3 part aspect. |
| Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu) | The religion of the "Adem" people from Name of the Wind is extremely reminiscent of Taoism. |
| The Martian Chronicles* (Ray Bradbury) | Really fantastic and thought provoking. Bradbury makes super bold plot decisions that you second guess as being fake (or incomplete), and this makes reading him almost seem not real. We are very accustomed to "fake out deaths" in modern movies/TV, so things like the death of all Martians, the destruction of Earth, and the humans leaving Mars all come as a real surprise. |
| Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) | Before reading, I thought the monster was named Frankenstein, it was green, had something sticking out of its head, and was a brute (I think I got the appearance ideas from various Halloween costumes). I was very shocked by the monster's eloquence, this is something I had never seen in modern tropes / renditions of the character. |
| Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy) | "the judge" is a wonderful character, so rich and interesting. My favorite passage is the one where the judge has one of his philosophical sermons with the gang: "Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent ... The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos." |
| The Poppy War Series [The Poppy War, The Dragon Republic, The Burning God] (R. F. Kuang) | The first book is really strong, but it feels like there was not enough material for a trilogy. There seems to be a push for trilogies in the fantasy publishing world (lots of trilogies on this list). Also, yet another "story where the children end up becoming generals and the entire population > 22 years old seems to disappear" cliché. WHERE ARE ALL THE ADULTS??? |
| Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Thomas De Quincey) | |
| Murderbot Diaries 1-3 (Martha Wells) | (work scifi book club) Short, exciting, fun. Not very recommendable though. I would have liked more about the interactions between the AI characters, especially ones of different sentience / processing power. |
| The Enchiridion (Epictetus) | Chapter 50: "Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself, abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them. Don't regard what anyone says of you, for this, after all, is no concern of yours. How long, then, will you put off thinking yourself worthy of the highest improvements and follow the distinctions of reason? You have received the philosophical theorems, with which you ought to be familiar, and you have been familiar with them. What other master, then, do you wait for, to throw upon that the delay of reforming yourself? You are no longer a boy, but a grown man. If, therefore, you will be negligent and slothful, and always add procrastination to procrastination, purpose to purpose, and fix day after day in which you will attend to yourself, you will insensibly continue without proficiency, and, living and dying, persevere in being one of the vulgar. This instant, then, think yourself worthy of living as a man grown up, and a proficient. Let whatever appears to be the best be to you an inviolable law. And if any instance of pain or pleasure, or glory or disgrace, is set before you, remember that now is the combat, now the Olympiad comes on, nor can it be put off. By once being defeated and giving way, proficiency is lost, or by the contrary preserved. Thus Socrates became perfect, improving himself by everything, attending to nothing but reason. And though you are not yet a Socrates, you ought, however, to live as one desirous of becoming a Socrates." |
| Animal Farm (George Orwell) | |
| The Stranger* (Albert Camus) | |
| The Gap Cycle [The Real Story, Forbidden Knowledge] (Stephen R. Donaldson) | |
| Butcher's Crossing (John Williams) | Supremely depressing, but a good story. |
| One Piece (Eiichiro Oda) | Second comic I've read, pretty good. A thousand chapters is nothing to sneeze at, I can't believe the author has been working for over 20 years. |
| The First Law Trilogy* [The Blade Itself, ...], Best Served Cold (Joe Abercrombie) | An amazing series with great characters and some cool lore. I hope the second trilogy is as good! |
| The Lies of Locke Lamora*, Red Seas Under Red Skies (Scott Lynch) | Very good heist books. I thought the first one was far better than the second. |
| The Things They Carried (Tim O'Brien) | |
| Sula (Toni Morrison) | |
| Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) | Reading books written long ago is always such an interesting experience. I found it amazing that the characters in the story (which was written around 1868) act out scenes from Shakespeare, much like we still do today. I bet that if you removed all technological and chronological references from the story, it would be hard to place it in a specific time when reading. |
| The Three-Body Problem (Liu Cixin) | Here is a quote from the translator's note that I found especially interesting: "The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture's patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language's rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people's gestures and movements." |
| Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut) | The Tralfamadorian concept of time is exactly the same as Dr. Manhattan's in the comic series "Watchmen". I wonder if Watchmen was influenced by Vonnegut. |
| The Glass Bead Game (Hermann Hesse) | I find a recurring pattern in Hesse's works is that I keep thinking about them months after I am done reading. More so with Siddartha, but with Glass Bead Game, it brings me memories of my time reading it and feeling lost. |
| This Side of Paradise (F. Scott Fitzgerald) | |
| Breach of Peace (Daniel B. Greene) | I watch Daniel's videos on youtube about Sci-fi and Fantasy books, and when he announced that he had become an author, I had to check out his book. I think it is extremely good for a debut novel, and the title is one of the best I have seen. |
| Siddhartha* (Hermann Hesse) | A beautiful story that I would recommend to everyone. I was supposed to read this in high school, but never got past the first chapter. I am glad I picked it up again after college. |
| Piranesi (Susanna Clarke) | |
| The Jungle (Upton Sinclair) | Makes me grateful to live in to 2010s and not the 1910s. This book made it seem as if people were regularly dying from starvation in the early 1900s. This seemed reasonable given the conditions they were living in, so I decided to research how often this happens now. I found a lot of information on food insecurity in the USA, but next to nothing about lethal starvation. It is apparently extremely rare nowadays in the USA (lethal starvation ~ 1000s, as opposed to food insecurity ~ 50 million). |
| Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell) | Very good. I am excited to watch the movie. This book's format is similar to the format of "Tsar of Love and Techno" (further down the list), in that the story is broken up into distinct sections that all reference eachother. However, this one has a slight twist where fictional stories within the book reference real events (and the other way around), causing confusion as to what is real and what is fake. |
| The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) | I started reading this book in 11th grade for my English class, but never finished it. I picked it up again in late 2020 and restarted. There are so many great quotes in this book from Lord Henry Wotton, I will compile a list of favorites someday. |
| The Foundation Trilogy (Isaac Asimov) | Huge in scope and payoff. There is no way that Star Wars did not copy the idea of Coruscant from the Galactic Empire's capitol planet of Trantor. They are both (1) planets covered entirely by a city with no natural landscape uncovered (2) the seat of a galaxy wide government (3) the central coordinate for all space navigation. |
| The Cosmere Universe [Stormlight Archive (1-4) + Edgedancer + Dawnshard, Mistborn (1-7) + Secret History, Warbreaker, Elantris + The Emperor's Soul, Sixth of the Dusk, Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell] (Brandon Sanderson)* | The Cosmere is my favorite fictional universe and I am so excited that the author is regularly writing new books about it. |
| Meditations (Marcus Aurelius) | This is a tough, but worthwhile read. Probably the most powerful author on my list so far (an emperor of Rome). |
| Ender's Shadow (Orson Scott Card) | This book and Ender's Game are connected in a way that I have not come across before. They both tell the same story, but from different character's perspectives. Overall, I liked this one a little less than the original because the reader is expected to know the ending. |
| The Silmarillion (J. R. R. Tolkien) | Insanely detailed and consistent worldbuilding. The writing style is hard to pick up at first, but by the end, it begins to make sense and the beauty of the phrasing becomes apparent. Now that I have read this and the Hobbit, I am ready for the Lord of the Rings! |
| The Great Alone (Kristin Hannah) | This is a very short book, and I am glad for that. The plot was very predictable, and yet, the characters didn't act like how I have perceived real people to act. It was like that classic TV show situation where people don't actually verbalize what they are feeling, and then act surprised when others act in ways they don't appreciate. However, despite this, I stayed up late several nights in a row reading this book. This book has a sort of realism (I'm defining this as "feels like it could be possible") that is fascinating. |
| Altered Carbon (Richard Morgan) | Really cool scifi worldbuilding and excellent pacing. I watched the show on Netflix about a year ago and liked it, so I thought I would read the book. I am glad I did. |
| Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) | I recently read an an essay by Keynes about the future of economics once mass automation has ended the need for everyone to work. Brave New World seems to be a pessimistic prediction of the world Keynes imagined, and I think that it is really well conceived. My favorite character is Mustapha Mond. |
| Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) * | Absolutely loved it. My reading list is very dude heavy, so it was nice to get a female perspective, both from a main character and author. I never doubted Mr. Rochester for a second, I love that guy. |
| Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J.P. Morgan (Susie J. Pak) | Assigned reading in my History of Capitalism course. While it is interesting to see how magnates come to power, I think it is more interesting how they retain that power and transform it into a dynasty for their children. This book reminds me a lot of HBO's Succession, about a media magnate and his family. |
| The Fifth Season*, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky (N. K. Jemisin) | Fantastic world building and storytelling. The narrative structure of the first book is quite novel. It follows three separate characters that are later revealed to be the same woman at different points in her life. If you are like me and love learning about the lore behind the fantasy, stick with all three books as the reveals come very late in the series. |
| Attack on Titan (Hajime Isayama) * | First comic book I have ever read. Probably my favorite fictional world. The fact that the author has been releasing a chapter every month for 10 years is amazing. The art is insane, the plot is unique, the themes are real; I would recommend AOT to anyone. As of January 2020, the author made an announcement that he would be finishing the series within the year! October 2020 Update: wow the series is steaming towards a conclusion! The final season of the anime adaptation (cover everything after chapter 90) has been confirmed for this December. May 2021 Update: we got thrones'd. I was expecting a lot more out of the ending of this series and I am very disappointed. Very sad to say that the final chapters did not do the series justice. |
| The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell) | I picked this book up after seeing it beat out Hyperion on a sci-fi list. This is the only book I have read that is built mostly on religious themes and internal conflicts of faith. |
| Hyperion *, Fall of Hyperion (Dan Simmons) | Excellent Science Fiction. This book and its sequel are a must read for fans of the genre. On the sequel: the author admits that he needed a down payment to buy a new house, so he split the book into two parts so he could make more money off the story. Respect. |
| Dune Series (Frank Herbert) * | One of my favorites -- All six books are epic, but the fourth, God Emperor of Dune is the highlight of the series. I am so hyped for the movie coming out in 2020. October 2020 Update: haha! sike. The movie got delayed until October 2021 due to covid19. October 2021 Update: Wow the movie was good. Slightly disappointed that it is just part 1 of 2. |
| East of Eden (John Steinbeck)* | This one is a tear jerker that really made me think about what it means to live an entire lifetime. As a young person, the American life expectancy of 77 years seems like an impossibly long time. It was nice to see how the characters evolved over the course of the book |
| The Long Walk (Stephen King) | This book does a great job of instilling the reader with the sense of anxiety that the characters are feeling. |
| Declaration of Independence + US Constitution | Reading this text is so exciting and inspiring, although parsing the grammar of the language that was used at the time is very difficult. Reading alongside an interpreted version is also very helpful; knowing what to look for makes the run on sentences more manageable. |
| The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway) | I think I missed the point of this book entirely, so maybe I will reread and do some more thinking. |
| A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara) * | This is an good book for many reasons. First, the book follows the four main characters for their entire lives. Second, it provides insights into both living with a mental illness and supporting friends with mental illnesses that I thought were very poignant. |
| The Death of Ivan Ilych (Leo Tolstoy) | |
| The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger) | |
| The Tsar of Love and Techno (Anthony Marra) | Required reading for my first summer before college. I liked the stories spanned several decades and all joined together at the end. |
| The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) | |
| The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) | I read this because I became interested in the Cold War. Growing up in America, it is easy for me to think that Economics == Capitalism, and that our current system is the best system. This book didn't shatter that belief, but it certainly made me think. |
| 1984 (George Orwell) | Yay for civil liberties. |
| The Kingkiller Chronicle [The Name of the Wind, The Wise Man's Fear, The Slow Regard of Silent Things] (Patrick Rothfuss) * | Pat Rothfuss really needs to release the third book! The magic system in this series is unique amongst the fantasy I have read because it has its basis in chemistry and physics. Reminds me of the magic in Mistborn. It has now been over a decade since the release of book two, and there has been no concrete information even hinting at the existence of a final book in the series. The author says that he is working on it, but that it is difficult for him to finish the series. For his sake, I hope he finds the strength to reach the finish line, it is very apparent that he is unhappy with the lack of a third book. |
| The Art of War (Sun Tzu) | Not very applicable to my life as a student! |
| The Puritan Dilemma (Edmund S. Morgan) | One of the most boring books I've read. |
| The Hobbit (J. R. R. Tolkein) | The last 40 pages of this book spawned a 3 hour movie. |
| The Martian (Andy Weir) | |
| Night (Elie Wiesel) | Required reading during my Junior year of high school. I am glad we were assigned this book. I have seen it referred to as a "must read" for people interested in learning more about the Holocaust, and I agree with this assessment. |
| With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (E. B. Sledge) | This book is one of the reference materials for the HBO series "The Pacific". There is also a chance that I am distantly related to the author. |
| Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) * | Two people have told me that the spin-off series "Ender's Shadow" is also really good, so I might look into that. |
| Whale Talk (Chris Crutcher) | This book appropriately handled some very mature themes for a story targeted at young adults. |
| All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque) | |
| The Maze Runner (James Dashner) | |
| World War Z (Max Brooks) | Very different from the movie, so if you were disappointed with that, check out the book. It's structured as a series of short stories from survivors of the war. |
| The Book Thief (Markus Zusak) | I first learned who Jesse Owens was from this book when one of the main characters (a young boy) covers himself in coal dust and runs around a track. My favorite Owen's quote is "Hitler didn't snub me - It was our president who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram" (from Triumph by Jeremy Schaap, near the end of the "Day Three" chapter). |
| Lord of the Flies (William Golding) | |
| Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck) | This was assigned reading in 9th grade. Rumor has it, the instant the book was announced, someone in another class stood up and said "Isn't this the one where George kills Lenny at the end?" |
| The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) | The only movie adaptation I have seen is the new one with Leonardo DiCaprio, which I liked. A few of my film loving friends don't approve of my approval. |
| Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury) | HBO adaptation was bad. My favorite part of the book was the main character's wife Mildred. She is shown to be addicted to listening to broadcasts that are beamed directly into little "seashells" in her ears. This is such an accurate depiction of what we now do with wireless headphones, it makes me think of the novel every time I see a crowd of people all listening to something or on their phones. The HBO adaptation cut her character entirely, which was disappointing because her death at the hands of a rival nation during the one day war was the climax of the book. |
| Whirligig (Paul Fleischman) | |
| Unwind (Neal Shusterman) | Really terrifying book that had some great scenes. "They" should make this into a movie. |
| Hunger Games Series (Suzanne Collins) | Cool worldbuilding. If you liked this one, you will like the Japanese movie Battle Royale that came out in 2000 (8 years before HG). |
| The Knife of Never Letting Go (Patrick Ness) | |
| To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) | |
| The Pearl (John Steinbeck) | |
| Pendragon Series (D. J. MacHale) | I started reading this book and then gave it up. A few months later, the author, DJ MacHale came and spoke to my middle school. He was a really great guy, so I gave the book a second shot. I ended up reading all 10 consecutively. |
| Hatchet (Gary Paulsen) | Main character is named Brian. This book goes well with the {My,On the Far} Side of the Mountain series. |
| The Giver (Lois Lowry) * | Movie was good. I read this because my grandmother, who was a school teacher, assigned this book for her students. |
| The Supernaturalist (Eoin Colfer) | Ended on a promising sequel setup, but as of 2007, only a rough outline of the alleged second book exists. I am not hopeful. |
| Divergent (Veronica Roth) | |
| Code Talker (Joseph Bruchac) | One of a small number of war books I have read, but among the best. |
| The Darkest Minds (Alexandra Bracken) | Bad movie adaptation. |
| Harry Potter 1,5,6,7 (J. K. Rowling) | I have a lot to say about HP. My biggest complaint is that the worldbuilding is just plain bad (illogical and inconsistent). For example, it is impossible that the Weasleys are poor (magic can be trivially monetized, ie: duplicating currency), it is impossible that not a single wizard has defected and told the muggle world about the existence of wizards, it is ridiculous that the Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix were in a state of "war", yet no muggle weapons are even considered. In many ways, my complaints boil down to the fact that the author had to make the series "PG" rated. The explanation for most of these issues is that "Wizards don't concern themselves with the muggle world", or some sort of false sense of superiority preventing wizards from adopting muggle technology. This is pretty weak... Having a moral superiority over something doesn't mean you can't learn from it. Also, the tone is pretty inconsistent with respect to the "bad guys". They should have been way more ruthless and intelligent. Voldemort makes all of his horcruxes famous objects because he's vain? Come on. It really feels like the author wanted to make a point about genocide being bad, yet didn't want to actually to make an intelligent critique and instead set up this strawman of a villain that was kind of half assing "being bad". I really love digging through the lore of created worlds, and when they don't hold up to even basic inspection, it makes me angry! |
| Artemis Fowl Series (Eoin Colfer) * | I still think about the cool transportation system the elves used where they would predict geothermal events and ride the blast up tunnels to the surface. |
| Inheritance Cycle [Eragon, ...] (Christopher Paolini) * | This was my favorite book when I was a young child. I loved how the story had multiple narrators and the world the author created really felt worth exploring. |
| The Compound (S. A. Bodeen) | |
| The City of Ember (Jeanne DuPrau) | |
| The Green Glass Sea (Ellen Klages) | |
| Half Moon Investigations (Eoin Colfer) | Totally different tone from the other sci-fi titles this author has (Artemis Fowl, The Supernaturalist). |
| Frindle (Andrew Clements) | |
| Seabiscuit (Laura Hillenbrand) | |
| Holes (Louis Sachar) | |
| My Side of the Mountain, On the Far Sides of the Mountain (Jean George) | Really excellent kids book about a boy running away from home and living in the Catskills. This one shows spends a lot of time discussing respect for nature and friendship with animals, as well as the importance of self sufficiency. |
| Tales of the Greek Heroes (Roger Lancelyn Green) | |
| Gloomy Gus (Walt Morey) | I read this one over the course of a semester in middle school, one sitting at a time, every week. It is not about a sad human, but the relationship between a boy and a bear (the animal). |
| The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton) | |
| The Thief Lord (Cornelia Funke) * | One of the main characters "Scipio" was my hero. |
| Leviathan (Scott Westerfield) | I would like to see this adapted as a movie. The concept of WW1 being fought between animal and machine powered nations could be visually stunning. |
| Snow Treasure (Marie McSwigan) | |
| The Haunting of Freddy (Dietlof Reiche) | This is the only book I have read that uses a non-standard font / page layout / color schemes. |
| Flipped (Wendelin Van Draanen) | |
| Alex Rider Series [Stormbreaker, ...] (Anthony Horowitz) | |
| A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking) | Relax, it was the illustrated version. I was not actually reading Stephen Hawking in elementary school. |
| The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain) | I'm not sure I actually finished this one, I will follow up again with it in 2023. |
| Percy Jackson Series (Rick Riordan) | First book that I really got into reading. I remember being caught in class in 5th grade reading this book when I should have been following along with a lesson. |
| The Reluctant Pitcher (Matt Christopher) | Probably other MC books as well, they are all sports books for kids |
| Spy X: The Code (Peter Lerangis) | I learned about the concept of a "skeleton key" from this book, I think the main character has one. |
| By The Great Horn Spoon (Sid Fleischman) | |
| Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scott O'Dell) | I believe I read this in 4th grade. Pretty bloody for a kids book! |
| Top Secret (John Reynolds Gardiner) | 2nd grade maybe? |
| Magic Tree House (Mary Pope Osborne) | I read a bunch of these throughout 1st-3rd grade. |
To read maybe?: The disappearing spoon, Just for Fun (book about linus torvalds), On death and dying, Crime and Punishment, LoTR, Uncle Tom's Cabin, River Out of Eden, Illium (dan simmons), Starmaker, Canticle for Leibowitz, John Crowley (Ka, Little Big), Lord of Light
As of the end of 2019, I do most of my reading on a e-reader (Kindle) because I have found this method to be much cheaper than buying books.
I use the free and open source application Calibre to manage my digital library and I download my books from the following websites:
- Standard EBooks (https://standardebooks.org/)
- Z-Library (https://z-library.se/)
- Project Gutenburg (https://www.gutenberg.org/)
- Library Genesis (https://libgen.is/)