Book List 75-100

Note that none of these books are in any particular order.

5/5 rating
Eat Pray Love – Easy read. A book that just makes you feel good about life.
Ishmael – Says a lot about the world that I hope people feel, even if they don't recognize it.
Call of the Wild – This is referenced in almost every single non-fiction book about the environment or environmental protection. I can see people reading this as kids and wanted to be like the character and go savage.
Wilderness and the American Mind – History of the environmental movement. Interesting for me to see how all these events that I referenced in class affected each other.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Who can resist the magic of Harry Potter!? I can't. This is the not the first time I've read this, but it was just as good the second time around.

4/5
Ahabs Wife – A female companion to Moby Dick.
The Alchemist – Beautiful writing, interesting story.
A Farewell to Arms – I love Hemingway as an author.
The Sex Lives of Cannibals – Hilarious travel writer, who I wish Paul Thereux was.
Into the Wild – A person who decided to go against what society taught him and live his life as he saw fit.
The Time Travelers Wife – I watched the movie too, and the book contains much more of the story than the book does.
Walden – Take Thoreau with a grain of salt. His life didn't mimic the epic myth that we all chalk him up to. But he's still a great writer and has a lot of important ideas to share with the world.
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince – Great series in general.
War and Peace – Epic.
Tortilla Flat – Steinbecks retelling of King Arthur and the knights of the round table.

3/3
Lies my Teacher Told Me – How to better teach history.
The Scarlet Letter – It was OK. I expected a bit more from Nathaniel Hawthorn.
The Diary of Anne Frank – A book that I feel like I should have read before now.
Extreamly Loud and Incredibly Close – If you liked his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, you'd like this.
Robinson Crusoe – A jolly good holiday on a deserted island.
Under the Banner of Heaven – Mormon religion, from Krakaurs perspective. Honestly I like his books about man vs nature much better than man vs God.
Boy – Dahls childhood.
The 19th Wife – An interesting companion to Under the Banner of Heaven.
Sweet Thursday – Steinbeck, enough said.
The Places In Between – a man hikes across Afghanistan.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – coming of age story, similar to Catcher in the Rye.

So after having read 100 books, here are a few other lists:

Best Book:
Travels with Charley – John Steinbeck is my most favorite author and the story of him as a 60 year old man going on a cross country road trip with his dog is fantastic. The best book I've ever read. Not necessarily profound or challenging, but my favorite all the same.

Books I really tried to read, but couldn't get through:
Bury My Heart and Wounded Knee – the history of Native American peoples, after the white people came. While I do think that people should know all the underhanded things that were done to the Native Americans, reading hundreds of pages, upon hundreds of pages about the same thing got tedious. I can sum the whole book, the white people came, did some morally hideous things to Native populations and drove them out of their own land, they then put them on reservations, and/or killed them. The story is important. I just couldn't get through the same story over and over again.
Breaking Dawn – I got within 100 pages of finishing and couldn't do it anymore. Stephanie Meyer what happened? It's like she felt she could go all willy nilly with the last novel. My two favorite characters, Alice and Jasper, weren't around for the majority of the book, I realized I couldn't stand Bella and Edward without Alice and Jasper there to balance them out. And Renesme or whatever the name that they gave their child, seriously? And what the sperm of the undead impregnated Bella? And then Jacob imprints on this little girl who seems to age very rapidly until she's 16 or so and then stops? Stephanie.... this is too much.
Reading Lolita in Tehran – I couldn't relate to anything. I hadn't read any of the books that were heavily referenced, and I'm pretty sure if I met the author in real life I would find her a bit obnoxious.
The Ugly American – I got 10 pages in and it was torture. I figured if this was an indication as to how the rest of the book was going to go I'd rather just put it back on the shelf.
The Ginger man – Within the first 10-15 pages the main character (who the back said you would learn to love even though he was an asshole) cheated on his wife, beat his girlfriend, and professed to being an alcoholic. I frankly didn't want to learn to love this man and got so angry at this book that I threw it against the wall. As if to answer my anger the next book had an epitaph that quoted H. G. Wells “Read the best books first because you may not get the chance to read them all.”
Favorite Authors: John Steinbeck
Joseph Conrad
Edward Abbey
Aldo Leopold
Bill Bryson