What to Read Next?

Booklovers everywhere can find themselves vacillating between two poles: the pole called So Many Books, So Little Time – and the pole we could call Whatever Shall I Read Next That’s Going to Be As Wonderful as This Book I’ve Just Finished?

Our anxiety about finding a really good next read can cause us to forget that other readers have read - and loved – some really great books! And while there’s no accounting for taste when it comes to what you, specifically, might enjoy, another bibliophile’s fave can pan out to be one of yours.

The Internet, of course, is one source of reader recommendations. For example, you can find FlavorWire’s list of ten famous writers’ favorite books here. There are thousands of similar book lists on the Internet, which Mr. Google can help you find.

There are also plenty of books devoted to valorizing particular titles, such as the 2007 title whose cover is featured here. This book features summaries of 544 different titles cited by 125 different writers. A compilation of simiar book-recommening titles can be found sprinkled throughout the Atlanta Booklover’s Blog’s  ”Books about Books“ section. You don’t have to buy these books: you can borrow them from your local library.

Finally, there are databases available that try to identify books with similar locales, writing styles, time periods, etc. One of the best is NoveList, available  to anyone with an Atlanta-Fulton Public Library borrower’s card. (You’ll find a list of databases on the library system’s website.)

With all these resources – plus whatever you may have scribbled down onto (or input electronically into) your own personal TBA (To Be Read) list – we hope you’ll never have to wait too long between One Amazing Read and The Next One.

The Mother of All Book Lists?

Largehearted Boy continues to post, in one place, the gazillions of online “Best Books of 2011″ lists he’s been able to find.

You’ll find in this meta-list all sorts of general lists, exquisitly specific lists, zany lists, and lists in all these categories that are conveniently confined to fiction or nonfiction. If you’re in the market for The Next Great Read, you might want to scroll down through this treasure-trove of “bests.”

Incidentally, Largehearted Boy (the blog, not the blogger, David Gutowski ) recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. Congratulations, David, and thanks for all the lists over the years!

Found via the Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy

Some “Best Books of 2011″ Lists

• Salon’s Best Fiction of 2011
• Time Magazine’s Top 10 Fiction Book s of 2011.
• Time Magazine’s Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2011.

There are links to dozens of more lists at Largehearted Boy’s Online “Best of 2011″ Book Lists

Good Mystery Writers: A Reader’s Recommendations

If you enjoy reading mystery novels and happen to be in the market for some suggestions about which mystery to tackle next, read on.

The following information was provided by John Fears, a long-time mystery reader who, along with his wife Joanna, is a frequent user of the library system’s Ponce de Leon Branch, via Ponce staffer Anne Vagts.

Start with Agatha Christie, the queen of mystery writers. She has sold more books than any other mystery writer, ever, and more books period, than almost everybody else in any genre. There is a very good reason why she has been able to do that. My wife got me hooked on mysteries by “feeding” Agatha Christie to me as soon as we married. She started me on the best ones. Like all authors who write more than one book, there are differences in quality among Christie’s books: some are transcendent, some are great, some are merely good, some are average, and some don’t measure up to the standards of her better efforts. Christie doesn’t give you great characterization, except for her main characters, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Christie’s command of English grammar is not that great. When she is “on her game,” which is most of the time, what she does give you is a good view of human nature and pure logic. There are never any surprises – Christie gives you the essential clues to her mysteries somewhere between the first page and the middle of each book. Most of the time, though, she will fool you. Anyway, here are the ones that my wife Joanna thinks are Christie’s best:

Cards on the Table
13 at Dinner
Ten Little Indians (aka And Then There Were None)
Appointment With Death
Crooked House
The Hollow (aka Murder After Hours)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd¹
What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw
The Mirror Crack’d
Sad Cypress
Peril at End House
4:10 From Paddington

Following is an alphabetic list of other mystery authors that Joanna and/or I have enjoyed. If we enjoyed everything we read by an author, only the author’s name is listed. Where I list one or more titles, it may mean that we liked only those, or it may mean that those are all that we have here at home and I can’t recall other titles, or it may mean that that those were the only ones that we liked by that author and thought that others were inferior.

Isaac Asimov, A Whiff of Death²

Robert Barnard
Anthony Berkeley, Trial and Error
Charity Blackstock: Dewey Death, The Woman in the Woods
Nicholas Blake³
John & Emery Bonett: Dead Lion, A Banner For Pegasus
Christiana Brand: Green For Danger,⁴ Fog of Doubt, Tour de Force, Suddenly, at His Residence
W. J. Burley, especially Charles and Elizabeth, The House of Care, The Schoolmaster⁵

Alison Cairns, Strained Relations
Dorothy Cannell⁶
David Carkeet, Double Negative
Sarah Caudwell
Elizabeth Chaplin [pseudonym of Jill McGown]: Hostage to Fortune
Jill Churchill: Grime and Punishment, The Merchant of Menace, etc.⁷  
Anna Clarke
Douglas Clark, Premedicated Murder
Susan Claudia: Clock and Bell, Mrs. Barthelme’s Madness
Deborah Crombie, Mourn Not Your Dead
Ursula Curtiss

Mary Daheim: This Old Souse, Viagra Falls, Bantam of the Opera, etc.⁸
L. P. Davies: especially The Shadow Before, What Did I Do Tomorrow, Artificial Man, White Room⁹
D. M. Devine, My Brother’s Killer
Cohn Dexter, especially The Daughters of Cain

Mignon Eberhart, The Chiffon Scarf¹⁰
Margaret Erskine, No. 9 Belmont Square
Max Ehrlich, Last Train to Babylon

Rae Foley¹¹      
Leslie Ford: Murder in Maryland (among others)
C. S. Forester, Payment Deferred

Dorothy Gardiner, The 7^th Mourner
Dorothy Gilman, The Tightrope Walker
E. X. Giroux, A Death for Adonis
C. W. Grafton, Beyond A Reasonable Doubt
Caroline Graham: A Place of Safety, Faithful Unto Death, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, Murder at Maddingley Grange

Cyril Hare
H. F. Heard, A Taste for Honey
Joan Hess¹²  
Georgette Heyer¹³ 
Reginald Hill
S. B. Hough, Fear Fortune, Father

Sebastien Japrisot, Trap for Cinderella

Lane Kauffmann:¹⁴ Waldo and The Perfectionist

John le Carre: A Murder of Quality, Call For the Dead
Elizabeth Lemarchand

William March, The Bad Seed¹⁵

Ngaio Marsh
Sharyn McCrumb, Sick of Shadows
Patricia McGerr: Fatal in My Fashion, The Seven Deadly Sisters
Jill McGown¹⁶

Margaret Millar
Hubert Monteilhet: Return From the Ashes, The Praying Mantises¹⁷

Sheila Radley
Ruth Rendell: especially Make Death Love Me, A Judgment in Stone
Mary Roberts Rinehart: especially The Yellow Room, The Swimming Pool, The Breaking Point, The Circular Staircase
James Ronald, Murder in Family

Julian Symons

Josephine Tey

June Thomson
Simon Troy, Swift to Its Close

Michael Underwood, Hand of Fate

Henry Wade: A Dying Fall, The Hanging Captain, Heir Presumptive
Cohn Watson, Coffin Scarcely Used
Anna Mary Wells, A Talent for Murder

Margaret Yorke

Additional recommendations:

• If you are interested in reincarnation, you would probably enjoy An Old Captivity by Nevil Shute or Frank De Felitta’s Audrey Rose (also a good movie).
• If you are anti-war, you might enjoy On the Beach by Nevil Shute (and the movie based on it – but read the book first).
• Another favorite author is B. J. Chute, who wrote Greenwillow, Katie, An Impertinent Fairy Tale, and The Fields Are White. Actually, I think that Beatrice Joy Chute is perhaps the best writer I have ever read. Closely following, or perhaps equally good, Shirley Jackson. My two favorite Shirley Jackson novels are We Have Always Lived In the Castle and The Sundial.

Notes:

¹Most people think that this one is one of her best, but as I figured out early on who the murderer was early on, I am not in complete agreement with Joanna on this one.
²Asimov is known primarily for his science fiction novels, but this title is a mystery, and a good one.
³Joanna likes Blake more than I do.
⁴Also a very good movie.
⁵Burley also wrote a series of dectective mysteries featuring Chief Inspector Wycliffe, and most of them are good, and among my favorites.
⁶Most are funny. Joanna says “cute.” I haven’t read any of them.
⁷I haven’t read them, but Joanna likes them.
⁸I haven’t read them, but Joanna likes them.
⁹Davies writes hard-to-classify books (some are pseudo-mysteries, others are science fiction). Although there are 4 or 5 other titles that are very readable, there are one or two that are not so good. Anyway, Davies is worth checking out. He’s one of my favorites, at least for the half dozen or so that I really like.
¹⁰Eberhart wrote 1940’s to 1950’s suspense novels, sometimes very good. Joanna likes a number of Eberhart’s other titles.
¹¹Foley wrote suspense novels, similar to Eberhart’s, but wrote 10-20 years later.
¹²Hess’s books are funny. Joanna likes only the ones with Claire Malloy as the protagonist; I haven’t read any of them.
¹³Heyer wrote numerous English Regency period historical fiction books, which I have never read, but she also wrote eight very good mysteries, all very good and often funny, or at least sarcastic; one of my favorites.
¹⁴Sometimes spelled Kauffman or Kaufmann. His 1960s and 1970s novels resemble those of John O’Rara but, unlike O’Hara, he was very literate, and a good writer. Kauffman’s style is also similar to John Updike’s, as evidenced by Kaufmann’s Another Helen.
¹⁵Also a very good movie.
¹⁶McGown’s novels with the same detectives are best read in order because of the changing relationship of the two she created.
¹⁷Very good movies were based on both of these novels.

Indie Booksellers to Share Lists of Their Favorite Books

Every day for the next two months or so, Hans Weyandt, the co-owner of a bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota, will be posting to his blog a different list of 50 favorite books complied by some other independently-owned bookstore owner. (So far, Weyandt’s received lists from booksellers in over 17 different states.)

Weyandt has already posted his own Top 50 list, and together with the additional lists he’ll be posting daily, his readers will end up with well over a thousand titles of highly-recommended personal favorite titles from people who’ve read a lot of books in their time. Eventually, Weyandt will be posting a list of most-frequently-recurring titles from these lists, but in the meantime, you might want to chek Weyandt’s blog from time to time if you’re in need of some recommended titles of your next read.

Scanning down Weyandt’s list, we see among some familiar titles a lot of others we’ve never heard of, but the fact that all the titles are favorites make this unusual set of lists quite intriguing.

Found via Shelf Awareness

 

Recommended Books Written by Librarians

One of the major online booksellers has posted a list of 25 books – mostly novels – written by librarians.

Found by Atlanta Booklover’s Blog reader (and librarian)  Stephanie Atkinson

Best Books Adapted for Broadway?

The folks over at Word & Film have posted their list – and a video of a song from each – of the Top Ten Musicals Based on Books.

We were expecting to see the book that spawned Mame in the list, but it wasn’t included. See which musicals made the list.

Found via Shelf Awareness

Another “Best Fiction of All Times” List

Staffers at The New York Times Magazine were recently asked to list their favorite novels, then vote on the resulting list, and these are the titles they came up with.

Winner of the vote: Nabokov’s Lolita. Of course, the Magazine’s readers promptly chimed in with additional (i.e., overlooked) titles of their own, along with some caustic comments about some of the titles the Magazine’s staffers had chosen.

Be that as it may, you could still probably discover a few titles from the many worthies on this list to add to your own “To Be Read” list.

Found via Baby Got Books

Booklist du jour: The 100 Best Nonfiction Books

Yesterday the book editors of the UK-based Guardian posted to the newspaper’s website their list of all-time best nonfiction titles. The list is divided by topic (Art, Biography, Politics, etc.) and will no doubt garner a lot of comments from readers whose own favorites were omitted.

Two reminders:

• All of these books are available in Atlanta’s public libraries.
• We’ve included a link to this booklist in the Booklover’s Toolbox (under the heading Booklists).

Found via Shelf Awareness

 

Unusual Booklists: “10 Devastatingly Sad Books”

Flavorwire posted these annotated suggestions last week. And of course readers promtly chimed in with their own recommendations.

We’re not exactly sure when you might need such a list, but, reading moods being as wildly various as we know them to be, perhaps this list will in fact come in handy at some point – either for inspiration or as fair warning about particular titles you might have considered reading without knowing how relentlessly sad they apparently are.

Found via Baby Got Books