What works of fiction would you recommend?

Question

I find it really difficult to find truly good, satisfying novels, and I could really use some help. Any suggestions would be highly appreciated. This may be a challenge, as I'm a little hard to please, but I have faith that some book snob out there in Yahoo! Answers land will know just the book for me.

Here's a little about my preferences, just to give some idea:

-I generally read memoir, so I definitely appreciate first person narration when I read fiction. Third person becomes a little distracting to me after a while, though it's not a dealbreaker.

-I just finished reading <i>The Time Traveler's Wife</i>. I almost always avoid reading bestsellers, because they are too often either total crap, but I quite enjoyed this one.

-I'm a writer, and I am very critical of the way things are written, diction, grammar, and the rhythmic flow of a piece of writing, so if a book is not well-written, I simply will not get through it.

-My favorite fiction writers are Gabriel García Márquez and Jhumpa Lahiri, and I also love Jane Austen, Tim O'Brien, Charles Bukowski, Sylvia Plath, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

-I'm not going to read <i>Twilight</i>.

-Before I read <i>The Time Traveler's Wife</i> the last novel I read was <The Abortionist's Daughter</i>, which I think suggests something about annoyingly dull titles.

-I recently purchased <i>The 19th Wife</i> and <i>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</i>, and haven't gotten around to them yet, just because I haven't been in the mood for either of them, but I am looking forward to both.

-I'm a college student, and my research interests include confessional literature, fundamentalist Mormon polygamy, feminism, the pro-choice and pro-life movements, and the concept of virginity, so novels that touch on these subjects, happen within one of those contexts, or hold related themes will likely be quite interesting to me.

Additional Details

Thank you! <i>Dracula</i> has actually been on my to-read list, and I had forgotten about it. And Charlotte Perkins Gilman is another favorite of mine--"The Yellow Wallpaper" is amazing.

And, of course, I just realized not that HTML does not work here, so please excuse how awful that looks!

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

Though our interests may be slightly different, based on the authors you mentioned, I have some recommendations for you. First and foremost, I applaud your taste in literature, as I too am fond of the writers you mentioned. (I refuse to read 'Twilight' as well).

Based on your interest in Tim O'Brien, try Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse Five', and Khaled Hosseini's 'The Kite Runner.'

Based on your interest in Jane Austen, try Tillie Olsen and Virginia Woolf.

It may not be your prefered genre, but I also highly suggest the prose poetry and various writings of Charles Baudelaire.

Based on your research interests, you may want to read the short story "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway if you haven't already done so.

I hope this list is helpful, and you enjoy the literature as much as I do.

Good Luck!

Source(s):

I admit I'm a book snob.

Asker's Rating:

Asker's Comment:

Thanks lots! I'll take many of these suggestions with me to the bookstore.

Answer 2

You might like "Dracula." It is a classic and is told from several first-person points of view.

Answer 3

It sounds like you might enjoy the works of Charlotte Perkins-Gilman. Try The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories. She was, I believe, one of the finer feminist writers out there.

Answer 4

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Traveler's Gift by Andy Andrews
any of Dan Brown's books

Answer 5

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Beloved by Toni Morrison and Blindness by Jose Saramago...

To Kill a Mockingbird and Beloved are both classics and are both amazing

Blindness is new but is bound to become a classic. It was made into a really awful movie but the book is about an epidemic of blindness and the government starts quarantining the blind citizens but one man's wife pretends she is blind so she can protect him, so she is the only one who can see all the disturbing things happening around them. It is amazingly written. Very complicated and multilayered though. For instance, there is no punctuation (no commas no quotations when people speak) and none of the characters have names, they all are named "the doctor's wife" or "the girl with the dark glasses"


To Kill and Beloved are both Pulitzer Prize winners and Saramago won a Nobel prize after writing Blindness.

Source(s):

To Kill a Mockingbird: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Kill_A_Mocking_Bird

Beloved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beloved_%28novel%29

Blindness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindness_%28novel%29