[A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens]

Overrated. Like all of Dickens.

[Recommendations on a good suspense thriller]

I just read "The Church on Foster Drive" by Taylor Y. Lime. It was a crime thriller/romance with college students as the main characters. I enjoyed it. As far as I know, it seems to be available only as a Kindle eBook.

[Looking for a new book/series]

If you like dystopian, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. It's just amazing.

[Looking for recommendations...]

You could try Nelson DeMille. He's a mystery writer. Several of his books revolve around a police officer or an investigator for the military. I would suggest The General's Daughter or Up country.

[Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust]

Reading Proust is completely worth the effort. I read the first two volumes (hope to read the last 4 at some point). While they do take a lot of time and effort to read, your life will be changed. Proust verbalizes things that you thought or knew about your own life but never recognized because you could not put them into words yourself. It is a novel about life, art, and the evolution of time. If you have ever felt saddened by the passing of time, you will enjoy Proust.

 

Additionally, if you enjoy music, it will please you to discover that Proust writes a lot about music. One of the major themes of the first volume is a piano sonata that comes to mean various things to the characters as they progress through time.

 

The other thing Proust is really famous for is his metaphors. Nowhere else will you find such extended, unexpected, and surprising metaphors, generated from nearly all topics of the text.

[Rebecca West]

I also read The Return of the Soldier. It was a short but well-written and touching novella.

[Ayn Rand]

In every one of Rand's "novels," the characters are cardboard cut-outs spewing her "philosophy" from their mouths instead of any real dialogue. The one thing that could almost be admired about Rand's work is the strong female protagonists--until you realize that Rand apparently has

a rape fetish, and all of her female protagonists undergo sexual assault at some point during these novel

. It is deeply upsetting that Rand works this in to books that, while ineffective, are supposed to be about individuals achieving happiness by pursuing their own ends. It still surprises me that a woman was capable of writing exceedingly long novels on the subject of the value of human life, then

condoning sexual violence against women

and basically marginalizing women as underlings to the male protagonists.

[Virginia Woolf]

If you want to read something by Woolf that's completely different from her other work, you might try Orlando. It's something of a mock epic, written not as stream-of-conciousness but in more mythical language combined with a modern focus on ordinary shortcomings.

[The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger]

I read Catcher in the rye in high school and didn't get it. I thought, what's the big deal? I read it again in college and my opinion completely changed. I thought it was one of the most touching books I've read. What I really liked about it is the sense of loss. It's hard to capture that in a character who hasn't truly lost something tangible. But Holden fears that he is about to lost something, even though he doesn't know what it is. Also, the part where he gives Penelope the broken record pieces is unforgettable.

[What are your top three classics?]

In Search of Lost Time by Proust

Mrs. Dalloway, Vigrinia Woolf

Pale Fire, Nabokov

[Haruki Murakami]

I find The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore to be his strongest novels. Both are some of my favorite novels of all time. But unfortunately 1Q84 was a rambling disappointment, despite its almost-promising moments with the stairs from the expressway and the two moons.