Suggestions for Reading:
free audiobooks:
If you like something you've already read and want something fairly similar, try this out.
Find out what's popular right now on The New York Times Best-Sellers List.
- Type in what you liked, and this website will show you books that other people who like that also like -- if that makes sense. It's simpler than I'm making it sound...
Find out what's popular right now on The New York Times Best-Sellers List.
If you came here for my suggestions, here are a few:
Fantasy:
Science Fiction:
Thriller:
History:
Books I teach:
Fantasy:
- My favorite books of all time are in The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss.
- This epic fantasy follows the life story of the narrator.
- When he was still a boy, his parents were murdered by 7 evil beings, the Chandrian, who kill anyone who learns about them.
- The boy needs to find a way to learn about them and how to fight them without drawing their attention...
- The first book is The Name of the Wind, and the second is The Wise Man's Fear.
- Hopefully the third book comes out soon...
- The Game of Thrones series and the Harry Potter books are also books I'd highly recommend, by the way.
- And I can't leave out J.R.R. Tolkien's works (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion) as well as The Chronicles of Narnia, by Tolkien's good friend C.S. Lewis.
Science Fiction:
- I thoroughly enjoyed the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.
- If you like any video games at all, you'd probably love this book. The main character is trying to win a contest in a virtual-reality universe that includes playing video games and acting out parts of some of our favorite movies, such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Meanwhile, an evil corporation is trying to find where the best players in the game actually live in the "real world" in order to kill them...
- Another book by the same author is called Armada.
- Wouldn't it be great if we needed videogame players to defend the world? Then all of our gaming skills would actually be productive!
- Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is another great book.
- It's similar in some ways to Ernest Cline's books (plus it came first). Aliens have previously attacked Earth, and we barely pushed them back. Because of his mental abilities, Ender is chosen as a young boy to undergo training and selection to find the leader for Earth's defenses for when the aliens come back.
- Mr. Baumgartner recommended The Long Earth to me, and I really liked it.
- It's the first book of the series by the same name. Here's some of the plot summary from Wikipedia: The "Long Earth" is a (possibly infinite) series of parallel worlds that are similar to Earth, which can be reached by using an inexpensive device called a "Stepper." The "close" worlds are almost identical to "our" Earth (referred to as "Datum Earth"), others differ in greater and greater details, but all share one similarity: on none are there, or have there ever been, Homo sapiens.
Thriller:
- If you're OK with a CIA agent torturing and even killing terrorists (at least in fiction), check out Vince Flynn's books.
- The first one I read was Memorial Day, which is about al-Qaeda planning to detonate a nuke in Washington, D.C., on Memorial Day. The main character finds out about it just before it's too late, and he has to take extreme measures to try to stop it in time...
- The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton is another book I read that I think most students would really enjoy.
- The narrator is a young man writing in prison, and he writes about how he hasn't been able to speak since he was eight years old, how that played a part in his toying around with combination locks and door locks until he figured out how to pick them, and then how that led to getting sucked into the criminal world. It was a very entertaining read, perhaps especially since you know from the beginning that he's in prison.
History:
- If history is more your thing, you might like Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad, by William Craig: Russians vs. Germans in World War II. The movie by the same name was based on the sniper "duel" during the battle.
- Maus, by Art Spiegelman, was the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize.
- The book depicts the author's conversations with his father, a Holocaust survivor.
- The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris.
- The Librarian of Auschwitz, by Antonio Iturbe.
- All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, is set during World War II.
- It follows a young German boy who is quite good at understanding radio technology, a blind French girl with a secret given to her by her father (who was a locksmith at a museum in Paris), and a Nazi gemologist trying to find a priceless gem that went missing from the museum.
Books I teach:
- You may like some of the books I teach in my English classes. Some are amazing works of art and imagination.
- Students in my One vs. Society class read quite a selection of excellent books:
- Students in my Historical Fiction class read some great books as well:
- Students in my AP English class are required to read a bunch of books on their own, but together we read the following: