Book List Part 2

I was going back over my list from last week over my favorite books of all time. As I said in that post, if you asked me on three separate days what my favorite book is, you would likely receive three different answers.

But looking over my list, I started to notice that the vast majority of my choices were from the fantasy or adventure genres. Plus, it wasn't even all that complete. I started to come up with a few other options and I realized that I needed to add to my list.

I'm going to acknowledge right here that this list and my previous list only covers works of fiction. I'll probably make a non-fiction list at some point, but I'm going to try to keep this at least respectably concise.

Saint Maybe - I love this book, and it's different from the typical book I read because it's so focused on domestic life. The story follows the life of Ian Bedloe, who inadvertently causes his older brother's suicide and then must care for his now-orphaned nieces and nephew. Ian throws himself into his "burden" of raising the children and forsakes all the earthly pleasures he would have likely pursued had he not done his horrible deed and sought repentance. Seeing how the author, Anne Tyler, develops her characters over the course of several years makes the book so much more satisfying than if it had covered a short period of time.

The Shining - The first Stephen King novel I'd ever read. And it's not nearly as similar to the movie as I thought it would be. It was the first time I'd been introduced to such painful foreshadowing in a novel. King purposefully projects almost exactly what will happen in the novel right from the beginning, and it carries the force of seeing a steamroller approaching a cripple from a mile away. It's horrible. You know it's coming. There's nothing you can do to stop it but watch it happen.

Lonesome Dove - Oh those sad, sad, cowboys. Being a cowboy must have been fun, right? A glorified herder despised by most of society. And yet McMurtry pulls at the ol' heartstrings following Gus and Call on a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. Reading this book is a bit of an epic undertaking, and McMurtry treats it like an epic journey. This was assigned in a college course titled Literature of the American West and was the most exciting work for me that year.