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Novels I want my kids to read

A couple of months ago, I started a list of books I wanted my kids to read when they approached adulthood. While I am no literary buff and basically uneducated, as witnessed by my skirting of  the classics, these novels are among the ones that opened my mind.

Since I have the world’s worst memory, there are a probably a hundred more that should be here, but have slipped through the cracks of my brain.

Gunter Grass. The Flounder. The Tin Drum. etc.

Thomas Pynchon.  V. Mason & Dixon. and so on.

Jim Dodge. FUP.

Joseph Heller. Catch 22.

Naguib Mahfouz. Midaq Alley

Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness.

Herman Hess.  Siddartha.

William Boyd. The Destiny of Nathalie X.

Graham Green - all and anything by him

Douglas Adams. Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy.

Ken Kesey. One flew over the Cuckoos Nest.

Gabriel Garcia Marques. Love in the time of cholera. 100 Years of Solitude.

Ante Andric.  Bridge over the river Drina.

Ben Okri. The famished road.

Moses Isegawa. The Abyssinian Chronicles.

Tim Robbins.   Still life with Woodpecker

John Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men.

Cormac McCarthy. Border Trilogy

Evelyn Waugh. Scoop.

Albert Camus. The Stranger

Franz Kafka. The Trial

JRR Tolkien. Lord of the Rings.

Richard Adams. Watership Down.

John Updike.   take your pick.

John Irving. The World According to Garp.

 

Aug 31, 2011 | Opinion

  • Leonie Marinovich

    An eye opener for me was:-
    Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird (Read as a teenager in apartheid South Africa)
    V.S.Naipaul. A Bend in the River (Read when I moved back to Jozi in 2000)
    Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart ( I bought this in Calabar at the airport in 2010)
    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Half of a Yellow Sun (absolutely brilliant)
    Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm Brothers’ Fairytales – this shaped my expectations as a girl (knight-shining armour…)
    Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina (first Russian novel I managed to enjoy, though I did work my way through WAR & PEACE ;-) and enjoyed it)
    Gabriel Garcia Marques – Love in the time of Cholera (most brilliant love story ever, to counteract all those fairytales)
    Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook (made a huge impression on me at the time I read it – early 20′s)
    Laura Esquivel – Like water for chocolate

    For now the books I’m looking forward to reading to them:
    Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
    The Swiss Family Robinson,
    The Hardy Boys (esp the earlier stuff where they travel all over the world)
    Isabel Allende’s Children’s Series about Alexander Cole and his grandmother.

    And a lot from your list above, I’ll be adding… a nice thing to leave our kids.

  • Christopher Sherlock

    Norman Maclean: ‘A river runs through it.’

  • Marinovichg

    thanks guys .. and you know that this is just part one of my list ..

    g

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_KFBSGMZXLP3MTXVHDQFTCNRJ2E olivier

    Two eye opener amongst a lot of others for me :
    Kurt Vonnegut “Mother Night”
    Norman Mailer “The naked and the dead”

  • Riteshuttamchandani

    Hate to say it, but it’s Tom Robbins, methinks you mis-spelt it as Tim! Also how about Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and The Sea of Stories and Spike Milligan’s Silly Verse For Kids!

  • Leonie

    The Red Tent – Anita Diamant (for our daughter)

Array