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Kate De Gennaro
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The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
James Mustich
As story and as media phenomenon, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games is at the top of the pile of wildly popular dystopian teen fiction that has dominated twenty-first-century bestseller lists (in no small part by appealing to readers well beyond their teen years). In the nation of Panem, power and ...show more
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Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn
Gone Girl is the story of a marriage’s unraveling and the suspicion that falls on the husband in the wake of his wife’s disappearance. But it is author Gillian Flynn’s knowing exploitation of the intimate pact between writer and reader, her head-turning violation of it, that tightens the story's gri...show more
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
Just read it. This book will change your life, and maybe your death... a beautiful, funny, heartbreaking and uplifting piece of art. I don’t know how she can state something so simply which also conveys the deepest human feelings. Brilliant.
The Invisible Man
H. G. Wells
“My fantastic stories,” Wells once wrote, “do not pretend to deal with possible things. They aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as one gets in a gripping good dream.” That’s certainly an accurate description of the target hit by The Invisible Man—although, by the end of the book, delic...show more
American Prometheus
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin are well aware of the mysteries surrounding the brilliant man most famous for his role as director of the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb. It is a paradoxical but undeniable measure of their achievement in this magnificent biography that their scho...show more
Life Among the Savages
Shirley Jackson
As I was reading this book I felt a bit "meh". It was good, but was it worth this list? After I finished I agreed it was, definitely.
The book is understated. It is funny, but subtle - the kind of funny that makes you guffaw under your breath instead of cackle out loud. But that is its genius. Jack...show more
The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown
This is obviously no literary masterpiece, but it is a good introduction to the "dad book". It is a primary example of the contemporary genre that combine rich and accurate historical references to a modern day thiller/mystery.