The best book I ever read: a Blog Off post
Every two weeks, the blogosphere comes alive with something referred to as a Blog Off. A Blog Off is an occasion where bloggers of every stripe weigh in on the same topic on the identical day. The topic for this round of the Blog Off is "What's the best ebook you ever examine?"
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This is a tough one and I'm having a hard time narrowing it down to just one. I've been a prolific reader my whole life and different periods have always revolved around different books. I remember reading Alex Haley's Roots when I was in sixth grade and I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever read.
In high school I bounced between Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace. When I went away to college I was all about Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage until I ran into John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire. I thought that was the most profound thing I'd ever read. A couple of years later I stumbled across John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and it held the title of best book I ever read for a number of years.
I learned to examine once I changed into around four and because then I've cycled thru limitless Best Books I Ever Read. Whether fiction or non-fiction, there's always been something on the top of the pile. But I think the last ten years or so have brought with them a much less flexible experience of the Best Books. I actually have my lifetime favorites of route and I do go lower back and re-examine some of them from time to time. But now not they all are great. These same final ten years have had me gravitating in the direction of the social complaint (fiction and non-) from the overdue nineteenth early part of the 20th Centuries.
The instances we stay in now are largely the end result of societal shifts that occurred over the last a hundred years. Going back and studying what became a modern-day observation from 1890 and seeing how times have modified or not changed because then is ad infinitum charming to me. It drives domestic the point that history is a continuum and that I'm a part of that equal continuum. It additionally tells me that people have always been people. We have the identical emotional variety, irrespective of the technology and the times. There's nothing I sense or assume today that hasn't been felt or thought in an countless loop seeing that Homo sapiens first graced the scene.
So with that said, there are 3 books that sit on the pinnacle of my favourite ebook pantheon and that they've help that spot for a while. I'm positive it's going to shift with time but on 31 August 2011, those three books are:
Jacob Riis' How The Other Half Lives. In 1890, Jacob Riis exposed the horrific conditions that New York's tenement dwellers lived in. Due to his book and its accompanying photographs, there arose a movement to clean up the inner cities in this country and at the same time a sense that there are minimum standards in which people should live and that it's in a society's best interest to establish and enforce those minimum standards.
Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt from 1922 is a scathing indictment of conformity, suburban and bohemian alike. George F. Babbitt is a Realtor and early in the novel his professional life's described as making "nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry,” but that he is “nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.” It's scathing and prescient at the same time. Lewis wasn't the first to point out the holes in the American dream but I don't think anyone's ever done it better.
Finally, John Steinbeck's 1939 masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath holds a place so near and dear to me I struggle to find words to describe what an important work it is. Most people are forced to read Grapes when they're in high school and that's unfortunate. Few 17 year olds have the life experience to appreciate what goes on between the covers of that novel. In some ways it picks up where Babbitt left off. The Grapes of Wrath is all about the dark underbelly of capitalism, and underbelly that's become vogue to ignore again. If you haven't read The Grapes of Wrath since high school, read it again. If you've never read, read it for the first time. Read it before the next election.
What approximately you? What book or books keep the identify excellent to your international?
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As the day goes on, the rest of the participants in today's Blog Off will appear miraculously at the end of this post. Keep checking back and check out everybody's posts. You can follow along in Twitter as well, just look for the hashtag #LetsBlogOff. If you'd like more information about about the Blog Off or if you'd like to see the results of previous Blog Offs, you can find the main website here .