Every week The Broke and The Bookish host a meme for book lovers to post and get the chance to check out everyone else’s responses. This week’s topic is:
Top Ten Books that Make You “Think”
(about important topics, events, people, places)
1. Fireboat by Maira Kalman
The John J. Harvey fireboat was the largest, fastest, shiniest fireboatof its time, but by 1995, the city didn’t need old fireboats anymore. So the Harvey retired, until a group of friends decided to save it from the scrap heap. Then, one sunny September day in 2001, something so horrible happened that the whole world shook. And a call came from the fire department, asking if the Harvey could battle the roaring flames. In this inspiring true story, Maira Kalman brings a New York City icon to life and proves that old heroes never die.
-This book serves as a way to discuss 9/11 with children and it just reminds me of where I was when the towers fell.
2. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
This one is pretty self explanatory, I haven’t eaten at a McDonald’s or Hardee’s since.
3.Behind the Mask of Chivalry by Nancy MacLean
The synopsis of this book is too long to post here, but it basically is a book that details the history and rise of the second Ku Klux Klan. I had to read this for one of my history courses, and any time I even see the spine I can only imagine the atrocities that happened because of skin color.
4. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. . . . Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.
–Most Holocaust books tug on my heart strings, but this book is told from the point of view of Death and it is beautifully haunting.
5. Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin
Part love story, part literary mystery, Melanie Benjamin’s spellbinding historical novel leads readers on an unforgettable journey down the rabbit hole, to tell the story of a woman whose own life became the stuff of legend. Her name is Alice Liddell Hargreaves, but to the world she’ll always be known simply as “Alice,” the girl who followed the White Rabbit into a wonderland of Mad Hatters, Queens of Hearts, and Cheshire Cats. Now, nearing her eighty-first birthday, she looks back on a life of intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. First as a young woman, then as a wife, mother, and widow, she’ll experience adventures the likes of which not even her fictional counterpart could have imagined. Yet from glittering balls and royal romances to a world plunged into war, she’ll always be the same determined, undaunted Alice who, at ten years old, urged a shy, stuttering Oxford professor to write down one of his fanciful stories, thus changing her life forever.
-Even though this book is a work of fiction, it makes me think of the hard lives that child literary muses live. Christopher Robin, Peter Pan…the children that inspired those incredible children’s stories suffered in the spotlight of their literary counterparts. Benjamin does an EXCELLENT job of exploring that.
6. Animal Farm by George Orwell
Most people are familiar with this novel, but after doing my Master’s Thesis on in the influence of Marxism in literature, I cannot help but think how it would be if Orwell’s novel predicted the reaction of humans to the condition.
7. Madhouse- Megalomania and Modern Medicine by Andrew T. Scull
This is a book exploring the historical mistreatment of the mentally ill and the many, many terrible experiments performed on them. Even now I have a soft spot for asylums and mental patients after reading this.
8. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.
-This book makes me think about the loneliness that McCandless must have felt during his last days, and how I would never want or wish that for myself or anyone.
9. Stolen: A Letter To My Captor by Lucy Christopher
This is a novel that a former kidnapping victim wrote in the second person to her former captor. This is an extremely interesting exploration of the human condition when exposed to a hostile situation. The question of Stockholm Syndrome is fascinating in this novel.
10. American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
American Born Chinese tells the story of three apparently unrelated characters: Jin Wang, who moves to a new neighborhood with his family only to discover that he’s the only Chinese-American student at his new school; the powerful Monkey King, subject of one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables; and Chin-Kee, a personification of the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, who is ruining his cousin Danny’s life with his yearly visits. Their lives and stories come together with an unexpected twist in this action-packed modern fable. American Born Chinese is an amazing ride, all the way up to the astonishing climax.
– This novel is an amazing telling of how modern racism still exists and how the culture of those races suffers under the eye of some Americans.
I’d love to hear some recommendations of books that make YOU think! Suggestions? Leave them in the comments.
Moving! 