Embry’s Favorite Books

If you are running out of good books to read during this period of house arrest, Embry has some suggestions for you. She is always reading two or three books at at time and right now is in three book clubs. I don’t know how she does it but do know that the books I have read on her list are all good. Here is the list:
Books from Childhood and Adolescence
Bible Stories (as read by my grandmother)
Miss Minerva books (as read by my mother)
Betsy, Tacy, and Tibb—Maude Hart Lovelace
Anne of Green Gables—Lucy Maude Montgomery
Green Mansions—W.H. Hudson
Little Women—Luisa May Alcott
Jane Eyre– Charlotte Brontë
The Last of the Just– André Schwarz-Bart
Biographies and Memoirs
The Long Walk to Freedom—Nelson Mandela
Katherine Graham’s Personal History—Katherine Graham
Dreams from My Father—Barack Obama
A Tale of Love and Darkness—Amos Oz
Any of Antonia Fraser’s biographies, such as Mary Queen of Scots.
Novels
This is too vast a subject, but here are a few novels I loved (“So many books, so little time”):
Death Comes to the Archbishop—Willa Cather
Heart of Darkness—Joseph Conrad
Anna Karenina—Leo Tolstoy
Germinal—Emile Zola
Scarlet Letter—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Le Rouge et le Noir (Red and the Black)—Stendhal
One Hundred Years of Solitude—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
James Mitchener’s books, all fun reads
Passage to India—E. M. Forster
Half a Yellow Sun–Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Kitchen God’s Wife—Amy Tan
Cutting for Stone—Abraham Verghese
The Hungry Tide—Amitav Ghosh
A Thousand Acres—Jane Smiley
Crossing to Safety—Wallace Stegner (Joe’s Favorite, too)
Snow—Orphan Pamuk
Dr. Zhivago—Boris Pasternak
The Color Purple—Alice Walker
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—James Joyce
Great Expectations—Charles Dickens
A Fine Balance—Rohington Mistry
To Kill a Mockingbird—Harper Lee
Pride and Prejudice—Jane Austen
A Day in the Live of Ivan Denisovich—Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Stranger—Albert Camus
The Magic Mountain—Thomas Mann
The Metamorphosis—Franz Kafka
Short Stories:
Stories by Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, and John Cheever.
Politics/Sociology/History
The Second Sex—Simone de Beauvoir
Simple Justice—Richard Kruger
Nickle and Dimed—Barbara Ehrenreich
Democracy in America—Alexis de Tocqueville
Guns of August—Barbara Tuchman
Guns, Germs, and Steel—Jared Diamond
Joe Howell’s books, available online

4 thoughts on “Embry’s Favorite Books

  1. thanks much!
    for those like me who just want page-turners, not necessarily a substantive or informative or important read, how about an abridged list?

  2. Very impelling list, Embry. May I add a title I just read and is quite remarkable, Educated, by Tara Westover. Thanks for the list. and as you say, so many books, so little time.

  3. Thank you so much Mimy! I was just asking my daughters for their recommendations. Any more favorite French titles?
    Love

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