Research shows that the best way of becoming a better reader and writer is through reading for pleasure.  We are sometimes asked for suggestions.  So we have put together a list of some of our favorite books. 

This list has been prepared from memory, so expect some inaccuracies (corrections will be appreciated). * before the title means: easy or short. ***** means: very hard or long.

Children’s Fiction (strongly recommended for so-so readers and writers):

**Treasure Island (R.L. Stevenson)

*Regarding the Fountain (Kate Klise)

**Abel’s Island

*Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Dahl)

**Wrinkle in Time

**The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)

**The Little Prince

**Call of the Wild (London)

***Lord of the Flies (Golding)

****Huckleberry Finn (Twain)

**My Side of the Mountain (George)

**Cress Delahanty (West)

*Harry Potter (first book in series)

Adult Fiction

**Three Men in a Boat (Jerome)

*****Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)

*****Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky)

***Women of Brewster’s Place (Naylor)

****Things Fall Apart (Achebe)

****For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway)

****East of Eden (Steinbeck)

****I Swear and I Vow (Olivier)

****An Ancient Enemy (Moinot)

****Devil’s Advocate (West--of interest, especially, to practicing catholics)

****Island (Huxley)

****One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey)

****The Razor’s Edge (Maugham)

****One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn)

**Carry On, Jeeves (Wodehouse)

****Middlemarch (Eliot)

***The Lilac Bus (Binchy)

Adult Non-Fiction

**Black Boy (Wright)

***Reasons for Hope (Goodall)

*****The Third Chimpanzee (Diamond)

****Silent Spring (Carson)

***Parkinson’s Law (Parkinson)

***Media Monopoly (Bagdikian)

*****Brave New World Revisited (Huxley)

****American Aurora (Rosenfeld)

**Having Our Say (Delany & Delany)