Order of all Books - January 2014

This Table presents all the books read by the erstwhile-legendary Last Thursday Book Club, listed in order of quality based on the averaged numerical votes of the club members. This list is reconstituted at the end of each calendar year to integrate the most current 12 selections. In general see the Review Summaries for details on what the Club liked, did not like.

We are currently hard at work reading and evaluating books during the year 2014. We are exhausted from our efforts in 2013: we entered two (2) books into our top twenty-five (OK, one was tied for #25), and (sadly) two into our bottom 25. You will have to search deep to find Ulysses on our list. The second column provides the date of the LTBC meeting during which the book was discussed.

Here is our revised table as of January 2014 representing the first twenty years of our existence ...

Order	discussion date	Title	Author	Notes
1	29-Jan-98	The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck	(580 pgs) Our choice for best of all
2	29-Apr-93	A River Runs Through It	Norman Maclean
3	25-Feb-99	Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage	Alfred Lansing	Alfred Lansing is perhaps the most underrated author in our list.
4	29-Oct-98	Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov
5	28-Feb-08	Infidel	Ayaan Hirshi Ali	Ali was the Somali-born member of the Dutch parliament who faced death threats after collaborating on a film about domestic violence against Muslim women
6	25-May-00	To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee	When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow....
7	27-Feb-94	The Killer Angels	Michael Sharra	(1974)
8	26-May-94	The Good Earth	Pearl Buck	(1937)
9	27-Jul-06	The Old Man and the Sea	Ernest Hemingway	Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated. Pull the boat, fish.
10	28-Aug-94	Red Badge of Courage	Stephan Crane
11	31-Jul-97	Undaunted Courage	Stephen Ambrose
12	22-Aug-97	All the Pretty Horses	Cormac McCarthy
13	30-Jul-98	A Fan’s Notes	Frederick Exley
14	27-Apr-00	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Samuel L. Clemens
15	28-May-09	When A Crocodile Eats The Sun	Peter Godwin	This story of a family was highly emotional. The author was watching his father die and his country die - what will it take (in time) to improve the situation in Zimbabwe? The father said whites in Africa are like Jews anywhere - waiting for the next crisis.
16	29-Oct-09	In Cold Blood	Truman Capote	It has been said of Mr. Clutter that his shoulders were broad, his hair had held its dark color, his square-jawed, confident face retained a healthy-hued youthfulness, and his teeth, unstained, and strong enough to shatter walnuts, were still intact.
17	28-Jul-94	Monsignor Quixote	Graham Greene
18	28-Jan-99	All The King’s Men	Robert Penn Warren
19	27-May-99	Angela’s Ashes	Frank McCourt	When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.
20	25-Mar-04	Life of Pi	Yann Martel	a transformative novel, an astonishing work of imagination that will delight and stun readers in equal measure.
21	22-May-08	Out Stealing Horses	Per Petterson	The author as Trond Sander: "All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this."
22	18-Nov-04	Disgrace	JM Coetzee	the least given to sentimentality of the talented novelists to have come out of South Africa.
23	25-Jul-96	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”
24	19-Dec-96	The Spy Who Came In From the Cold	John LeCarre
25	25-Mar-10	Three Cups of Tea	Greg Mortensen	One man's mission to promote peace, one school at a time. In 1996, Mortensen returned to Korphe to build the promised school.
26	30-Dec-93	The Assault	Henry Mulisch
27	26-Jan-95	Winter of our Discontent	John Steinbeck
28	29-Sep-05	The Actual	Saul Bellow	The worldly and clever Harry Trellman, a grand noticer of things, tells the familiar Bellow story of an old adolescent love which is finally admitted to and resumed.
29	27-Jul-95	The Moviegoer	Walker Percy
30	27-Mar-03	Master and Commander	Patrick O'Brian	the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels. Title provides links to Smithsonian articles on how this series came to be.
31	31-Aug-95	A Confederacy of Dunces	John Kennedy Toole	the funniest book on the list; memorable characters
32	25-Jan-01	The Professor and the Madman	Simon Winchester	Creating the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the major contributors was a US Army surgeon who murdered a man in London and was in a lunatic asylum.
33	31-May-01	The Shipping News	E. Annie Proulx	From all outward appearances, Quoyle has gone through his first 36 years on earth as a big schlump of a loser.
34	22-Nov-01	This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind	Ivan Doig	The grandson of homesteaders and the son of a ranch hand and a ranch cook, Ivan Doig was born in Montana in 1939.
35	28-Apr-05	Housekeeping	Marilynne Robinson	I have observed that, in the way people are strange, they grow stranger, says Ruth, our narrator. When she was young, her mother returned with her and her sister to Fingerbone, Idaho. Once there, she left the two of them on the front porch of her mother's
36	27-Mar-08	Man in the Holocene	Max Frisch	Erosion was a theme; Geiser’s mind was eroding. At the same time, Geiser remembers every minute on the Matterhorn.
37	20-Nov-08	The Yiddish Policeman's Union	Michael Chabon	"He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker." "...collecting himself like a beggar chasing scattered dimes along the sidewalk."
38	24-Jun-04	The Reader	Bernhard Schlink	the story of a man whose adolescent affair with an older woman returns to haunt him years later.
39	30-Dec-05	The Nigger of the Narcissus	Joseph Conrad	"The Narcissus came gently into her berth; the shadows of souless walls fell upon her, the dust of all the continents leaped upon her deck, and a swarm of strange men, clambering up her sides, took possession of her in the name of the sordid earth. She h
40	29-Jun-06	Gilead	Marilyn Robinson	"I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me."
41	30-Apr-09	The Reluctant Mr. Darwin	David Quannem	"He didn't foresee being swallowed up by barnacle taxonomy for eight years ... His study must have smelled like a pub, from the evaporation of pickling alcohol off his specimens." Darwin anecdotes: Little son George asking his playmates, "Where does your father do his barnacles?"
42	29-Jul-10	The Big Sleep	Raymond Chandler	“I’ve been around,” he said. “Know the boys and such. Used to do a little liquor-running down from Huenene Point. A tough racket, brother. Riding the scout car with a gun in your lap and a wad on your hip that would choke a coal chute. Plenty of times
43	27-Sep-07	Deliverance	James Dickey	Dickey's writing is gripping - the rape scene actually hurt to read it. Some of his poetic descriptions were carried away. Provided unspoken interaction between the four guys, most of whom wanted to be macho like Lewis.
44	17-Dec-09	Mutiny on the Bounty	Charles Nordhoff et al	The story of the Bounty will be told as long as men sail the sea. The storytelling genius of the authors finds here a canvas filled with color, action and adventure. Readers will realize, as did the authors, that so large a drama could not be confined to a single volume. We read the first of the trilogy.
45	28-Oct-93	Bless Me Ultima	Rudolpho Anaya
46	22-Dec-94	The Painted Bird	Jerzy Kosinski
47	23-Dec-99	The Sun Also Rises	Ernest Hemingway	Everyone enjoyed the bull fighting descriptions, wanted more.
48	27-Jul-00	Citizen Soldiers: Normandy to the Bulge	Stephen Ambrose	combines history and journalism to describe how American GIs battled their way to the Rhineland.
49	26-Feb-04	The Debt to Pleasure	John Lanchester	If Humbert Humbert had written a cookbook rather than about his nymphet, this would have been the book.
50	25-May-06	As I Lay Dying	William Faulkner	It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.
51	28-Sep-06	Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the Sky	Cormac McCarthy	War endures. … Before man was, war waited for him. ... Men are born for games. Nothing else. ... (every child) knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard.
52	25-Feb-10	The Road	Cormac McCarthy	In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.
53	29-Mar-07	Ironweed	William Kennedy	Ironweed is only secondarily about Albany. It is primarily about survival - about an ordinary man, a bum by his own admission, whose extraordinarily bad luck has brought him to rock bottom but also to the discovery, within himself, of an inner strength.
54	28-Oct-10	The Last Picture Show	Larry McMurtry	We enter the one-stoplight town of Thalia, Texas, where Duane Moore, his buddy Sonny, and his girlfriend Jacy are all stumbling along the rocky road to adulthood. The trip includes naked swimming parties, a visit to a blind heifer, mean high school coach.
55	30-Jun-05	The Kite Runner	Khaled Hosseini	An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from the final days of Afghanistan’s monarchy to the atrocities of the present.
56	26-Aug-99	Snow Falling on Cedars	David Guterson
57	30-Nov-00	Flashman: From the Flashman Papers	George MacDonald Fraser
58	29-Jul-04	Benjamin Franklin: An American Life	Walter Isaacson	Transforms marble men into flesh-and-blood figures, complex and admirable if hardly perfect.
59	29-Sep-04	Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress	Dai Sijie	lot of laughs as well as having our eyes opened again concerning Mao's Cultural Revolution
60	27-Jan-05	Beowulf - the new verse translation	Seamus Heaney	In the introduction to his translation, Seamus Heaney argues that Beowulf's role as a required text for many English students obscured its mysteries and "mythic potency." We are treated to a world view in which a thane's allegiance to his lord and to God is paramount.
61	25-Aug-05	Beloved	Toni Morrison	Race, slavery, and the effects and banality of evil. Sethe, Paul D, and Stamp Paid have each endured a furious past, complete with the worst horrors imaginable.
62	31-Aug-00	Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Crusade	Kurt Vonnegut	Extra Credit: Timequake
63	30-May-02	My Antonia	Willa Cather
64	27-Feb-03	Blue Latitudes	Tony Horwitz	Boldly Going Where Capt. Cook Has Gone Before
65	26-Jul-07	The Things They Carried	Tim O'Brien	Included The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong (story of Mary Anne and the Greenies) and On the Rainy River (story of the old man Elroy and The Trip (almost) to Canada).
66	29-Sep-95	The Reivers	William Faulkner	more great humor
67	25-Jun-98	The Crossing	Cormac McCarthy	Extra credit: Blood Meridian
68	17-Dec-98	Cities of the Plain	Cormac McCarthy
69	2-Aug-01	The Last Battle	Cornelius Ryan	Battle for Berlin: Ryan stressed realism and was meticulous in attention to detail and his extensive research notes.
70	30-Dec-04	The Seven Pillars of Wisdom	T. E. Lawrence	"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
71	28-Dec-06	The Brave Cowboy	Edward Abbey	Taking place in the fictional town of "Duke City, New Mexico"
72	7-Aug-08	A Thousand Splendid Suns	Khaled Hosseini	Plot more believable than The Kite Runner. A page-turner synopsis of Afghanistan with women as third class citizens. Mariam's hatred of Laila turn into Friendship.
73	18-Dec-08	What is the What	Dave Eggers	Valentino Achak Deng, the real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war - the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath - of the 1980s and 90s. The fictionalized memoir by Salon.com's Dave Eggers.
74	27-May-93	The Education of Little Tree	Forrest Carter
75	22-Nov-94	Tortuga	Rudolpho Anaya
76	26-Jan-96	Glory	Vladimir Nabokov
77	25-Jun-96	Life on the Mississippi	Mark Twain
78	4-Oct-96	The Best of Edward Abbey [or Slumgullion Stew]	Edward Abbey
79	24-Oct-96	The Warrior Woman	Maxine Hong Kingston
80	26-Jun-97	The Secret Agent	Joseph Conrad
81	22-Sep-97	Recapitulation	Wallace Stegner
82	18-Dec-97	Lie Down in Darkness	William Styron
83	26-Oct-00	Cold Mountain	Charles Frazier
84	31-Mar-05	Flyboys	James Bradley	Over the remote Pacific island of Chichi Jima, nine American flyers - Navy and Marine pilots sent to bomb Japanese communications towers were shot down. Eight were captured by Japanese soldiers on Chichi Jima and held prisoner. Then they disappeared.
85	27-Oct-05	No Ordinary Time	Doris Kearns Goodwin	A compelling chronicle of a nation and its leaders during the period when modern America was created.
86	25-Jan-07	Saturday	Ian McEwan	a novel set within a single day -- 15 February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon.
87	27-Jan-00	The Perfect Storm	Sebastian Junger	an extended Reader's Digest true-adventure article, except the heroes don't survive
88	25-Apr-02	Longitude	Dava Sobel
89	29-Aug-02	The Chosen	Chaim Potok
90	26-Sep-02	Julian	Gore Vidal	Gore Vidal's fictional recreation of the Roman Empire teetering on the crux of Roman Empire teetering on the crux of Christianity and ruled by an emperor who was an inveterate dabbler in arcane hocus-pocus, a prig, a bigot, and a dazzling and brilliant leader.
91	23-Oct-03	Love in the Time of Cholera	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	unrequited passion so strong that it binds three people's lives together for more than fifty years.
92	29-Jan-04	Girl with A Pearl Earring	Tracy Chevalier	The novel isn't perfect, but provides a view into a fascinating period of history and a portrait of perhaps the world's greatest painter.
93	23-Feb-06	The Plot Against America	Phillip Roth	A "what-if" historical novel -- the isolationist, Nazi sympathizer, and anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh runs against Roosevelt in 1940 and wins.
94	3-Jan-08	Terrorist	John Updike	From the first chapter one hears the ticking of a bomb in the background. Ahmad was a U.S. citizen who didn't adopt to the outside world as his home country. Jack Levy defused him.
95	26-Mar-09	Blindness	Jose Saramago	Saramago's apocalyptic novel provides yet another view of man's animal nature. Chaos seems to inevitably bring out the worst in us. On the other hand, Saramago also portrayed some of the love and tenderness we associate with human behavior.
96	19-Nov-09	The Untouchable	John Banville	It was not about spying but about relationships. Protagonist was a twit in the true English tradition. The writing was at times very special - such as "a tracery of raindrops' and "Sodden sycamore leaves lolloping about the road like injured toads."
97	21-Nov-96	God: A Biography	Jack Miles	(won Pulitzer Prize in April, 1996)
98	28-Dec-00	Invisible Man	Ralph Ellison
99	26-Apr-01	Crossing to Safety	Wallace Stegner	[be sure to see the review by the Literary Society of San Diego]
100	27-Jun-02	A Bend in the River	V. S. Naipaul	Naipaul was 2001's Nobel winner in literature.
101	29-Apr-04	The Maltese Falcon	Dashiel Hammett	The best known, and considered the best, of Hammett's Sam Spade novels.
114	26-Jun-08	Lord of the Flies	William Golding	Golding described theme as an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature and that the "shape of society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system..."
115		Right Ho, Jeeves	P. G. Wodehouse
116	6/27/2013	Lucky Jim	Kingsley Amis	"If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing." "... all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he had none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face."
117	28-Jun-07	Bang the Drum Slowly	Mark Harris	“It might or might not probably ever happen” - Good story, clever dialogue held true throughout the 243 pages (even the doctors talked like baseball players), minor league characters working toward teamwork.
118	1/27/2011	Still Alice	Lisa Genova	"Okay, Alice, can you spell the word water backwards for me?" he asked. She would have found this question trivial and even insulting six months ago, but today, it was a serious question to be tackled with serious effort. She felt only marginally worried
119	12/29/2011	War Trash	Ha Jin	Some of us rushed into the nearby bushes and some lay down in the roadside ditches. The planes dropped a few flash bombs, a shower of light illuminating the entire area; our troops and vehicles at once became visible. Then bombs rained down and machine guns began raking us.
120	28-Oct-04	Invitation to a Beheading	Vladimir Nabokov	Cincinnattus lives.
121	26-Oct-06	White Noise	Don DeLillo	Captures the particular strangeness of life in a time where humankind has finally learned enough to kill itself. Naturally, it's a terribly funny book, and the prose is as beautiful as a sunset through a particulate-filled sky.
122	6-Nov-08	Winter in the Blood	James Welch	“…Long Knife had become shrewd in the way dumb men are shrewd. He had learned to give the illusion of work, even to the point of sweating as soon as he put his gloves on, while doing very little.”
123	29-Apr-10	Suite Francaise	Irene Nemirovsky	Published more than sixty years following the author's death at Auschwitz, a remarkable story of life under the Nazi occupation includes two parts--"A Storm in June," set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, and "Dolce."
124	12/20/2012	The Tennis Partner	Abraham Verghese	"perhaps he was drawn to doctoring because he subconsciously thought that if he attended to the pain of others, it would take care of his own."
125	25-Mar-99	The Day of the Locust	Nathanael West	[#73; movie c. 1975]
125	30-Oct-99	A Walk in the Woods	Bill Bryson	Katz!
127	19-Dec-02	Founding Brothers	Joseph Ellis	non-fiction
128	25-Jun-03	the works of Edgar Allan Poe	Edgar Allan Poe	any poem, short story, work
129	30-Jul-09	Water for Elephants	Sara Gruen	Gruen framed the story with Jacob as a 90 or 93 year old, and overpopulated it with characters (over 40 named). The nursing home scenes were entertaining, but the circus story itself was not so well written and not so credible.
130	18-Nov-10	Exiles in the Garden	Ward Just	Alex had the usual habits of one who lived alone: a fixed diet, a weekly visit to the bookstore, a scrupulously balanced checkbook, and a devotion to major league baseball and the PGA Tour.
131	1/26/2012	Caleb's Crossing	Geraldine Brooks	“Life is better than death. I know this. Tequamuck says it is the coward’s talk. I say it is braver, sometimes, to bend.”
132	7/5/2012	The Heart is a Lonely Hunter	Carson McCullers	“This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her—the real plain her...This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard.
133	30-Mar-00	Ceremony	Leslie Marmon Silko
135	28-Sep-00	Of Love and Shadows	Isabel Allende
136	31-Jan-02	Kim	Rudyard Kipling
136	20-Nov-03	Atonement	Ian McEwan
137	6/30/2011	Tinkers	Paul Harding	“Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing."
138	3-May-07	The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time	Mark Haddon	Focuses on one character and gives the character more autistic traits than are normally seen in one individual.
139	28-Jan-10	Italian Shoes	Henning Mankell	"I always feel more lonely when it's cold. The cold outside my window reminds me of the cold emanating from my own body. I'm being attacked from two directions. But I'm constantly resisting. That's why I cut a hole in the ice every morning. "
140	27-Oct-95	Mozart	Marcia Davenport	[extra credit: view Amadeus]
141	29-Feb-96	Death Comes for the Archbishop	Willa Cather	not at all the compelling book it's made out to be
142	29-Aug-96	I Heard the Owl Call My Name	Margaret Craven	The Indian knows his village and feels for his village as no white man for his country, his town, or even for his own bit of land.
143	27-Feb-97	Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad	(novella, 1902)
144	29-May-97	Roughing It	Mark Twain
145	28-May-98	Dandelion Wine	Ray Bradbury
146	19-Nov-98	Hiroshima	John Hersey
147	24-Feb-00	Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man	James Joyce	extra credit: Dubliners
148	27-Sep-01	A Rumor of War	Philip Caputo	What the experience of Vietnam meant to a young college graduate, a 'gung-ho' lieutenant in the marine corps who enlisted for the 'heroic experience' of war.
149	22-Dec-01	Band of Brothers	Stephen E. Ambrose	The saga of Easy Company, whose 147 members Ambrose calls the nonpareil combat paratroopers on earth circa 1941-45.
150	29-May-03	In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead	James Lee Burke	The restless specters wait in the shadows for cajun cop Dave Robicheaux
151	18-Dec-03	All the Little Live Things	Wallace Stegner	many consider one of his three best.
152	27-May-04	The Map That Changed the World	Simon Winchester	In the early years of the nineteenth century, William Smith created the first geological map of Great Britain, a time-consuming, solitary project.
153	26-Aug-04	Reading Lolita In Tehran	Azar Nafisi	a memoir based on an underground book club in Tehran.
154	24-Feb-05	The Ornament of the World	María Rosa Menocal	The history of medieval Spain under the Muslims, from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries.This was a rare period in history, when Christianity, Judaism, and Islam flourished side by side, borrowing language, art, and architecture from each other.
155	31-Jan-08	Charming Billy	Alice McDermott	The grandmother "cooking the toughness into a roast." Her belief that vegetables and Brussels sprouts had no intrinsic taste but only received flavor from the salt and butter. The young lady awaiting word from her former suitor: Tell him "I am still here."
156	25-Sep-08	To A God UnKnown	William Steinbeck	In this short novel, Steinbeck explores the relationship of man to his land. The plot follows a man, Joseph Wayne, who moves to California in order to establish a homestead, leaving his father, who soon dies.
157	25-Jun-09	The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao	Junot Diaz	The life of Oscar Wao and the fukú. The curse served as a bridge across time and space. Diaz' ability to take depressing, brutal sequences under Trujillo and get us through them with a sparkling sense of humor. Example: "And you thought your committee was tough!"
158	11/17/2011	Cleopatra - A Life	Stacy Schiff	Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order.
159	5/31/2012	The Warmth of Other Suns	Isabel Wilkerson	“They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, desserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.”
160	2/24/2011	Queen of the South	Arturo Pérez-Reverte	"There is one necessary skill…in this business. Looking at a man and instantly knowing two things. First, how much he's going to sell himself for. And second, when you're going to have to kill him."
161	26-Feb-95	Farewell to Arms	Ernest Hemingway
162	6-Jun-96	Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep	Philip K. Dick
163	28-Feb-02	Bend Sinister	Vladimir Nabokov
164	21-Nov-02	The Heart of the Matter	Graham Greene
165	1-Nov-07	The Friends of Eddie Coyle	George V. Higgins	When Higgins wrote this, his first novel, he was a federal prosecutor for the Boston district.
166	27-May-10	Pompeii	Robert Harris	Pompeii is a blend of fictional characters with the real-life eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79 that overwhelmed Pompeii and its surrounding towns. The author references various aspects of vulcanology, use of the Roman calendar, and Roman aqueducts.
167	8/30/2012	Winesburg, Ohio	Sherwood Anderson	In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt.”
168	8/30/2012	The Loved One	Evelyn Waugh	“Mr. Schultz, you're jealous of Whispering Glades." "And why wouldn't I be seeing all that dough going on relations they've hated all their lives, while the pets who've loved them and stood by them , never asked no questions, never complained, rich or poor, sickness or health, get buried anyhow like animals?”

170	4/28/2011	Half Broke Horses	Jeannette Walls	When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.” “If I owned hell and west Texas, he said, I do believe I'd sell west Texas and live in hell.”
171	19-Feb-98	Laughing Boy	Oliver La Farge	(187 pgs)
172	23-Aug-01	The Time Machine	H. G. Wells	1894 novel (his first) describes the adventures of his hero, the time-traveler, mostly in the year A.D. 802,701, when he encounters a class-ridden battle between the decadent Eloi and the primitive Morlocks.
173	24-Oct-02	It's Not About The Bike	Lance Armstrong
174	31-Aug-06	The Devil in the White City	Erik Larson	Their fates were linked by the magical Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, nicknamed the “White City” for its majestic beauty. Architect Daniel Burnham built it; serial killer Dr. H. H. Holmes used it to lure victims to his World’s Fair Hotel.
173	11/29/2012	Three Empires on the Nile	Dominic Green	The book touches on the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire and the ascendency of British imperialism, with a cast of characters that includes a parade of colonial notables including Gladstone, Gordon, Kitchener and the corrupt pseudo-monarchs of the disintegrating Egyptian vassal state.
176	28-Aug-03	seldom disappointed: a memoir	Tony Hillerman
177	25-Sep-03	The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon	Stephen King	When a young girl finds herself lost in the woods, she tunes her Walkman to a Boston Red Sox game
178	29-Jul-93	The House at Otowi Bridge	P. P. Church
179	26-Aug-93	Sidhartha	Herman Hesse
180	28-Aug-98	On the Road	Jack Kerouac
181	28-Jun-01	The Sparrow	Mary Doria Russell	Religion-based framework for First Contact with clever clashing of ideas, humor & pathos.
182	30-Mar-06	Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border	Ken Ellington	It's a timely issue, a local issue, a political issue, and a human issue of major proportions.
183	28-Aug-08	Bel Canto	Ann Patchett	Fictionalizing the Peru kidnapping. "Years later, when this period of internment was remembered by the people who were actually there, they saw it in two distinct periods: before the box and after the box." (of opera scores was brought in).
184	7-Dec-06	The World is Flat	Thomas L. Friedman	. . . A Brief History of the 21st Century
185	30-Mar-95	If Morning Ever Comes	Anne Tyler
186	28-Dec-95	A Thousand Acres	Jane Smiley	[extra credit: King Lear by W. Shakespeare] Iowa farmers really get down in the dirt. Jane should have left it to the bard.
187	29-Mar-01	Sons and Lovers	D. H. Lawrence	There appears to be much autobiographical material in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.
188	28-Jul-05	Florence of Arabia	Christopher Buckley	They handed her a pamphlet titled 'What American Women Should Understand When They Marry a Wasabi National.' The State Department's reflexive response to any American in extremis overseas is to hand them a pamphlet…"
189	29-Nov-07	That Old Ace in the Hole	Annie Proulx	Proulx presents the Texas Panhandle through the eyes of 25-year-old Bob Dollar, a newcomer arriving by car.
190	24-Jun-99	The Life of Samuel Johnson	Robert Boswell	Most read the 430 page version, abridged from the 1799 edition. One of the most-frequently quoted men of the 18th Century. One should at least become familiar with it, but don't read every word.
191	27-Apr-06	The Year of Magical Thinking	Joan Didion	Writer Joan Didion's best-selling memoir, "The Year of Magical Thinking" is about the death of her husband and her daughter's ultimately fatal illness.
192	2/28/2013	Barney's Version	Mordecai Richler	"I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence."
193	17-Nov-05	Things Fall Apart	Chinua Achebe	First published in 1958, a relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism.
194	24-Jun-93	Talking God	Tony Hillerman
195	30-Sep-93	The City at the Edge of the World	V. B. Price
196	29-Mar-94	Hard Choices: Health Care at What Cost?	Mark Jaffe et al
197	31-Mar-96	Kingsblood Royal	Sinclair Lewis
198	30-Jan-97	The Thief of Time	Tony Hillerman
199	22-Oct-97	MidAir	Frank Conroy	[short stories]
200	20-Nov-97	The Bean Trees	Barbara Kingsolver
201	26-Mar-98	Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	(270 pgs)
202	29-Apr-99	The Sea of Grass	Conrad Richter	the triangle of rancher Colonel Jim Brewton, his unstable Eastern wife Lutie, and the ambitious Brice Chamberlain.
203	23-Sep-99	Tropic of Cancer	Henry Miller
204	29-Jun-00	Tuesdays with Morrie - Life's Greatest Lesson	Mitch Albom
205	25-Oct-01	Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone	J.K. Rowling	Harry Potter knows a miserable life with the Dursleys, his horrible aunt and uncle, and their abominable son, Dudley. Then an owl arrives.
206	31-Jul-03	To The Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf
207	22-Feb-07	Young Men and Fire	Norman Maclean	Studying the Missouri River fire of 1949 was his passion for over two decades, and the book is still used as training material in firefighting schools.
208	29-Jan-09	The Other	Dave Guterson	Was John William truly “The Other” for Neil Countryman? Or a confused character who latched onto an enabler for his hare-brained schemes of wilderness and survival.
209	3/29/2012	The Good Soldier	Ford Madox Ford	“There is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.”
210	9/27/2012	The Art of Fielding	Chad Harbach	“What would he say to her, if he was going to speak truly? He didn't know. Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn't plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened.
211	31-May-07	A Question of Loyalty	Douglas Waller	Plunges into the seven-week Washington trial of Gen. William "Billy" Mitchell, the hero of the U.S. Army Air Service during World War I and the man who proved in 1921 that planes could sink a battleship.
212	24-Sep-09	The Moon is a Harsh Mistress	Robert Heinlein	Heinlein celebrating our 200th anniversary of our own revolution by having us witness it again, but this time the colony was perhaps more like Australia: a penal colony that constituted the basis of the population of the moon in 2076.
213	22-Feb-01	Timeline	Michael Crichton	His Andromeda Strain was very well done, and so was Jurassic Park. Not Timeline.
214	30-Jan-03	A Little Yellow Dog	Walter Mosley	an Easy Rawlins Mystery
215	27-Oct-94	You Just Don’t Understand	Deborah Tannen
216	1-May-08	The Birth of Venus	Sarah Dunant	Historical view of Florence. The Strange Case of the Tattooed Nun.
217	24-Jun-10	The Land of Green Plums	Herta Muller	The Land of Green Plums is the story of a group of young people in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania.
218	26-Aug-10	The Lone Survivor	Marcus Luttrell et al	The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing: Push 'em out. Gentlemen, I'm your instructor for the next two weeks. I'll help you, if you need help, over matters of personal concerns. If you get injured, go to medical and get it fixed and get back into training.
219	4-Feb-94	The Children of Men	P. D. James
220	28-Apr-94	Einstein’s Dreams	Alan Lightman	(fiction)
221	26-Jan-06	The March of Folly	Barbara Tuchman	From Troy to Vietnam. "no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence."
222	26-May-05	Acqua Alta	Donna Leon	Complex, moral, gracious, and fiercely loyal, Commissario Guido Brunetti is a husband, father, detective, and, above all, a proud resident of the enchanted floating city of Venice.
223	4-May-95	Hole in the Sky - A Memoir	William Kittredge	a life examined that shouldn't have been
224	2-Apr-02	Man and Superman	George Bernard Shaw
225	9/23/2011	The Ancient Child	N. Scott Momaday	"Set imagined it was to please, but it was to astonish God that he painted. His presumption and arrogance were pronounced and dangerous, for they would certainly lead to the Sin of Despair, thence to death and nothingness. "
226	7/28/2011	The Storyteller	Mario Vargas Llosa	"But what do I have? The things I'm told and the things I tell, that's all. And as far as I know, that never yet made anyone fly."
227	11/21/2013	The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier	J. Michael Orenduff	"If I stuck to my principles, the nightmare at Schnitzel never would have happened. Maybe there was a lesson there. I called Dolly and invited her for dinner. The sale of a second plate shortly before closing buoyed my spirits. If I eventually sold all one hundred, I'd gross ten thousand dollars."
228	29-Sep-94	The Devil at Home	Oliver Lange
229	23-Apr-98	Rabbit is Rich	John Updike	extra credit: Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux
230	23-Sep-98	Buffalo Girls	Larry McMurtry	(350 pgs)
231	24-Apr-03	Ulysses	James Joyce	the major imaginative work in English prose of the 20th century.
232	27-Aug-09	The Kill Artist	Daniel Silva	Story of international intrigue and the global fight against terrorism with focus on Israeli intelligence efforts.Some intriguing questions about morality, particularly on the part of Ari Shamron who allowed the killing of a terrorist who was dying anyway.
233	9/26/2013	On Top Of Spoon Mountain	John Nichols	Come that future day Ben would kneel beside my half-exposed skull on which bleached tufts of ancient pelage were fluttering while Miranda rustled through the weathered knapsack: "Hey Ben, look! Here's one of those antique cameras with a snapshot inside of our reasonable, responsible, and respected dad on his 65th birthday when he perished of heatstroke, a heart attack, and lethal naivete combined."
234	22-Jun-95	Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game	Herman Hesse	intellectual life vs. real life: choose one
235	22-Apr-97	Ride With Me Mariah Montana	Ivan Doig
236	30-Aug-07	The Castle	Franz Kafka	the new translation by the Kafka scholar, Mark Harman, who, according to the The New York Times, has "made it more faithful to Kafka's dreamlike style."
237	25-May-95	The Witches of Eastwick	John Updike
238	18-Jul-02	Swift as Desire	Laura Esquivel	LAURA ESQUIVEL is the award-winning and bestselling author of Like Water for Chocolate.
239	22-Nov-93	One	Richard Bach
240	25-Apr-96	Bluefeather Fellini in the Sacred Realm	Max Evans	My eternal source of shame, but not as bad as my brothers claim
241	27-Mar-97	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
242	25-Jul-99	Jonathan Livingstone Seagull	Richard Bach
243	30-Sep-10	Jemez Spring	Rudolpho Anaya	With "Jemez Spring," Rudolfo Anaya again centers on the literate and spiritual private investigator, Sonny Baca. We have a corpse. But not just any dead body. Sonny is beckoned to crack the mystery behind the death of New Mexico's governor.
244	30-Jun-94	Alburquerque	Rudolpho Anaya
*A special purpose book for special consideration:*
	26-Feb-09	Just Coffee	Don Tobesing	Special event. Don Tubesing has already received the highest award from the LTBC - no further voting is necessary, no greater accolade is possible. May he rest in Wisconsin.

Last Updated on 01/04/2014
By Michael A. Blackledge