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$\"Gravatar\"$ As one trying to read the 100 Greatest books, I can understand your goal as a teenager to look pretentious and intellectual. That’s my goal now $\"\"$ (my website is linked above to the literature page).

Anyway I can recommend several books based on what you are into at the time. I would definitely recommend Les Miserable and Wuthering Heights if you have not read those. Let me know if you are looking for more fantasy/less literature and I can recommend some in that reign as well.
Jim Lehane | Homepage | 08.07.09 - 6:31 pm | #

$\"Gravatar\"$ I read Silent Spring several years back for my Conservation of Natural Resources and I really enjoyed it (even though it was sad). A few other books I read in this class were Cadillac Desert and Cry of the Kalahari. Both were good, although I enjoyed Kalahari a bit more.
ReBecca | Homepage | 08.07.09 - 6:42 pm | #

$\"Gravatar\"$ Les Miserables is glorious. A tough read, but infinitely worth it, more so than some other books of similar length (for instance, The Brothers Karamazov).

I'd also recommend The Phantom of the Opera (short, and nothing like the musical), and if you want to get a feel for Hugo's style before starting Les Mis, read Notre Dame de Paris (aka The Hunchback of Notre Dame).
Paul | Homepage | 08.07.09 - 6:56 pm | #

$\"Gravatar\"$ Le Mis is my favorite book, but I largely enjoyed The Brother's Karamazov as well as mostly anything by Dostoyevsky. Most Russian writers in fact I usually enjoy.
Jim Lehane | Homepage | 08.07.09 - 7:09 pm | #

$\"Gravatar\"$ Trouble with Lichen is one of my favourite Wyndham books, too. I like that it deals with more humanist issues than most of his other books. And I love the idea of a controversial new technology being smuggled into circulation as a \"beauty treatment\", because I find that very believable.

I can think of two other quasi-\"feminist\" stories by Wyndham, but neither of them features a strong female character - in fact, the point of both is that the lead female character is not strong. In Consider Her Ways, a woman from Wyndham's own time is transported into a male-free future female utopia, but is too emotionally connected to her own society to accept the new one. There's also a rather creepy short story called Dumb Martian (in the collection The Seeds of Time) in which a man buys himself a \"brainless\" Martian bride and proceeds to use and abuse her harshly, only to discover at the last moment that she's not quite as brainless and unfeeling as he thought she was.

To steal someone else's comment: \"How do you spell the result of forced indenture of a really smart alien bride? W-i-d-o-w.\"
Christopher Taylor | Homepage | 09.07.09 - 1:01 am | #

$\"Gravatar\"$ Thanks for all the recommendations - we have a lot of the classics on the bookshelf courtesy of my bookworm husband, so that's definitely more to add to the list.

And given what's blown up in the blogosphere I'm determined to read Unscientific America...
Julia | Homepage | 15.07.09 - 7:38 pm | #

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