Looking+for+a+good+book?

If you're having trouble finding a book that you'd like to read, check out the lists below. I put my my Top 10, as well as other themed lists. Please, feel free to add your own books! It doesn't have to be a list. You can just talk about them or one in particular.

This list changes every time I make it, well, past the first five, anyway. I can't narrow it down, ever. Anyway, most of these are at the local library, I'm pretty sure, and I brought most of them into the classroom. **
 * Mr. Max's Top 10 Favorite Books
 * 1) //The Martian Chronicles// by Ray Bradbury. This is a fictional history of the human settlement of Mars, and it's a wonderful book, and very strange, almost more fantasy than science fiction. It's a collection of interwoven short stories.
 * 2) //Stranger Than Science// by Frank Edwards. A collection of supposedly true stories of the paranormal, UFOs, monsters, ghosts, and such. Wildly entertaining.
 * 3) //The Elements of Style// by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White. A grammar guide usually induces waves of OMG-boringness. Not so with this one. It's crisp and to the point, and it's how I learned to write well.
 * 4) //The World of Ripley's Believe It Or Not!// by Julie Mooney and the Editors of Ripley's Believe It Or Not! This is kindof the same appeal as the Frank Edwards books, except that everything in it is true. It has a lot of copies of the original cartoons.
 * 5) //House of Leaves: A Novel// by Mark Z. Danielewski. This is the weirdest, and possibly most difficult, book I've ever read, but also one of the most rewarding. The plot is very complex, but the short version is that a family moves into a seriously haunted house, and are forced to confront their darker natures as a result.
 * 6) //Not Wanted On The Voyage// by Timothy Findley. A retelling of the story of Noah's Ark that flips everything around: Noah is a drunk, his sons are brutish hicks, Lucifer is a cross-dressing angel named Lucy, and the most important and poignant character is a cat, Mottyl, owned by Noah's wife.
 * 7) //Beowulf// by anonymous, translated by Seamus Heaney. Don't judge the poem based on the movie... I mean, I kindof like the movie, but it's not the same. The Beowulf of the movie is not the Beowulf of this fantastic poem, an upright hero who we get to see progress from upstart to king. And the language is beautiful.
 * 8) The Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version, by anonymous. Whether or not you believe in it per se, there's a lot of good stories and poignant advice within these pages. "There is a time to be born, and a time to die... and there is nothing new under the sun." Plus if you don't like one book there's bound to be another in here... it's huge.
 * 9) //Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space// by Carl Sagan. If you want to know anything about space travel, it's in here, and it's so well written it'll make you cry. This is a great classic of science writing IMO.
 * 10) //Maus: A Survivor's Tale// by Art Spiegelman. Everybody should read at least one Holocaust memoir in their life, even if it's painful. I think knowledge of what happened is the first step to it never happening again. This graphic novel is one of the best out there.


 * Five Good Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English Books**
 * 1) //Beowulf//, by anonymous
 * 2) //The Canterbury Tales//, by Geoffrey Chaucer
 * 3) //The Vision of Piers the Plowman//, by William Langland
 * 4) //Sir Gawain and the Green Knight//, by anonymous
 * 5) //La Morte D'Arthur// ("The Death Of Arthur"), by Thomas Mallory

...Your books here!