JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

You’re on vacation, it’s hot, you’re bored. I have no sympathy for you. You could spend the next two months torturing yourself by looking at other people’s fabulous vacation photos online or walking around the mall until you’ve memorized what everything costs. Or you could read a book and entertain yourself. What book? Here’s a list of 100 titles.

These are my favorite books as of this year—the list changes often. A few of them, less than ten, were required reading in school; most of them I discovered on my own, by prowling in libraries and bookstores. Some of them were recommended by friends (For example, “In the first chapter his brother is kicked to death by Nazis! You want revenge!”); many of them were discovered in bargain book bins. Some of them I got interested in because of their movie/TV adaptations (I read A Game of Thrones just before the series premiered so I knew who was going to die). Nearly all of them are by white people because my education was traditional and my reading unsupervised.

I read a lot because I hate being bored and books keep me occupied so I’m not fuming about the unfairness of life etc. You may not like all these books, but you might find something you like. Instead of arranging them into genres bookstore-style, I’ve grouped them according to common themes. I’ve indicated the ones with movie versions (M) and the ones you can read on the net for free (N). For the descriptions, I try to answer the question, “What’s it about?” These books are listed in no particular order.

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