Embarrased to Say...

[RichC]

Jax won't read Harry Potter cuz he can't find a copy in Pop-Up format. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Easily the book that bored me to death was Old Man and The Sea. Wow, what a waste of time that was.

[Shadowcat]

I loved To Kill a Mockingbird. I think it was the best book I was ever forced to read for school.

I also really enjoyed (and some of these are plays, but are sold in book format) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (by Betty Smith), The Liar's Club (by Mary Karr), This Boy's Life (by Tobias Wolff), Lord of the Flies (by William Golding), The Crucible (by Arthur Miller), A Street Car Named Desire (by Tennessee Williams), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (also by Tennessee Williams), The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (by Avi), House of Stairs (by William Sleator), all of the Wrinkle in Time books except Many Waters (by Madeline L'Engle), Witch World (by Andre Norton)... I could honestly go on for pages. I read a lot.

Ok, a few of those aren't really considered classics by the masses, but they are to me. House of Stairs is such a great, and largely unknown, example of Sleator's vision and insight into the human psyche. Would you believe that my school librarian turned me on to this book when I was only eleven years old? There was something disturbing about the tale back then that only increased upon rereading it as an adult. Have you ever seen the movie The Cube? That movie blew me away the first time I saw it. House of Stairs came decades before it (originally published in 1975). They are obviously different tales, but they have the same feel. People stuck in a crazy situation start to play the game or go mad. In House of Stairs five kids get trapped in a human conditioning experiment. If you can get your hands on a copy, I highly recommend it.