THE BEST BOOKS I READ IN 2011
TOP PICKS
The Big Short (Michael Lewis) - Non-Fiction
Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides) - Fiction
HONORABLE MENTION
Born to Run (Christopher McDougall)- Non-Fiction
Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba (Tom Gjelten) - Non-Fiction
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot) - Non-Fiction
Motherless Brooklyn (Jonathan Lethem) - Fiction
Palace Walk (Naguib Mahfouz) - Fiction
COMPLETE 2011 READING LIST
NON-FICTIONAutobiographies, Biographies, Memoirs & Travel
- My Wild Irish Rogues - Vivian Moore Hallinan (1952)
- Soul on Ice - Eldridge Cleaver (1965)
- Bound Feet and Western Dress: A Memoir - Pang-Mei Natasha Chang (1997)
- Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption - Laura Hillenbrand (2002)
- Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town - Paul Theroux (2003)
- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi (2003)
- Meant to Be: The Story of a Son Who Discovers He is his Mother’s Deepest Secret - Walter Anderson (2004)
- The Manifesto of the Communist Party - Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels (1848)
- Small Business in the Third World - Malcolm Harper (1984)
- The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century - Thomas Friedman (2003)
- The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good - William Easterly (2006)
- Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey—and Even Iraq—Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World's Most Popular Sport - Simon Kuper & Stefan Szymanski (2009)
- The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis (2010)
History, Politics & Science
- George Washington - William Roscoe Thayer (1922)
- The Control of Nature - John McPhee (1989)
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey (1989)
- A General Theory of Love - Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini & Richard Lennan (2000)
- War Talk - Arundhati Roy (2003)
- Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World - Tracy Kidder (2004)
- Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power - Gary Wills (2005)
- New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa’s Renaissance - Charlayne Hunter-Gault (2007)
- Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause - Tom Gjelten (2008)
- Outliers: The Story of Success - Malcolm Gladwell (2008)
- Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen - Christopher McDougall (2009)
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot (2010)
FICTION
American Fiction
- The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James (1881)
- The Talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith (1955)
- The Ugly American - Eugene Burdict & William Lederer (1958)
- Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; An Inquiry into Values - Robert Pirsig (1974)
- Devil in a Blue Dress - Walter Mosley (1990)
- Women of the Silk - Gail Tsukiyama (1993)
- Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk (1996)
- Motherless Brooklyn - Jonathan Lethem (1999)
- Bel Canto - Ann Patchett (2001)
- The Bonesetter’s Daughter - Amy Tan (2001)
- The Fortune Catcher - Susanne Pari (2002)
- Martyr’s Crossing - Amy Wilentz (2002)
- Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)
- The Known World - Edward P. Jones (2003)
- Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen (2006)
- The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver (2009)
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (1865)
- 1984 - George Orwell (1949)
- Starship Troopers - Robert A. Heinlein (1959)
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone - J.K. Rowling (1997)
- American Gods - Neil Gaiman (2002)
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)
- Anthem - Ayn Rand (1938)
- Palace Walk (Between the Two Palaces) - Naguib Mahfouz (1956)
- Blindness - José Saramago (1995)
- The Bondmaid - Catherine Lim (1995)
- The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2001)
