No friend requests without a note please!

Here are some strongly held feelings about books I've read (this should tell you all there is to know about me in the context of an online book club):

2 books I absolutely love: Jorge Amado's Gabriela, Clove & Cinnamon and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo is also up there for me.

2 books that made me laugh and laugh and laugh: Richard Russo's Straight Man and Anthony Winkler's The Lunatic

2 books that I think everyone should read: George Orwell's 1984 and Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom

2 self-help-type books that changed my life: Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff

2 terrific depictions of politics in a novel: The Long Night of the White Chickens by Francisco Goldman and Robert Newman's The Fountain at the Centre of the World

2 favourite dystopian tales: Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring and Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale (of course!)

2 books that haunted me: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Edward P. Jones' The Known World

2 good graphic novels: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and Marisa Accocella Marchetto's Cancer Vixen

2 fantastic memoirs: Gioconda Belli's The Country Under My Skin and Anchee Min's Red Azalea. A close 3rd is Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight.

2 of the best non-fiction books I've ever read: Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost and Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography

2 books that have most informed my parenting: 10 Basic Principles of Good Parenting by Laurence Steinberg and Our Babies, Our Selves by Meredith Small

2 books I thought I would like but didn't: Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk and Maxine Hong Kingston's Warrior Woman (I finished the former but not the latter)

2 books I disliked even though they are highly rated: Kite Runner and Ian McEwan's Atonement.

2 books that left me utterly depressed: Kiran Desai's t
The Inheritance of Loss and Ha Jin's Waiting.

Magazines I subscribe to: New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Brain Child, Fast Company, Babybug and National Geographic Little Kids for my daughter). I also get the Sunday New York Times (it gets to Jamaica by Wednesday or so.) Oh yes, Creating Keepsakes,Simple Scrapbooks, and Scrapbooks, etc

My guilty pleasure reading (and addiction) is momoirs and anthologies of essays by women about relationships and family life, books like Bitch in the House and May Queen.

I have a few of my 2 year old daughter's favourite books on here. She is a big reader, and these are just the ones that I particularly like.

Weird reading interest: memoirs and novels about the CIA (go figure) « less