Recommendations, please

This is the page where I ask you to post recommendations for books that I’d love to read, or really ought to read before I die, or really should be embarrassed about getting to the age I have without having read already. So the page doesn’t look embarrassingly blank, here’s a list I’ve been keeping since the start of the year:

  1. Hunting the Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  2. Winter in Madrid - CJ Sansom
  3. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
  4. The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
  5. The Secret Life of Houdini - William Kalush and Larry Ratso Sloman
  6. House of Sand and Fog - Andre Dubus III
  7. The Plot Against America - Philip Roth
  8. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory - Deborah Lipstadt
  9. Roofworld - Christopher Fowler
  10. Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins
  11. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
  12. Polysyllabic Spree - Nick Hornby
  13. Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
  14. American Gods, Coraline and Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman
  15. Signs of Life - Dave Askwith and Alex Normanton
  16. Saint Morrissey - Mark Simpson
  17. The Roots of Coincidence - Arthur Koestler
  18. Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
  19. Farewell My Lovely - Philip Marlowe
  20. The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
  21. The Body-brokers - Annie Cheney
  22. On Writing - Stephen King
  23. Just Law and Eve was Framed - Helena Kennedy
  24. Senseless - Paul Golding
  25. The Thought Gang - Tibor Fischer
  26. Jar City, Silence of the Grave, Tainted Blood - Arnaldur Indridason
  27. In the Land of White Death - Valerian Albanov
  28. Metro Maps of the World - Mark Ovenden and Lise Amy Hansen
  29. The Search for the Panchen Lama - Isabel Hilton
  30. Austerlitz - WG Sebald and Anthea Bell
  31. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
  32. The Timewaster Letters - Robin Cooper
  33. Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs
  34. The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
  35. Watchdogs of Democracy - Helen Thomas
  36. His Majesty’s Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War - Naomi Novik
  37. Deja Dead - Kathy Reichs
  38. Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
  39. Ghost Map - Steven Berlin Johnson
  40. Bush’s Brain and The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power - by James Moore and Wayne Slater.

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Now, what else should I be reading? And what did you think of these books? Comments and suggestions to
recommendations@myweeklybook.net…