If you’re anything like me, you probably read a lot of books and forget a lot about them as well after reading them (also see: being ADHD)
Is there one specific book whose plot, characters, setting you just can’t get out of your mind and still think about today even when in the midst of another book?
For me, it’s 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. I think due to the sheer volume of this book (clocked in over 1000 pages) I was so invested in Tengo and Aomame’s stories that it’s quite impossible to forget them quickly. This is also why I prefer long novels, because they stick around in my memory for longer!
So what book is still stuck with you?
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Reading red rising atm and on light bringer atm and damn this whole series will stick with me
The Last Paper Crane by Kerry Drewery. It’s the only book that has ever made me cry. I also like the mixture of haiku and prose.
Almost White was a book I remember that really stayed in my head. I think that it was written in the early 60s. I read the book in the 90s. Never found that book again .no one would eve mentioned the topic. It was and would be to controversial. For the same people it’s about.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January. Read almost exactly a year ago, and even my ADHD brain still holds that story close.
The last books that stuck like this (each for very different reasons) were Carriger’s Soulless, Valente’s Orphans Tales, and Morganstern’s Night Circus.
Maybe because they were so long, but A Secret History by Donna Tartt and The Terror by Dan Simmons.
The terror def wouldn’t be for everyone, but I got so immersed in the arctic expedition it felt like I was there at times. A secret history I just found absolutely gripping in the second half, really looking forward to reading the goldfinch at some point when I’m ready to pick up a longer book again
“Fear Book”. I think it was a Dean Koontz book. You had to suspend your disbelief a bit, true. What made it stick in my head was the fear book itself.
If you hid your anger or rage about a person, and you opened up the book, you would read how to harm that person and get away with it. If you didn’t hide your anger, the pages were blank. That was such a novel concept that it blew my mind.
The second thing that made it stick in my mind was one of the main character’s recounts their psychological abuse at the hands of their parents, and this character’s wife said what I was thinking “Whatever he did to them, they deserved it.”
The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is really old, over a 100 years, and you can definitely tell. But there is something about an fantastic adventure seen with early 1900s eyes that stay with me.
Brave New World Ducks Americanah
Ministry of the Future
Fake Accounts
FastForward
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.
Circe. It’s my favorite now.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, his first autobiography. I’m a little angry that it wasn’t required reading for me, that it isn’t required reading for all students. I’m on the second autobiography now.
The Hollow Places, by T.Kingfisher. This book is a horror story that you spend most of it either laughing or freaked out. There are a lot of books people have listed in this post that I have read and loved. But this was the first book that angered me. When asked to leave a review I wrote, “Why has no one ever told me about this book?! How can this hilariously terrifying book exist and no one ever told me? What else am I missing out on?” Then I read a different book by T.Kingfisher and didn’t like it that much, so not all of her books are amazing, I guess. Anyway, read THIS book! But not in the dark, or by yourself. You’ve been warned.
For whom the bell tolls
The Last House on Needless Street - I was going for a thriller but by the middle it was so much more than that!! Became one of my favourite books for life! Some honourable mentions: Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, Bunny, Cleopatra and Frankenstein and My brilliant Friend (all 4 of them)!