booooooooooookses.

[schmerica]

Please to rec me books?

I like nonfiction. I like genre fiction of all kinds. I like funny books and quirky books and books with history or language or books or expatriates or food. I like both brand new books and older books. I read a lot and very quickly, but am easily bored (often, but not exclusively, with mainstream literary fiction). I am not well-read in the categories of YA or romance, and both are large enough that I am wary of guessing on goodness on my own.

Behind the cut tag is the list of the books I have read and enjoyed (that is, I'm kicking off the sucky and mediocre books I finished anyway) since December 2004, for context:

The Last Camel Died at Noon by Elizabeth Peters
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie
Miracle and Other Christmas Stories by Connie Willis
Frederica by Georgette Heyer
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
The Snake, The Crocodile and the Dog by Elizabeth Peters
The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard
As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann
Sunshine by Robin McKinley
Empress of the World by Sara Ryan
A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease by Cintra Wilson
Grass as His Pillow by Lian Hearn
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares
Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States by Bill Bryson
Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer by Chauncey Loomis
The Second Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares
A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libby Bray

Comments

[helvirago]

I myself love David Foster Wallace, though he's something of a particular taste. If you haven't read him, I'd recommend trying one of his essay or short story collections, like Brief Interviews with Hideous Men or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Also, he wrote Everything and More, which is nonfiction and about the mathematical concept of infinity. I liked it a lot.
Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, about Mma Ramotswe, a detective in Botswana.
Milan Kundera's Immortality, which is... um... a Kundera novel.
Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat -- a particularly 19th-century chaps-at-Oxford book, referenced at length in Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog (also highly recommended).
Sherri S. Tepper's Grass, which I found to be fantastic scifi worldbuilding, with a lower-than-usual concentration of her often-overwhelming gender politics.
Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, which is big and incorporates WWII and cryptography and modern-day cryptography and developing-world technology issues and van Eck phreaking and... stuff. My one beef with him is that he has a chip on his shoulder about "ivory tower intellectuals" -- but that really makes only one appearance and then it's over.

I know you have more than enough suggestions, but I couldn't not answer this one.