My Top 5 Best Books I've Ever Read...So Far!!!

Hello, I'm Ana Paula from the CPE morning group and I'm new here. By the way, congratulations, the blog is really good and I know I should've written a post before, but here's my humble contribution. LOL

Reading for me is just more than an activity or a habit, but a way of connecting to different things through words, thoughts and imagination, which surely makes me a better thinking human being. That is why Literature is truly one of my passions and I wish I had more available time to read all the books from the writers I love.

So, it's really difficult to make a list of my top 5 books, since there are so many of them that fascinate me, but I'll try:

5 - NATIVE SON, Richard Wright: A great drama about prejudice and social discrimination in the USA during the 50's in which, because of the racial segregation, black and white people could not share the same rights. More than referring to the crime that the main character is responsible for, when he, a black young man, kills his boss's white daughter, Wright describes the stupidity and unfairness of social inequalities in a prejudiced society, making you question if even after the "end" of the segregation in the USA, and after people like Martin Luther King and Obama's election, there still seems to be room for prejudice, not only there, but all around us and mostly, inside of us.

4 - O CRIME DO PADRE AMARO, Eça de Queiróz: It was the first book I read by Eça and I remember doing it because I had read about him when studying Portuguese Literature still in High School, and I wanted to know more about him. He's a really awesome writer and in this wonderful novel he shows the true colors of tradition, religion, alienation and hierarchy within the hypocritical Portuguese society during the middle of the 18th century. It's just amazing!

3 - ENSAIO SOBRE A CEGUEIRA, José Saramago: And there goes my passion for some Portuguese writers! It's just that you cannot die before reading anything by Saramago in your life!!! This particular novel indicates the sublime intelligence and criticism of a writer whose own writing style and relevance leads the reader to rethink what it means to see in this crazy world that we live in. Are we really using our ability to see things or are we drowning in our own blindness day by day without seeing/realizing it?

2 - PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, Jane Austen: As a devoted fan of English Literature, choosing Jane Austen here symbolizes my due respect to all the greatest English writers such as Thomas Hardy, the Brontë Sisters, Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Virginia Woolf and so on. Jane Austen is not only a writer but a myth, and this novel makes you think about the real roles of women and men in our capitalist-chauvinistic-prejudiced society in which material values are more important than feelings. And there's nothing left to say, just: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife".

1 - MEMÓRIAS PÓSTUMAS DE BRÁS CUBAS, Machado de Assis: Machado is the real reason I love literature because he does not write to entertain you but to challenge you, to trick you, to make you feel misarable when he refers to something you don't know, to get you more and more curious about his intentions when writing the way he does, to criticize what is considered right and wrong, that is, to transform you into a better reader and intelectual person. This novel is one of the greatest achievements in Brazilian Literature and just UNBELIEVABLE. You have to read it to know the feeling!

That's it, guys. Hope you've enjoyed... maybe it's too much Literature but it's what I simply love reading.

See you!!!

My Top 5 (plus 2)

I´m sorry Higor but I have to be fair and divide my Top 5 into Brazilian and foreign writers.

My list is:

Brazilian Writers

1 - Feliz Ano Velho, by Marcelo Rubens Paiva (it is an amazing and real story that portrays pain and happiness using the recent Brazilian History as background – I was lucky to meet the writer in a fair 10 years ago);

2 - Primeiras Estórias, by João Guimarães Rosa (I´ve read it twice, I cried and laughed in both of them);

3 - Contos Novos, by Mario de Andrade (I just love the Modernists, specially this book of Mario's, because all of the short stories happened in a São Paulo that I would have loved to live in);

4 - Memórias Póstumas de Braz Cuba, by Machado de Assis (there is not so much to talk about it, except that it is the best book ever written in Portuguese - I have read the book twice, I just loved the movie and the play is outstanding);

5 - Crônicas Escolhidas, by Rubem Braga (the short stories show the bohemian Rio de Janeiro, and the importance of the little moments of our lives).

Foreign Writers

1 - Selected Tales, by Edgar Allan Poe (I fell in love with Poe when I was 17 years old because I found out that he was a huge influence on Machado de Assis and the inventor of detective stories– I read him in Portuguese at first and then in English, which, I have to confess, is very difficult);

2 - The Witching Hour, by Anne Rice (I have read all her books, but this one is different because it portrays a family of powerful wicthes since the medieval age up to now, it is an odyssey with 1.000 pages);

3 - Die Verwandlung (A Metamorfose), by Franz Kafka (I read the book in portuguese and is pure fantastic realism with lots of metaphors - delightful);

4 - And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie (when I first read Agatha Christie I was 12 years old, and since then I have never stopped reading her– I have got approximately 30 books of hers, some in Portuguese others in English – I am just crazy about detective stories, it doesn´t matter if it is in a book, movie or tv series);

5 - Sofies verden (O mundo de Sofia), by Jostein Gaarder (I first read it when I was 17 years old and it is important to me because it was the first book that I bought with my own money, and when I started reading it opened my eyes to a whole new world – I have to confess that I have been reading it for the second time after 11 eleven years and it is amazing how a book can change when you read it again, actually only the great ones can do it).

So, that´s all folks!

Daiana Cabral Barbosa, CPE 1, mornings