It's been about 9 months since my personal reading renaissance I started reading again (EDIT: i'm no da vinci). It started when I discontinued my two Arts units in the second semester of 2008 to pursue a double major in Commerce instead.

I found myself with too much time on my hands, so instead of studying and investing more time in the remaining two Commerce units (...), I spent a bit of my time wandering into Angus & Robertson, Borders and Dymocks every so often to buy books faster than I could read them.

Starting with buying Animal Farm from Angus & Robertson back then, Classics and Literature quickly became my favourite genres by far. And whenever I finished another book, it went into the same pile on the desk in my room.

Here it is:

The pile actually starts at Animal Farm though, cause Volume #1 of Ranma and the 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy were already there to begin with. So here are the books that I've devoured over the last ~9 months in chronological order.

1. Animal Farm - George Orwell (short, but.. grand.)
2. The Book Thief - Marcus Zusak (nothing great. too easy.)
3. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (David still has it.)
4. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (one of my all-time favourites.)
5. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (didn't live up to the hype, I preferred '1984', maybe I should reread it though.)
6. Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury (pretty good, dystopian story again, but not as good as '1984' either imo.)
7. Lolita - Vladmir Nobokov (bloody good. somewhat explicit at times, but what an engaging novel.)
8. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami (not a classic! and did I say 'Lolita' was explicit? well, this trumps it. but it's pretty much Murakami's style and it works so I can't criticize him for it.)
9. Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami (this guy again? yup, also pretty explicit, probably a bit more. but moving and thoughtful.)
10. The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad (this. took. way. too. long. to. read. it wasn't even long only about 300 pages iirc. but it's Conrad, so yeah it was good just a bit hard to read.)
11. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (i recommend reading this before 'Tom Sawyer', even though this is the sequel.)
12. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov (careful when reading this, keep in mind it's fiction... so good though! wish it were longer but unfortunately the writer died before he could finish it and his wife actually had to tie it up. oh, Mikhail, what could've been...)
13. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess (lived up to the hype and then some. quite short, definitely worth the read.)
14. Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami (not as sexually explicit as Norwegian Wood but it's still there. typical Murakami novel, you'll know what you're getting yourself into when you read this if you're familiar with his works. NB: he wrote Norwegian, then Wind-up, then Kafka, and you can clearly see his writing style progress.)

Reading through some of Franz Kafka's short stories too, they're also pretty good. And finished 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens but it doesn't fit in the pile and I can't remember when I finished it.

So that's it! Best reads of those 14? Um.... 'Animal Farm', 'Catch-22', and 'Lolita' I reckon. Get cracking!

(Oh! But what about all the books I bought and didn't read or didn't/haven't finish... well, there's Moby Dick, The Odyssey, Atlas Shrugged is still going cause it's the biggest book I've ever seen, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Great Expectations to name a few off the top of my head...)

PS: Yes, that's a bulbasaur.