Here, in no specific order, is a list of recent favorite books I recommend to anyone who's looking for something to do now that the election's through:

Watership Down (Richard Adams)  - Rabbits and warrens and society, oh my! Required reading in high school that, somehow, I never was required to read. Worth it.

Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier) - Scrumptious thriller in the classic style, with "surprise" different ending for anyone who was introduced to the novel via the unparalleled Hitchcock film. Original ending was better!

All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque) - If I could require people to read one book about war, this is it. Unglorious, hardened, hardscrabble portrait of what it's really like in the trenches. Makes "Saving Private Ryan" seem like a walk in the countryside by comparison.

For One More Day (Mitch Albom) - Another loving vision of the meaning of life from a columnist I grew into adulthood admiring while living near Detroit 20 years ago. Man loses family, loses self, almost loses life - but the quirky journey is not trite, and totally worth the read.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou) - Maya's biography; this was my second time reading it, and I enjoyed it even more. Lyrical, lovely. Even more meaningful in the advent of an Obama presidency.

Bag of Bones (Stephen King) - King was never a horror writer to me. His characters struggle against the eternal good and evil within society, within and even beyond themselves and this life and in the legacies they leave behind. This is a ghost story of revenge and redemption that haunts me still - and not in a scary way. Other amazing tales by King: The Stand (all time fave for me) and The Shining (absolutely riveting, and nothing like Stanley Kubrick's trippy view).

Go Down, Moses (William Faulkner) - William and I have a problem. He writes, and I can barely read him without wanting to throw in the towel. This book is a series of short stories (notably including "The Bear," about man's relationship with nature and the loss of multiple definitions of wilderness) that are almost indecipherable. He makes you read stream of consciousness at a breakneck pace; but if you stick with him, if you believe there's a way out of HIS wilderness, you leave his works behind with a true sense of enrichment and accomplishment. I can't explain it; I'm a better person, I believe, for having slogged through the seeming insanity that is Faulkner.

Cider House Rules (John Irving) - Another treasured writer, John Irving weaves a complicated tale that explores the depths of love and longing, transgressions and forgiveness in wholly flawed yet largely admirable characters set in rural and coastal Maine. My all-time favorite Irving novel is "A Prayer for Owen Meany."

I Know This Much Is True (Wally Lamb) - Bit of a contrived ending (everything seems to wrap up a little too perfectly), but what a story. Identical twin brothers - one mentally ill - and the discrete travails they experience; their story unfolds as you read the autobiography of their Italian grandfather (a real bastard, but part of them and their history, too). Richly detailed, very real. If you can forgive the last few pages, you're set.

Books I'm currently reading or set to:

The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal) 

David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)

Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison) - already on my list, sans an Obama win, FYI

Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

Additions anyone? :-)