Truly gut wrenching.

The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns were both wonderful.

And it seems to be a mixed bag.

First of all, most of them are quite new. And that's a problem, given that several books of greater age are far more emotional. But never mind that.

I'll agree with Kite Runner, Thousand Splendid Suns and The Nightingale. Some of the others make no sense, though.

A bunch of the others make me wonder if I read the same book they did, and I keep asking myself if they confused what books they were reading with other works by the same writer. Like Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, but not Remains of the Day. Or One Hundred Years of Solitude, but not Love in the Time of Cholera.

And I'm gobsmacked that someone actually put The Hiding Place on anything but a potential 70s TV movie of the week list, and left off the far more visceral Diary of Anne Frank. That's just...blasphemy.

And I agree with its inclusion on this list. It was one of the ones I was thinking about before I started scrolling through the list. I have a copy of "Flowers for Algernon" because the Easton Press sent me a copy recently as one of the editions in their Masterpieces of Science Fiction series. I don't intend to read it, but I did see that movie with Cliff Robertson. I've also seen the movies "The Fault in Our Stars", "The Hiding Place" and "The Book Thief", and also "The Road" a year or two after I read the novel. I never read the book when I've already seen the movie, because the movie is a spoiler.

-- Ron

So I can't speak to it. But some of the others are still head-scratchers.