Below are the topics for the second ten editions of my local book salon. Each topic here includes a dozen representative books from the original lists of suggested books that were created to give people ideas about the possibilities for a given topic; however, participants are free to choose whatever book they believe fits the theme.
11: Best Picture Adaptations
Around the World in 80 Days (Jules Verne)
The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
The Godfather (Mario Puzo)
Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien)
A Man for All Seasons (Robert Bolt)
No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)
Out of Africa (Isak Dinesen)
Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
Schindler’s Ark (Thomas Keneally)
The Silence of the Lambs (Thomas Harris)
12: Disturbing Dystopias
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
The City of Ember (Jeanne DuPrau)
A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
The Giver (Lois Lowry)
The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
1984 (George Orwell)
Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)
The Stand (Stephen King)
We (Yevgeny Zamyatin)
13: Around the World in 30 Books
The Accidental Tourist (Anne Tyler)
Around the World in 80 Days (Jules Verne)
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (Laurie Lee)
The Great Railway Bazaar (Paul Theroux)
In a Sunburned Country (Bill Bryson)
The Innocents Abroad (Mark Twain)
The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James)
On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles)
The Songlines (Bruce Chatwin)
Travels with Charley: In Search of America (John Steinbeck)
Travels with My Aunt (Graham Greene)
14: What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
Cranford (Elizabeth Gaskell)
David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
Emma (Jane Austen)
Middlemarch (George Eliot)
North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell)
Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens)
Persuasion (Jane Austen)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)
Can You Forgive Her? (Anthony Trollope)
The Way We Live Now (Anthony Trollope)
15: Classic Boys Adventures
Captain Blood (Gabriel Sabatini)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
Journey to the Center of the Earth (Jules Verne)
Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson)
The Lost World (Arthur Conan Doyle)
Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
The Scarlet Pimpernel (Baroness Emmuska Orczy)
She (H. Rider Haggard)
Tarzan of the Apes (Edgar Rice Burroughs)
The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)
Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne)
16: Go West, Young Man!
Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Dee Brown)
Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
Little House on the Prairie series (Laura Ingalls Wilder)
Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry)
The Octopus: A Story of California (Frank Norris)
Roughing It (Mark Twain)
The Trees (The Awakening Land #1) (Conrad Richter)
True Grit (Charles Portis)
Undaunted Courage (Stephen Ambrose)
The Virginian (Owen Wister)
17: Food and Drink
Babette’s Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny (Isak Dinesen)
The Book of Tea (Okakura Kakuzo)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl)
Chocolat (Joanne Harris)
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe (Fannie Flagg)
Gabriela, Cloves and Cinnamon (Jorge Amado)
Heartburn (Nora Ephron)
Hunger (Knut Hamsun)
The Last Chinese Chef (Nicole Mones)
Like Water for Chocolate (Laura Esquivel)
The Old Devils (Kingsley Amis)
Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris) (Émile Zola)
18: We’ll Always Have Paris
The American (Henry James)
Down and Out in Paris and London (George Orwell)
The Dud Avocado (Elaine Dundy)
The Invisible Bridge (Julie Orringer)
Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (Victor Hugo)
A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)
Père Goriot (Balzac)
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Patrick Suskind)
A Place of Greater Safety (Hilary Mantel)
Revolution (Jennifer Donnelly)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
Zazie dans le métro (Raymond Queneau)
19: Killer Thrillers
The Alienist (Caleb Carr, 1994)
The Day of the Jackal (Frederick Forsyth, 1971)
Gaudy Night (Dorothy L. Sayers, 1935)
The Killer Inside Me (Jim Thompson, 1952)
The Long Goodbye (Raymond Chandler, 1953)
The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett, 1930)
The Moving Toyshop (Edmund Crispin, 1946)
Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie, 1934)
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Patrick Suskind, 1985)
The Postman Always Rings Twice (James M. Cain, 1934)
Strangers on a Train (Patricia Highsmith, 1950)
The Thin Man (Dashiell Hammett, 1932)
20: Out of Africa via a Passage to India
Black Narcissus (Rumer Godden)
Burmese Days (George Orwell)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene)
Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie)
Out of Africa (Isak Dinesen)
A Passage to India (E.M. Forster)
The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
The Jewel in the Crown (Raj Quartet #1) (Paul Scott)
Sacred Hunger (Barry Unsworth)
The Siege of Krishnapur (J.G. Farrell)
The White Tiger (Aravind Adiga)
Sly Wit 