Recommend me a book please!

Origins

A few weeks ago I had a bunch of friends over that I don't get to see often and an amazing conversation emerged with everybody talking about books that they had read and liked with everybody giving recommendations to everybody else. I am trying to read more these days and lament not grabbing a pen and pencil to record all of the titles mentioned. I am going to try to convince them to recollect what they can from that evening or other titles that they have read and would like to recommend either on the basis of liking other similar books or on their own.

Goal

Since my reading time is limited and precious, I am hoping to try to spend as much of it reading good stuff. I don't necessarily want to know everything about a book before I read it, as a matter of fact I love picking up something without knowing anything about it at all. I would like folks to contribute recommendations without things devolving into book reports, but rather impressions and relationships to other works as a means of describing the work.

Let's see how it goes.