OT - Best Book You Have Read?
So, I love to read and between news, sports, and of course mgoblog, I read whatever book strikes my fancy. But I'm stuck and don't have a book "on deck" like I usually do. So what are the best books you have read? Suggestions? I mostly read fiction, but a well written non-fiction or biography can keep my attention.
"Thread Titles You'll Never See On A Buckeye Blog" for $200, Alex.
the second I noticed this thread. Great minds.....
If you're looking for a good fantasy series, check out The Prince of Nothing by R. Scott Bakker. Well plotted, suspenseful, and without the obvious Tolkien rip-offs. No merry bands of travelers, quests to save the world, or anything else. Just a spectacular world still recovering for a 2000 year old apocalypse and looking at the possibility of another one. I highly recommend it. The author was a philosophy professor and PhD. However, he doesn't make the Terry Goodkind mistake by spending his novel proselytizing or transforming philisophical discourse into dialogue. Instead, the philosophy just informs his writing and its themes and gives a nice intellectual depth.
I can't get enough of their books. If you read Sahara you'll realize why Clive was so pissed off about how the movie turned out. The Autobiography of Bill Pete was a favorite of mine when I was a kid, he was a cartoonist for Disney.
I am Legend was a fantastic, quick read that was much better than the movie.
Timeline-Michael Crichton-really good
The Hobbit - Tolkien
The Weight of Glory - C. S. Lewis
Choke - Palahnuik
Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. The book that the movie "Gettysburg" is based off of, very moving. Can even give you some brief feelings of sympathy for the Confederacy, at least until the next time you hear an SEC fan talk.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. If you like thoughtful, intelligent sci-fi (and based off of the responses so far, I think a lot of you do.)
Hyperion and The Terror by Dan Simmons. Two great reads in very different genres (sci-fi and historical fiction) by one of my favorite authors.
Hyperion The Fall of Hyperion Endymion The Rise of Endymion
I read his Ilium/Olympos duology and it was very good. Good read if you like Greek mythology and sci-fi
Non-fiction book about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair centered around architect Daniel Burnham, who constructed the fair and Dr. H.H. Holmes, UM alum, who was a serial killer of young ladies.
Excellent, gripping read about Robert Ressler and his days in the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit as a criminal profiler. He's talked with and interviewed the lowest that mankind has to offer....From Ted Bundy to Richard Trenton Chase, and the book pulls no punches. It's filled with gruesome stories and intriguing mysteries, and Ressler brings you into the minds of some of the 20th Centuries' most ghoulish psychopaths. A must read for True Crime buffs.
Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections
Douglas Coupland - Life After God - Gen X existential short stories
Anything by Hideki Murakami - Start with Kafka on the Shore or the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Kazuo Ishiguro -Never Let Me Go - The less you know about it, the better it is
Zadie Smith - White Teeth and On Beauty
Joe Queenan - True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans
Philip Roth - The Great American Novel
David Winner - Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football
Bill James: Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?
Thought I could take a break from work for a few minutes, and got sucked into this massive thread! Should have known better.
Got a few new ideas, ordered a couple of books from Amazon to add to my queue (The Long Walk and A Walk in the Woods). Thanks!
I'd say this list is getting pretty comprehensive. My faves have all been mentioned except one (unless I missed it).
Sometimes A Great Notion (Ken Kesey, most famous for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and being big in the hippie/psychedelic scene for many years). The way he describes nature (both human and environmental) blew my mind...I couldn't put the book down. It's tied with East of Eden and Brothers Karamazov in my 3 favorite/best books.
Also not sure I noticed Tom Robbins. Incredible writing style that really grabs you and takes you for a ride. Skinny Legs and All, Still LIfe with Woodpecker, and Jitterbug Perfume are my faves.
You will definitely enjoy A Walk in the Woods. It is written in a very easy-to-read kind of way.
I'll go with entertainment and reality:
From Russia with Love - Ian Fleming. They're all good, but that's the best of the books.
Anything written by Bo.
Louis L'Amour's books are fun and easy reads. He is a great storyteller and pretty much any of his books are worth reading. I especially loved 'The Sacketts' series.
The Guns of August -- Barbara Tuchman
The Zombie Survival Guide--Max Brooks
The Killer Angels--Michael Shaara
John Adams--David McCullough
Company K--William March
The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz--Hector Berlioz
So my list will probably skew that way (especially toward epic adventure). The list could easily be four times this long, but here's a good start (many already included upthread):
- The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein. It's essentially the tale of the lunar colony's revolt against the Earthbound "Lunar Authority" and planetary government.
- Stranger in a Strange Land, also by Heinlein. A human raised by Martians returns to Earth.
- 1984 and Brave New World. Both excellent dystopias.
- The Foundation series, Isaac Asimov. Oddly, I think the two prequels and two sequels to the original trilogy are better than the originals. The prequels begin with the Galactic Empire in decline, and you move into a sort of interstellar Dark Ages from there.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide series, Douglas Adams. The best way to describe this is "Monty Python in Space".
- The Discworld series, Terry Pratchett. This is to medieval fantasy what Hitchhiker's Guide is to sci-fi.
- The Harry Potter series. While it's not unusual for me to pick up a book before bed, only to glance at the clock and see that it's 2 am, book 7 is the only one I've ever read where I did that, turned out the light, then turned it back on and started reading again because I was so into the book I couldn't fall asleep. Got hooked in middle school when the third one came out.
- Lord of the Rings. I never did get into The Silmarillion, as that one seems to be more world-building.
- A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin. Unfinished series at the moment (7 books planned, four out ... and the fifth's been in progress for five years now). Epic fantasy, but with an insane number of plot threads to track.
- If you're looking for nonfiction-biographical stuff, Failure Is Not an Option (Gene Kranz) and anything by Richard Feynman are good choices.
- I haven't read these (and they appear to be out of print), but if you like non-fiction chemistry lab horror stories I've heard that Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? (Max Gergel) and Ignition! (John Clark) are highly entertaining and terrifying (among other things, the latter describes an attempt to use as rocket fuel a particularly nasty compound that will spontaneously ignite just about anything - including sand and asbestos).
William Gibson:
_Neuromancer_
_Pattern Recognition_
_Burning Chrome_
Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra
A crime novel set in Bombay - the interwoven stories of a gangster and the policeman who hunts him down.
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
A 1000-page novel set in 1950s India, centered on a girl trying to decide who to marry. But also about a lot of other people in her family and the city they live in, and about politics and love and pretty much everything else you can think of. I don't think I've ever identified with characters so much as in this novel.
2666, Roberto Bolano
I'll cop to only having read about 500 pages of this one, but the fourth section alone - "The Part About the Murders" - is terrifying and brilliant. I'm actually not partial to his other work, but this stands alone.
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa
Suite francaise, Irene Nemirovsky
Child 44 (and The Secret Speech), Tom Rob Smith
Crime novels set in Soviet Russia. Page-turners, but also literary and full of fascinating detail about Soviet life.
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
The Stand, Stephen King
The Gold Coast. As soon as I finished it, I went out and bought The Gate House (its sequel).
Didn't read through the whole list so SIAP.
The Count of Monte Cristo (unabridged) - Alexandre Dumas
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
1984 - George Orwell
Lone Survivor - Marcus Luttrell
I still don't like Catcher in the Rye.
Maybe at the time it came out it was an important book for emphasizing self over group and helping baby boomers break out of the cultural barricades of their parents' generation. That generation resisted (and banned) that message, which I think accounts for the popularity of the book. But with that war now over, to me Holden just comes off like a bratty teenager, a special snowflake who can't get past his specialness.
In that regard, I think Infinite Jest is a more germaine adolescent cultural novel for our generation: Whereas Holden's struggle is to hold to his delusions that he is something special in a world of phonies and derogated morality, Hal's thing is that while he too is a special snowflake in a world of phonies and derogated morality, he can't summon the emotional response to properly feel it.
The Secret Knowledge of Water by Craig Childs
If you like mysteries, these are very good, especially the Hercule Poirot mysteries.