|
Post by callipygias on Mar 9, 2009 12:02:11 GMT -5
Pretty much any positive thing said in the Library is a sort of recommendation, but I though it would be nice to have a thread specifically to recommend the books you really love, and that you think others here might like too. I'll start with one my cousin got me for Christmas last year: The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien. The Amazon review starts like this: "A comic trip through hell in Ireland, as told by a murderer, The Third Policeman is another inspired bit of confusing and comic lunacy from the warped imagination and lovably demented pen of Flann O'Brien" The Third Policeman also has one of the greatest beginnings ever: "Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar."And it justs gets better. By the last quarter of the book I knew it was going to be one of my favorites, and with just one reading it's in my top ten. If you enjoy the absurd (from Vonnegut to One Hundred Years of Solitude) give this a try. BUT! DO NOT READ THE INTRODUCTION FIRST! MAJOR, MAJOR SPOILER IN THERE!
|
|
|
Post by mummifiedstalin on Mar 9, 2009 12:10:55 GMT -5
Bicycles ARE the key to the universe.
Love that book. It even made a cameo on LOST. The Dalkey Archives is also good. In Ireland, though, he's mainly known for _At Swim Two Birds_, but you have to know your Irish/Celtic mythology to really "get" that one.
|
|
|
Post by callipygias on Mar 11, 2009 15:55:54 GMT -5
Bicycles ARE the key to the universe. Love that book. It even made a cameo on LOST. The Dalkey Archives is also good. In Ireland, though, he's mainly known for _At Swim Two Birds_, but you have to know your Irish/Celtic mythology to really "get" that one. Immediately after reading The Third Policeman I bought O'Brien's collected works, and as much as I'm looking forward to reading At Swim-Two-Birds I'll probably read Policeman a second time before I do. I get the feeling I'll revisit it many times.
|
|
|
Post by inlovewithcrow on Mar 13, 2009 12:41:33 GMT -5
I recently found a comedy writer I like, Christopher Moore. I guess he has a cult following of sorts. Had his publishers not clued me in to his writing comedy with "funny" typeface on the spine of a book, I'd have never found him, and I'm desperate for comedy writers I think are funny. (IMO, no one else touches Donald Westlake, alas, and he died to my great grief on New Year's Eve.)
Moore writes sorts of sf/horror/comedies. Yeah, horror comedies, whoda thunk? But they are, and they are quite funny, with reluctant heroes pulled into VERY strange circumstances. Luckily, there are 8 more of his novels I haven't read yet.
|
|
|
Post by callipygias on Mar 13, 2009 13:50:31 GMT -5
I recently found a comedy writer I like, Christopher Moore. Moore writes sorts of sf/horror/comedies. Yeah, horror comedies, whoda thunk? But they are, and they are quite funny, with reluctant heroes pulled into VERY strange circumstances. Luckily, there are 8 more of his novels I haven't read yet. I think I'll try him out, but they're pretty spendy and there are quite a few of them. Do you have any favorites?
|
|
|
Post by inlovewithcrow on Mar 15, 2009 14:23:48 GMT -5
I've only read three, so I'm no expert. For a more s-f-y idea, try Fluke, about whale song. For a horror comedy of his, A Dirty Job has a number of laughs. This average guy wakes up and suddenly he's an angel of death. (not THE angel of death. AN angel of death. ) I didn't know they were expensive. I used the public library to read them, though they do have waiting lists to get to them all.
|
|
|
Post by Satchmo on Mar 17, 2009 20:42:45 GMT -5
Thank You For Smoking
Read this for a project I did on satire. Funny as hell.
|
|
|
Post by inlovewithcrow on Mar 21, 2009 11:26:32 GMT -5
I've been reading a number books from "Best of" lists at www.webrary.org/rs/FLbklistmenu.html . It's a librarians' listserve and pretty reliable in recommendations. Off their best of year lists, I read and recommend John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things. It's about a boy, an enthusiastic reader, at the beginning of WWII. Having lost his mother and taken on a step-family he doesn't like, he throws himself more into reading, particularly fairly tales, and the boundary between the Fairy Tale World and his world thins; soon he goes there altogether and has a series of adventures. These are dark fairy tales, not the Disneyfied forms. Other books have done this sort of thing too (Land of Laughs, for instance, which is far darker than this book) but it is done well here. And since it isn't marketed as fantasy, people who love literate fantasy might not know about it.
|
|
|
Post by abomb on Mar 23, 2009 17:46:02 GMT -5
A couple of years ago I stumbled onto a novel called Earth Abides by George Stewart. Written in 1949, it was the grand-daddy of the end-of-man genre.
Initially it's the story of a single survivor, one of a mere handful left in the San Francisco Bay Area by a virulent global plague. It gives a remarkably plausible picture of the gradual decay of human infrastructure and the wild re-adaptations of both wild and domestic species. Scientifically grounded, the passages describing these are nonetheless lyrically written.
It's not much of a giveaway to say that eventually the survivors re-establish communities. At this stage the challenge is less about personal survival than cultural survival. How much of what had been can be preserved, or even should be? This comes to be an especially sore point as the community comes to be dominated by the survivors' children and grand-children.
It's a mystery to me that this book isn't better remembered, it should be a classic.
The symbol of their god is a hammer, but they pay him no great reverence . . .
|
|
|
Post by doctorz on Mar 31, 2009 14:25:33 GMT -5
Neil Gaiman - Pretty much any of his books. I'm a big fan and have all his books. The latest one is the The Graveyard Book. Mostly his books have to do with some clueless everyman getting caught up in some brutal conflict between elder gods and spirits and the guy (usually) discovering his hidden strength or talent or whatever. I make it sound dull. It isn't.
|
|
|
Post by Mighty Jack on Apr 10, 2009 1:28:43 GMT -5
Brideshead Revisted by Waugh and Brothers Karamozov by Dostoyevsky are for me the quinessential novels. I wouldn't change a thing about them, not one word or period or anything.
Of course there are critics who will see flaws in them, but for me they are the 2 best things I've ever read.
As far a modern reads, the crime/mysteries of Michael Connelly are about a good as it gets.
|
|
|
Post by inlovewithcrow on Apr 14, 2009 15:50:29 GMT -5
Yes, as a mystery fan, I concur: Connelly is right up there at the top of the list. Don't let "genre" writing fool ya--much of the best writing in America is being done in crime/mystery. Connelly and Sanford, smart, talented, reliable, research cop details very well. Connelly really touches me, often. Sanford's view of female sexuality delights me, and that female Missourian hit-woman character in two of his novels is one of my favorite characters ever. They each write about a book a year, and that's great--but I read them in a day, which is not so great.
|
|
|
Post by Crowfan on May 12, 2009 20:13:52 GMT -5
I love reading history books and I would recommend a few:
Lincoln by David Herbert Donald
Blood On The Moon by Edward Steers
Adolf Hitler by John Toland
The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich by William L. Shirer
Shelby Foote's three volume The Civil War
|
|
|
Post by mrsphyllistorgo on May 19, 2009 15:33:14 GMT -5
The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. I'm rereading it for the third time, and it makes me shriek with joy and genuinely tear up every time. In brief, it takes place in the not too distant future (hey!) With time travel being available and used. But not for what you'd think--it's used in Oxford college for historians to travel back in time to observe and enhance thier understanding of the past. (You can't go back and change anything--shoot Hitler, for example, because the past cannot be changed. The Net, the machinery used for travel, will either not open or perform "slippage", setting you down miles and weeks from where you wanted to be in order to keep the past intact.)
In this universe, a young grad history student goes back to the Middle Ages, over the vociferous protests of her tutor, and gets stuck in the middle of the Black Death. The story swerves from her time with a mideval family and the present, with her teachers frantically trying to locate her during an influenza epidemic. You will not be able to put it down.
|
|
|
Post by inlovewithcrow on Jun 17, 2009 7:51:12 GMT -5
Any Human Heart by William Boyd, just read and couldn't put it down.
Had I read a description of this, I might not have ever even picked it up. It's a lifelong journal of a fictional British guy, upper class at first, eventually a writer and a spy and an art dealer and finally a poor old man, disappointed by his life but still paticipating in interesting events.
I can't entirely explain why I found it so compelling--perhaps it was how real the journal felt, so that I felt I was getting a peek into a private life. There's sex, there's humor, there's a cast of a hundred famous people as bit characters. It's very British. I found it impossible to put down.
|
|