That other forum stalwart - Fave Books

[Niall Estick]

Follwing on from favourite films, lets exercise our grey matter and come up with our favourite books. I'd be interested to know if blokes go for 'Prick -Lit' - Andy MacNabb etc. (The One That Got Away was always the better book IMO)

Can we have novels please? No cycling biographies or reference books.

Children's books are allowed.


Off the top of me pork pie:

On the Road - Jack Kerouac (it really did change my life)

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner (utterly original and compelling structure)

Birdsong - Seb Faulks (a book I couldn't stop thinking about for months afterwards.

Vernon God Little - TBC Pierre. A classic American novel, even though it was written by a Brit living in Mexico.

The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - a beautiful love story.

 

[John the Monkey]

Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset-Maugham
Collected Essays - George Orwell
The Water of the Hills (Jean De Florette and Manon Des Sources) - Marcel Pagnol
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
Pop. 1280 - Jim Thompson
If Not Now, When? - Primo Levi
Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake
The Right Stuff - Tom Wolfe
Man is Wolf to Man - Janusz Bardach
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Great Apes - Will Self

Coincidentally, I'm reading "Birdsong" myself at the moment.

Facebookers might be interested in the "Books" application, which is a nice way of keeping track of what you've read and have on the shelf waiting to read, as well as nosying at what others are reading....

 

[Melvil]

Anything from Jeffrey Archer does me fine................................................NOT

Erm...bit of a nerd with my reading choices so I'm not telling lest embarassment ensue!

 

[Crackle]

The Gruffalo
Dragonheart
Mr Brown Can Moo Can you
The sneetchers
Fox in Socks
The Lorax
Monstranomica

I know. Kids you see

 

[cisamcgu]

Aubrey/Maturin series - Patrick O'Brian
Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
The Perfect Machine: Building the Palomar Telescope - Ronald Florence


and of course, everyones favourite ping the duck (Just check out the first review - a masterpiece )

 

[Crackle]

hmmm tricky, so many

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Tin Drum
Hamlet
The Snow Leopard
Zen & the Art of Motorcyle maintenance
Lord of the Rings
Come hunt an Earthman
Jeeves & Wooster
James Herriot
7 years in Tibet
Touching the Void
The poems of Dylan Thomas, Sassoon, Larkin, Hughes, Betjeman etc..
The Dune Trilogy
Thomas Covenant


....and I've not even scraped the surface

 

[andylaw79]

Not much of a reader myself, but on the odd occasion I do pick up a book:

Anything by Bill Bryson (not really novels but...) or Ian Rankin or Ivine Welsh.
Catcher in The Rye - J.D. Salinger:
Agent ZigZag The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman - Ben MacIntyre

 

[Flying_Monkey]

As with films, this can change from week to week - at the moment:

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
If on a Winter's Night, a Traveller - Italo Calvino
The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin
Chronicle in Stone - Ismael Kadare
Lord of Light - Roger Zelazny
The Bone People - Keri Hulme
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Ecotopia - Ernest Callenbach
The Watson Trilogy (Killing Mr Watson, Lost Man's River, Bone by Bone) - Peter Matthiessen
Strandloper - Alan Garner

 

[theclaud]

Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Poor Things - Alasdair Gray
White Noise - Don DeLillo
The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
History of the World in 10½ Chapters - Julian Barnes
The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
A Passage to India - EM Forster
The Code of the Woosters - PG Wodehouse

How many are we allowed?

 

[Melvil]

Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Poor Things - Alasdair Gray
White Noise - Don DeLillo
The Third Policeman - Flann O'Brien
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
History of the World in 10½ Chapters - Julian Barnes
The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
A Passage to India - EM Forster
The Code of the Woosters - PG Wodehouse

How many are we allowed?

10 and a half

 

[Melvil]

As with films, this can change from week to week - at the moment:

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
If on a Winter's Night, a Traveller - Italo Calvino
The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin
Chronicle in Stone - Ismael Kadare
Lord of Light - Roger Zelazny
The Bone People - Keri Hulme
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Ecotopia - Ernest Callenbach
The Watson Trilogy (Killing Mr Watson, Lost Man's River, Bone by Bone) - Peter Matthiessen
Strandloper - Alan Garner

Interesting choice of Sci-fi, there, FM. Might I suggest Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan if you liked neuromancer?

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Interesting choice of Sci-fi, there, FM. Might I suggest Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan if you liked neuromancer?

Read all of his... they aren't exactly subtle, but good page-turners. My favourite recent SF novels have to be Brasyl by Ian McDonald or Air by Geoff Ryman.

 

[Melvil]

Read all of his... they aren't exactly subtle, but good page-turners. My favourite recent SF novels have to be Brasyl by Ian McDonald or Air by Geoff Ryman.

Well, yes, but still rather interesting. Funnily enough am in the middle of Brasyl at the mo and finding it rather good, which is pleasing as I was pretty unimpressed with his previous one River of Gods.

 

[Niall Estick]

Sorry can I add '1984' and 'Animal Farm'? Must reads in my book.

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Well, yes, but still rather interesting. Funnily enough am in the middle of Brasyl at the mo and finding it rather good, which is pleasing as I was pretty unimpressed with his previous one River of Gods.

I liked River of Gods, but it reads like a bit of warm up for Brasyl IMHO. I've just finished Paul McAuley's The Quiet War, which is the best kind of technopolitics and solar system colonisation space opera...