favourite books?

[Bunnylingus]

Like I say, minds me of when I was a kid, and I think theyre great.

[Charlie Parker]

CS Lewis

[Bunnylingus]

haha, why the ?

[The Colossus]

autobiography of malcolm x, ham on rye, last exit to brooklyn, mama black widdow, i know why the caged bird sings, the wind up bird chronicle, satanic verses, quantity theory of insanity... etc. I can't really think of just one.

[sylvianorth]

Originally Posted by *blaine*

i really didnt like that book, i found it hard to read asi felt there wasnt really a ppoint to it at all

Loads of people don't like it, and for that very reason! That's part of the reason I like it, just the rambling that Holden does. Oddly enough I hate pretty much every other book I've ever read in that style.

[Withnail]

Originally Posted by *blaine*

i really didnt like that book, i found it hard to read asi felt there wasnt really a ppoint to it at all

Aye, same here. I gave up, tbh, and I can't remember the last time I did that.

Favourite books - Espedair St -Iain Banks
NIght watch - Terry Pratchett
Poor Things - Alisdair Gray

and
Amis - Money
The Marriages Between Zones 3,4 and 5- Doris Lessing
A Passage to India - Forster

Surprising, given how much I HATED all of those last three when I had to read them for Eng Lit

[Bunnylingus]

Originally Posted by The Colossus

autobiography of malcolm x, ham on rye, last exit to brooklyn, mama black widdow, i know why the caged bird sings, the wind up bird chronicle, satanic verses, quantity theory of insanity... etc. I can't really think of just one.

I didnt ask you to

Good call on Maya Angelou, not read that for years, might dig it out.

Originally Posted by Withnail

Aye, same here. I gave up, tbh, and I can't remember the last time I did that.

Favourite books - Espedair St -Iain Banks
NIght watch - Terry Pratchett
Poor Things - Alisdair Gray

and
Amis - Money
The Marriages Between Zones 3,4 and 5- Doris Lessing
A Passage to India - Forster

Surprising, given how much I HATED all of those last three when I had to read them for Eng Lit

Wow, we like the same stuff.

Whodathunkit

[¡Punk!]

Catch 22 - I loved the juxtaposition of the story and had me pissing myself laughing throughout. The first, and only book, I've finished and went straight to chapter 1 again.
The Odyssey - I used to read this when I worked at IBM during my breaks and maybe it was because it was breaking the monotony of the work but I fucking loved it. To use an oft used cliche the characters really jumped off the page and still has the greatest anti-hero in fiction.
'Salem's Lot - I read this one Sunday working in The Steamie. It was so dead we never got any customers in after 5 and I read it front to back. I actually didn't shut the pub until an hour or so after our license was over because I lost track of time. Anyway I walked home that night, takes about an hour, and there's this one part on the way with no lights and lots of trees and I was freaked out for about a week.
Clive Barker's Books of Blood - Fucking amazing. In the wee intro at the start Clive Barker says the monsters in his stories are "about as likely to fuck you as eat you". Some twisted, sadistic, sexually repressed shit in these stories that only a gay scouser could come up with.
I Am Legend - The title does make sense! If it said "I Am A Legend" it wouldn't be the coolest last line ever!
Fahrenheit 451 - Done this for my RPR and was the first book I read I could actually disect and delve into. Wonder if it's still as good as I remember.
1984 - Can't really describe this one without plot spoilers and such Alright the whole "evil future dictatorship" blah blah was cool and as I read it as Bush/Blair was attempting to invade Iraq the whole Eastasia/Eurasia thing struck a chord but I liked the love interest part of the story especially when he enters Room 101 and dingies the bitch

[Charlie Parker]

Christian iconography wrapped up in fairy tale lala land. Some idiot relative got me the Narnia books when i was young, thank fuck i was already reading Robert E Howard and promptly used them for toilet paper.

[Poisey]

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

"...a dystopia, influenced by Orwell's classic 1984. The story set in the near future USA in the Republic of Gilead, a state ruled by religious fundamentalism. All the freedoms women have gained are revoked and language is forbidden to all but the male élite. The narrator, Offred, is a "handmaid", valued for her ovaries. She is one of the few women whose reproductive systems have survived the chemical pollution and radiation from power plants."

Memoirs Of A Geisha- Arthur Golden

Beautifully descripted!!

Catch 22

Sunset Song

Currently reading Wicked - Gregory Maguire - A story of the lifes and times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

[Charlie Parker]

George Pelecanos's Down By The River Where The Dead Men Go

Welcome to the unlit bleakness of grunge crime fiction. Nick Stefanos (Nick's Trip) inhabits D.C.'s most squalid streets, tending bar, boozing for free, wasting his 30s and dating a girl with a taste for the sauce to rival his. One night, out on a bender and nearly passed out, he hears a murder being committed and decides to find the killers (how a guy this hammered can later remember so much is cheerfully glossed over). Nick gets himself an alarmingly straight-arrow partner and dives headlong into the underbelly of the porn trade. Two young black men have been dealing drugs and selling their bodies; one is dead, and the other is missing. Stefanos only pauses to drink, listen to music by bands with whom only the hippest readers will be familiar and have a few bouts of desperate sex. Although his innumerable descriptions of bars and boozing might leave some bored (or queasy), Pelecanos joins company with James Ellroy, Andrew Vachss and Jack O' Connell in extending the noirest tones of crime fiction. Here, he unleashes a lacerating view of urban angst and degradation.

[¡Punk!]

You've just reminded me I should really put Factotum in there too...

[The Colossus]

Originally Posted by Bunnylingus

I didnt ask you to

trickery...

[StuntGirl]

Originally Posted by poprock

I really hated that book. Straight to the charity shop it went!

i know a lot of people that hated it, but for some reason I really liked it. It was like Dynasty on K in Cannes, but with doctors and stuff

[Rowsbette]

Originally Posted by Campestral

i don't read much at all but the best i would say is les miserables which had me crying and laughing and getting all philosophical, and 2nd best is 'how late it was, how late' by james kelman an unbelievable piece of writing. oh yeah and 'the little prince'! brilliant short story.

That Kelman one was a weird one, I enjoyed it but by the end he hadn't answered ANY of the questions raised in the novel. What the fuck HAD happened to his girlfriend? I wondered if we were sposed to draw the conclusion he'd killed her when pished, but that didn't seem to gel with the rest of the novel. Also, it made me crave lots and lots of tea.

My favourite books:
Milan Kundera - Immortality
Laura Hird - Born Free
Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories
Kate Atkinson - Human Croquet
Paul Auster - Moon Palace

I'm sure I've outlined the reasons in a thread like this ages ago. There's a few I've read in the past two years or so that I think *will* make my favourites list (Coupland's Life After God, Greene's The End of the Affair and The Shadow of the Wind) but I don't like to chuck them on the list having only read 'em once.