favourite books?

[PrincessGarnet]

I like audiobooks! Although they are quite expensive. I spend most days reading chapters from various books or reading online journals so when i have spare time i don't really feel like reading.

[stripey_kitten]

Poppy Z Brite - Exquisite Corpse (gay serial killers in New Orleans, what more can I say)

JK Rowling - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkabhan (the introduction of Sirius )

SE Hinton - The Outsiders (I love teaching it, cheesy in parts but a really good read nonetheless)

Margaret Oliphant - Miss Marjoribanks (a scottish Jane Eyre, of sorts)

F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (decadent)

I know there are more but it's all I can think of off the top of my head.

[PrincessGarnet]

Originally Posted by PrincessGarnet

Cider with Rosie - forgot the authors name but the little stories he tells about his childhood really touched me, it's so sad in moments but so brillant

What an idiot it's an autobiography - so the author's name is Laurie Lee - I love the name Laurie for a boy :-)

[faerie_child]

Originally Posted by Rowsbette

I'd agree that audiobooks seem like a bit of a cop-out... but I'm making an exception for Ulysses. 40 minute round walk to and from uni + mp3 player + Soulseek = minimal reading of what everyone considers an unreadable book.

Bet this idea seems less appealing when I actually make a start on it, but.

good call on that. i never read it, i skimmed a couple of chapters but that was it. it is dire. mind you, i dont think i could listen to it either.

[supernothing]

Albert Camus - The Outsider/Stranger or Bukowski's Ham On Rye, it certainly has the best ending to a book I can think of.

[apocalypso4laz]

Trevanian - Shibumi. Its been my favourate book since l first read it when l was 15 which is saying a lot as my literary tastes have broadened since then. I usually read it twice a year, let it sit for a little bit, then pick it up and relive it all over again.

Otherwise l try not to think of any other book in terms of favorite because l read so much. Presently lm interested in the cold war and world politics so stuff by Ludlum and Forsyth are up my alley. Id seriously advice anyone who hasnt read either the Devil's Alternative and Icon to do so.

[The_librarian]

Anything By David Gemmill I find his work to be generally great. Though particularly Waylander, and The last SWord of Power (An Interesting take on Arthurian legend).

Also most of Pratchets Discworld series, the skewed view of or world sits well with my sensibilities, and I like the humour, Probably my favourite is Night Watch, mainly because I enjoy all the Vimes books, but this one just caught my imagination that little bit more.

Finnaly, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, one of the few books that I was made to read at school that I still find I can read again. A powerful story,with well balanced characters.

[Bunnylingus]

im adding Memoirs of a Geisha.

Im kinda unsure as whether I could read it again though.

[Charlie Parker]

I like Mills and Boon

[Bunnylingus]

I bought my nanna a Mills and Boon and she wouldnt speak to me for a week.

[Charlie Parker]

see new thread

[poprock]

Originally Posted by Charlie Parker

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

I think I’m going to pick this up and give it a try sometime over the next few weeks.

Currently reading Nanotales by Ziv Navoth, which is just as silly as you’d expect from the name. Around a hundred ultra-short stories, each only taking around five minutes to read. Nice wee snapshots, it reminds me of 253 but is nowhere near as good.

Oh aye, favourite books. Erm …

253 by Geoff Ryman
A novel that covers seven minutes of time on a London Underground train. Each page is a biography of one passenger, telling what’s on their mind as they sit for this seven minutes. 253 passengers, 253 intertwined stories. Who’d have expected a book like that to actually manage to contain a narrative, let alone a shock ending? I lent my copy to an ex in Oregon when leaving her to come home, and it took me fucking ages to get hold of a replacement copy.

Needle in the Groove by Jeff Noon
I fucking love Jeff Noon’s books. Everything from his psychedelic sci-fi fiction to his experimental attacks on the English language and attempts to be the next Burroughs or Joyce. The man’s a genius. Needle in the Groove is his masterpiece, halfway between conventional narrative and trippy experimentation. For starters there are no sentences, no full-stops. Instead the book is written in a kind of verse. Not that it rhymes, but is has rhythm. It doesn’t rock, but it rolls. Because the central conceit here being that music is a drug, both metaphorically and literally, the fact that it’s hard to read without building an internal rhythm and soundtrack is just beautiful. We follow the un-named bass player into a world of experimentation that he thought he had grown out of, joining and rejuvenating the best (unheard-of) band in the world as they reinvent music with the help of a new liquid recording medium. Everything starts to unravel and fall apart when he discovers that the other band members are injecting the liquid music and getting high on their own creativity.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
Cayce is a coolhunter with an almost supernatural talent. She’s psychologically (and that manifests itself psychosomatically in physical symptoms) allergic to branding; to graphic and product identities. The stronger the brand, the harsher her reaction. She has built a globetrotting career around this as a sort of guinea pig for corporations wanting to create new retail brands. They show her proposed designs and if she has a reaction, it’s good. If not, the design isn’t working yet. Cayce gets drawn into playing detective on the trail of an elusive video artist who is posting sections of narrative online anonymously. Every advertising agency in the world wants to capture this incredible talent, but nobody can find him or her. Cayce ricochets from the Eastern Bloc to Tokyo, London to New York on the trail of this elusive auteur. It’s a lot more exciting than that sounds, and uses the exploration of corporate identity as a metaphor for Cayce’s exploration of her own personal identity.

The Fuck-up by Arthur Nersesian
Nersesian excels at the sort of dirty, grungy, fucked-up life stories that can only really work in an eighties New York setting. Dogrun is a brilliantly redemptive tale of a girl who recovers from her no-good boyfriend’s death by throwing herself into a riot grrrl band. Chinese Takeout covers the transformation of a penniless artist into a slightly less penniless artist via a doomed affair with a beautiful junkie. Suicide Cassanova is just plain wrong, lulling you into identifying with one of the lowest, filthiest, sex-obsessed paedophile stalkers ever committed to paper. The Fuck-up though, is his best novel so far. It follows a guy through a rough year or so downtown, as he loses his girl, his friends, and his self-respect, dropping further down the job ladder with each position he takes. He ends up in a world of gay porn cinemas, low-rent rent-boys, and murder for hire.

Going Postal by Stephen Jaramillo
Another novel about an American loser in his early twenties. I have a thing for urban fantasies, I guess. Call me an old romantic. Steve Reeve comes from a long line of mailmen and is determined not to be one. He’s also unhealthily obsessed with the history of mailmen who have ‘gone postal’ and shot their colleagues. The record is thirty-something victims before being taken down by the police. Steve thinks he could do better. Steve has a temper. His Dad (a mailman) has just given him a gun. He doesn’t know who to shoot first. That’s all just the pyschological background for another story about a guy who loses everything but the will to live and builds a new life from the bottom up. The beauty here is in the details: Jaramillo paints the finest description of a night out in the big city that I’ve ever read.

[poprock]

Another:

Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow
Doctorow’s books are often just dissertations on his view of future technologies and connectivity, wrapped up in a pretty plot to make the treatise more palatable. EST is exactly like that, but the basic premise is simpler than that of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, leaving more room for plot. The world really is run by secret societies, but they’re not so secret and they’re not based on stuffy old religions. They’re based on timezones and the creative work people can do in the different hours of a day. These timezone tribes live interconnected lives online, they’re permanently jacked-in whether at rest or on the move, and they function as the ultimate old boys’ network. Sabotaging a rival tribe gains you wealth and power, just as easily as doing positive work to eleveate your own kin. Our hero falls for the wrong woman and trusts the wrong man, both turning out to be double-agents working for the glory of a rival tribe. Our hero needs to decide whether or not to push that pencil up his own nose and into his brain, in a crude attempt at a homemade lobotomy.

[Addy]

A few of my favourites:

Yevgeny Zamyatin: We The book 1984 was based on, and took enormous chunks from, and is inferior in pretty much every way to. We is a diary, from the point of view of the builder of a gigantic ship called The Integral. Society is a land much like the one in the film Equilibrium (which I've always considered the film version of We, such are the similarities) and it is the intention to convert other planets to the glory of OneState. To do this, people submit things like books, poems, thoughts, reflections - diaries - pretty much anything which shows how wonderful OneState is. These will be sent to far off lands on the Integral - in other words we are one of the targeted lands. The diary shows the last 30 days before the launch date, when of course problems happen. A lot of reading between the lines is needed, but it's truly wonderful stuff.

Max Barry: Jennifer Government Not a deep or complex book in any way whatsoever, I just really enjoyed it. It portrays anarcho-capitalism in the extreme, where even the police and the government are corporations, and your surname is the business you work for - if you're unemployed you don't have one. The title is actually one of the lead character's names. The book basically shows how half a dozen or so people from totally different backgrounds come into contact with one another, while ostensibly looking at a grandiose extortion/world domination plot by one which ends up affecting everybody (it's better than it sounds) The characters are clearly tiered - you can tell the first, second and third tiers, and the messages are obvious, but for an afternoon read you can do a lot worse.

Koushun Takami: Battle Royale Obviously. It's a premise that truly needs all 600 pages, and it doesn't actually waffle - it could be double the length and still seem plausible. 42 kids on a deserted island forced to kill each other in an AU where Japan won WWII, you can ignore the dodgy politics and enjoy a socio-cultural satire, exploring the question of whether or not you could kill your best friend. Really makes you think, but see the film first so you appreciate both - if you read the book first, you probably won't like the film.

Alisdair Gray: Lanark A life in four books, showing the decaying cities of Unthank and Glasgow, and a wanderer trapped in each. It's long, and it's complex, but it's brilliant all the same.

[poprock]

Originally Posted by Addy

Max Barry: Jennifer Government Not a deep or complex book in any way whatsoever …

Damned right there, it was even more shallow than it needed to be. I mean, fucksake, I got that part of it’s background premise was that a capitalist culture becomes more shallow as it heads closer to imposion/extinction, but really, making the prose and plot shallow in itself was a bloody clumsy metaphor.