Favourite 5 Books

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Cursed_Cat said:
what's this one John (bolded) ?
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About the life and times of a NZ band signed to the Flying Nun label called Sneaky Feeling. There is a wiki on the band. They tended to get sneered at by the more hipster types around the Dunedin Sound. The author quotes Chris Knox giving them the acid treatment for example but Bannister writes it in such a world weary way that you are dragged into their trials and tribulations and their fun as well. A top read and it made me order Sneaky records over from New Zealand just to hear them. To me this is what a book on independent music is all about. One of the best I have read. Not sure how readily available it is though. I was given it.
 
John said:
About the life and times of a NZ band signed to the Flying Nun label called Sneaky Feeling. There is a wiki on the band. They tended to get sneered at by the more hipster types around the Dunedin Sound. The author quotes Chris Knox giving them the acid treatment for example but Bannister writes it in such a world weary way that you are dragged into their trials and tribulations and their fun as well. A top read and it made me order Sneaky records over from New Zealand just to hear them. To me this is what a book on independent music is all about. One of the best I have read. Not sure how readily available it is though. I was given it.
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interesting, thanks for the synopsis - might look into the music ..
 
This is difficult, but anyway in no order;

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Watchmen by Alan Moore (Graphic Novel, prob doesnt count)

More difficult after that, in the running I would probably include;
Rendevous with Rama - Arthur C Clarke
Dubliners - James Joyce (more a short story collection)
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
Underworld - Don DeLillo
The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

Also I have fond memories of these books from when I was a teenager;
The Redwall series - Brian Jacques
A Fortunate Life - A.B.Facey (bio)
The Hobbit - J.R.R.Tolkien
 

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Blues_Man said:
Only 5 ?? gee thats a tough ask...ok i'll go with 5 off the top of my head..in no particular order:

1: A Really short history of nearly Everything Bill Bryson (This book should be read by everyone !)

2: Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck (absolute masterpiece, i defy anyone to read this book without shedding a tear or two)

3: Pillars of the Earth Ken Follett (brilliant read ..the sequel is just as good)

4: Marching powder Rusty Young Thomas /Mcfadden (amazing real life story)

5: River God Wilbur Smith (classic read ..couldn't put it down)

I would reccomend these books to anyone ..i loved each and every one.
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Bill Bryson writes some fantastic books. He fills the reader with information, very good. Of mice and men is a classic and Pillars is just a brilliant read better than the mini series. Ken Follett is writing an historical fiction series on the 20th century his first book is out. The next in the series I don,t know but I am waiting waiting waiting.
The series of books starts with The Fall of Giants, I think he plans about 6 . If you like this stuff filled with history and stories woven around it this fellow is a genius as you would have found with Pillars of the Earth, try World without End, his next middle ages book, about 200 years past the Pillars setting in time.
 
In no particular order: The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, A Handmaid's Tale, Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice.
 
Well this is pretty much impossible. To pick five of my favourites though:

The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas
The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
Black & Blue, Ian Rankin
Crime & Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie

My bookshelves are pretty roughly split between spy/crime fiction, classics/literature and non-fiction.
 
Mines never set in stone, but I'd probably go:

The Aleph & Other Stories - Jorge Luis Borges
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
Collected Poems - W.B. Yeats
Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
 
placebo said:
Mines never set in stone, but I'd probably go:

The Aleph & Other Stories - Jorge Luis Borges
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
Collected Poems - W.B. Yeats
Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
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A thousand kudos*.

*Looks back a page and notices that they are, in fact, return kudos', both in regards to Borges.
 
Dagless said:
A thousand kudos*.

*Looks back a page and notices that they are, in fact, return kudos', both in regards to Borges.
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Yeah, massive Borges fan. He was truly was one of the most original voices in 20th century literature, just excelled in most things he tried.
 
I'm more of a collector of all works than just 1 book by a certain author. So my list is more about the author than the individual book, so this list would change often.
1. Suttree-Cormac McCarthy. Read this over 20 years ago & lost it, found a copy last year & have read it 3 times since again. No country for old men would be my next pick for favourite Cormac book.
2. Berlin Noir (Bernie Gunther Trilogy)-Philip Kerr. Private dick in & around WWII in Berlin. Has released more in the series recently, all good reads as well.
3. Porno-Irvine Welsh. Could've been any of his books really.
4. Texasville-Larry McMurtry. Author of the last great picture show & lonesome dove.
5. Rain Gods-James Lee Burke. One of his lesser characters Hackberry Holland Texas Sheriff.

Honourable mentions to Ian Rankin, Peter Temple, Michael Connelly & Carl Hiaasen
 
Breva1200 said:
I'm more of a collector of all works than just 1 book by a certain author. So my list is more about the author than the individual book, so this list would change often.
1. Suttree-Cormac McCarthy. Read this over 20 years ago & lost it, found a copy last year & have read it 3 times since again. No country for old men would be my next pick for favourite Cormac book.
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Stunning book. Finished this year and was just floored by some of the prose.

About to start The Border trilogy by McCarthy. Excited.
 
placebo said:
Stunning book. Finished this year and was just floored by some of the prose.

About to start The Border trilogy by McCarthy. Excited.
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Suttree is my favourite McCarthy as well, right up there competing for my all-time favourite actually. Blood Meridian possibly would be next after that.

The Border trilogy is excellent as well, especially the first two. Cities of the Plan has a devastating 2nd half, but doesnt quite have the weight of the earlier two. Debut novel The Orchard Keeper is the only McCarthy that I dont really rate. I read everything he did from the beginning of 2008 till mid-2011, and loved the journey.
 

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Lots of favourites mentioned all through the thread and I'm sure I'm forgetting as many as I remember but:

Catch 22 - Joesph Heller
It took me a couple of goes to get into it but once I was sucked in it's got to be the funniest book I've ever read and often had me laughing out loud on buses, trains etc.

Shindler's Ark/List - Thomas Keneally (was Ark originally but I think it's sold as List since the movie)
Credit to the movie that it stays so close, there's a small amount extra on Oskar Schindler in the book which imo does add something and I liked how clear Keneally makes it when he's telling facts and when he's filling in the gaps.

Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keys
Great science fiction book that has nothing to do with science.

A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Popular Science at it's very best, easy to read, humorous and still filled to the brim with good science and history.

The War of the World's - HG Wells
I grew up with the Jeff Wayne soundtrack and so when I got into science fiction I always wanted to go back and read it and it is brilliant, 114 years later and it's still inspiring (and being plagerised by) stories. Also one of the few books I enjoyed as an audiobook, the narrator style in the book means one voice works really well.

Honorable mentions - The Dispossessed, Carrie, Dune, Childhood's End, True History of the Kelly Gang, The Star's My Destination, Star Maker, Rendenzvous with Rama, A Scanner Darkly, The Day of the Triffids, Deadhouse Gates...
 
Might be a bit young but I loved the book Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo.
One of the few books I can read more than once.
 
1 The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Each time I read this I find it a little more dispiriting -- maybe I'm getting old. Dunno. Masterpiece, though. Truly one of the greatest things ever written. Makes the reader become a decoder and a 'detective', cos if you don't, it won't make a lick of sense.

2 One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Not sure if I'd love it as much if I read it for the first time now. But when I picked this up magical realism was a completely new concept for me. It floored me. Since then, a legion of (much) less-gifted imitators has made the entire 'genre' a little shopworn and ho-hum.

3 Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Not the most lovable McCarthy, but his best IMO. The bloodiest, most cerebral 'western' ever written, with dashes of Biblical cadence thrown in for good measure. Religion, philosophy, conquest, the circularity of a man trying to take his own measure... And lots and lots of corpses.

4 Middlemarch, George Eliot
The most three-dimensional depiction of a community that I can recall. It's fascinating to see the way actions reverberate through the ensemble of characters.

5 The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy
This is the McCarthy I love most. The strange formal language of the parables married up with the monosyllabic dialogue of the two brothers. The writing can be gritty and prosaic one moment, and the next the narration is high-flown and abstruse. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but I think it's genius.

Others I might, on another day, include would be What the Crow Said, by Robert Kroestch. This is Canadian magical realism, I suppose. But it seems a very different beast to the Latin American variety. Reads more like Mark Twain or quality bullshitting.

Sister, Jim Lewis. First love between two teenagers. It's odd and has this slightly out-of-kilter unreliable narrator, and the overall effect is... unsettling. Brilliant.

Lolita, Nabokov. Steered clear of this for years and years. Was turned off by the subject matter. It was my loss, cos this is a work of genius. The way Nabokov undercuts the instinctive antipathy you have for Humbert is astonishing. Such is Humbert's wit and verve that, by the end of the novel, he'd sorta won my sympathy. Which is really icky when you stop to think about it. That's what Nabokov does: in a weird sort of way, he makes the reader an accomplice.

Went through a stage in high school and uni when I ploughed through one Graham Greene after another. After the first dozen or so you can't help but notice the sameness. That said, he's written more books that I like than any other writer. By a fair margin too. The Honorary Consul has always been my favourite.

I haven't read Satanic Verses, but I've read a few Rushdie, and I think Midnight's Children is the best of them by a country mile. Rushdie seems to have more ideas bursting off the page than just about any writer I can think of.

The March, EL Doctorow. Sherman's march through the South in the American Civil War. The kind of ensemble approach that Doctorow favours in a few of his books doesn't normally work for me. I usually find that no sooner has a story or character earned my interest or sympathies than the author has switched to someone else. Doctorow makes it work, though. One of the best two or three novels I've read in the last five years.

A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel. 800-odd pages about the French Revolution, but the pace never flagged. Some of the relationships between the main characters didn't seem credible. But honestly it's such a ripping read, I skipped over that sorta griping without a second thought.
 
Striptease - Carl Hiaasen
War Of The World - H. G. Wells
Louise Brooks: A Biography - Barry Paris
Scotland: The Story Of A Nation - Magnus Magnusson
Blood Guilt - Lindy Cameron
 
Favourites come and go. I'm not a fan of literature for literature's sake and have seen many lists that could double for my high school reading lists. Right now, these are the ones that are sticking with me.

The Hunter - Richard Stark (I love the Parker series, and this one mainly for its importance in being one of the earliest anti-hero tales where he gets away with the crime)

Night Passage - Robert B Parker (I like Jesse Stone a lot too. A fundamentally decent man with a disease.)

The Hunter - Tom Wood (I read a lot of contemporary crime and thriller fiction and I'm often disappointed in the transparent "plot". This was the first novel I've read in a long time with a twist I didn't see coming. Deserves its place based on that)

Every Dead Thing - John Connolly (Something about this series creeps me out like Stephen King books did when I was a kid. Daytime reading only :) ).

Elvis, Jesus & Coca Cola - Kinky Friedman (The man is crime/comic genius. I've snorted drinks out through my nose reading some of his tales. Very enjoyable series.)
 
Infinite Jest, House of Leaves, Illuminatus Trilogy, Slaughterhouse Five, Blue Moon Rising, LOTR, Catcher In The Rye.

I like all those classics too, like animal farm, 1984, mockingbird etc. Steinbeck bored me to tears though.

If you're into Philip K Dick you could do worse than reading House of Leaves. It's incredible.
 
WinmarToLockett said:
Infinite Jest, House of Leaves, Illuminatus Trilogy, Slaughterhouse Five, Blue Moon Rising, LOTR, Catcher In The Rye.

I like all those classics too, like animal farm, 1984, mockingbird etc. Steinbeck bored me to tears though.

If you're into Philip K Dick you could do worse than reading House of Leaves. It's incredible.
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I bought House of Leaves when it was released. Still sitting on my bookshelf unread.

I'm incredibly interested, it's just always been 'the next one'.
 
Dagless said:
I bought House of Leaves when it was released. Still sitting on my bookshelf unread.

I'm incredibly interested, it's just always been 'the next one'.
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My "next one" is Gravity's Rainbow. I've carried it overseas, moved houses, and taken it to and from work on and off for years but I've never seen the first page.

If it's any help, House of Leaves is a really simple book to read. It has a few dense sections, but compared to IJ it's like skimming through a Grug book. Infinite Jest probably took me 6 months to get through, but House of Leaves only a couple of days. And I'm a far from voracious reader; the exact opposite, really.
 
Here's 5 books I really like. There's more, I'm sure. And in no particular order:

The Great Gatsby. F Scott Fitzgerald. Read when I was about 13. Loved it. Regularly revisit it.

Master and Margarita. Bulgakov. There's a cat, a heap of satire and I couldn't put it down.

Under the Volcano. Malcolm Lowry. So evocative, so pathetic. A great novel.

Madam Bovary. Flaubert. Read this in my teens too. Stayed with me.

Wind up Bird Chronicle/Anna Karena/To the Lighthouse/Midnight's Children.... and on it goes.
 
The Master and Margarita is great, and To the Lighthouse is brilliant.

An updated 5 (as if I could actually just choose 5):


Ficciones, The Aleph, Labyrinths (let's just say the collected stories) - Jorge Luis Borges

Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes

Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman

Dubliners - James Joyce

Collected Poetry - W.B. Yeats

Some interchangeable options:

Suttree - Cormac McCarthy

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa

The Theban Plays - Sophocles

The Collected Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa


And then probably something from T.S. Eliot, Woolf and Rilke.
I really would've liked to work Shakespeare in there, but I genuinely couldn't choose a favourite play and I thought 'Collected Plays' might be cheating a little bit. But ah, actually, * it, let's add The Collected Plays of Shakespeare too (in a one volume-edition).
 
grizzlym said:
Here's 5 books I really like. There's more, I'm sure. And in no particular order:
Master and Margarita. Bulgakov. There's a cat, a heap of satire and I couldn't put it down.
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Amazing book, totally agree.

Although I loved it when I first read it, it's definitely one that continues to grow on me. Leading me to...

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Woman In The Dunes - Kobo Abe
The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

Finally got around to reading Murakami over the year, Wind Up Bird Chronicle definite deserves a mention.
 
placebo said:
The Master and Margarita is great, and To the Lighthouse is brilliant.

An updated 5 (as if I could actually just choose 5):

Ficciones, The Aleph, Labyrinths (let's just say the collected stories) - Jorge Luis Borges
Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes

Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman

Dubliners - James Joyce

Collected Poetry - W.B. Yeats

Some interchangeable options:

Suttree - Cormac McCarthy

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa

The Theban Plays - Sophocles

The Collected Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa


And then probably something from T.S. Eliot, Woolf and Rilke.
I really would've liked to work Shakespeare in there, but I genuinely couldn't choose a favourite play and I thought 'Collected Plays' might be cheating a little bit. But ah, actually, **** it, let's add The Collected Plays of Shakespeare too (in a one volume-edition).
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Placebo, we seem to have a similar taste. The only difference is I wouldn't pick As I Lay Dying from Faulkner's work personally (or maybe that particular narrative device spoke more to you).
 
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