[TheBulldozer]

East of Eden is quintessentially American. Steinbeck's ability to depict the setting is uncanny.

Gatsby is a must read every five years or so for me, but I equally love his lesser known works, specifically Tender is the Night.

More along the drama route, Oscar Wilde is fucking hilarious. Have a look at "The Importance of Being Earnest" one day. Total ridiculousness and as hilarious as it gets.

[Days of Broken Arrows]

(01-12-2012 03:11 AM)P Dog Wrote:  

Looking For Alaska by John Green. Even though the main character is a big time beta male who falls for and pedestalizes a trashy slut.

This is a great novel! Glad to see a fellow John Green fan on here. The guy can write.

I find that as a genre Young Adult seems more honest about male-female relations than mainstream literature. And while the main character was Beta, he knew he was Beta and a nerd, admitting right up front no one came to his birthday and he needed to transfer schools. This self-awareness, I think, made the novel work.

Finally, his getting with that Russian chick, then Alaska within a short time showed he was becoming Alpha. Green's "Paper Towns" is also pretty fab, as is his segment in "Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances."

[Matt Forney]

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

First, because it's just a great, funny book. Dark, savage, poignant, nihilistic, bleak, but funny and observant as all hell. The passage where Ferdinand Bardamu is watching Manhattanites shitting in a communal toilet cracks me up every time I read it. Celine's later work (such as Rigadoon or Death on the Installment Plan) is arguably better, but I have a sentimental attraction to Journey; it was the first book of his I read, and probably the best place to start.

Second, because Journey is probably the single most influential novel of the past hundred years; half of the good writers (and half of the bad ones) who came after Celine were influenced by him or just flat out ripped him off. Celine came up with half of the postmodernist literary devices that we now take for granted. Vernacular writing? Comes from Celine. Streaming dialogue? Celine. Ellipses and nonlinear narratives? Celine. And yet he rarely if ever gets credit for this because he was a fascist when he was alive, as if a man's politics have anything to do with his writing talent.

Michel Houellebecq is the most well-known disciple of Celine's, but he's had a noticeable influence on many other writers: Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and Kurt Vonnegut among them. And Catch-22? That piece of shit is a play-by-play ripoff of Journey. Put simply, if you want to understand 20th century literature, more than any other writer, you need to read Celine.

Some of my other favorites:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
Women by Charles Bukowski
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Memoir of a Russian Punk by Eduard Limonov
Pleasant Hell by John Dolan
Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq

[JimNortonFan]

For Whom The Bell Rings
The Good Gatsby
War and Cease Fires
Crime and Incarceration
A Tale of Two Urban Areas
Good Expectations

[GreenGranted]

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Goosebumps on several occasions.

[aphelion]

(01-11-2012 05:37 PM)mofo Wrote:  

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

I'd say that this is the second worst book I've ever read, but I didn't actually finish it. I dropped it into the trash can while taking a shit, because taking a completely uninterrupted shit was more pleasurable than reading The Alchemist under any circumstance.

[aphelion]

Cosign on We by Zamyatin. Very good book.

The best book I've ever read is Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. If you want a book to expand/blow your mind, this one tackles the entire (fictional) history of the universe, development of sentience and the character of deity all in 250ish pages. Humanity only accidentally occupies a single page worth of mention. It's a little dense, but absolutely mindblowing in scope.

And to top it off, it was written in 1937.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Maker

[Frontenac]

Clear and Present Danger - Tom Clancy
Ice Hunt - James Rollins

[Kaligula]

(05-17-2013 12:00 PM)aphelion Wrote:  

Cosign on We by Zamyatin. Very good book.

The best book I've ever read is Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. If you want a book to expand/blow your mind, this one tackles the entire (fictional) history of the universe, development of sentience and the character of deity all in 250ish pages. Humanity only accidentally occupies a single page worth of mention. It's a little dense, but absolutely mindblowing in scope.

And to top it off, it was written in 1937.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Maker

As you seems to be learning Polish, you may try Jacek Dukaj 'Inne piesni' in a similar style, I believe. Dukaj's Polish is very creative, and difficult to translate, but it is worth your time. As a curiosity, he also wrote the story about a male-female war, 'Wielkie podzielenie' (Great divide) but I believe it has never been republished since original appearance in 'Nowa Fantastyka' monthly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inne_pie%C5%9Bni

Personally, I trust only in old books, tested by time, and this is my list:
Robert Musil 'The man without qualities': lot of red pill stuff in this marvelously meandering novel.
Albert Camus 'The fall': his last and best novel, I believe, but also the one least talked about. His only red pill stuff, reading it in high school, unlike 'The plague' and 'The stranger', alerted me to the fact that something is deeply wrong with the official narration of the world . Still remembering the passage where the main character asks 'I heard once about a man who started sleeping
on the floor as soon as he had learnt that his friend was in prison. He could not bear living more comfortably than his friend. Now, can you nowadays imagine anyone in the West who would even consider that?!'
Miguel Unamuno 'The mist': A poetic red pill out of old Spain.
Balzac 'Human Comedy': very captivating, intoxicating even, has the quality of devilish phantasy later developed by other French fantastique writers like Barbey d' Aureville or Villers d'Isle-Adam.

[RoastBeefCurtains4Me]

"A Spaceship for the King" by Jerry Pournelle.

It's an older Sci-fi novel, and a little dated, but it's the perfect story for me. The key characters are from a planet that was left behind when the galactic empire broke down and left them isolated. They dropped down to Medieval levels, then the new galactic empire came back.

Now as a backward world, they are subject to being colonized, instead of joining the empire as a first rank world. The government recruits the key characters to go on an adventure that will enable the world to rejoin the empire with a higher status that allows them to retain some self determination.

It's the perfect sci-fi novel to me. It would make a great movie too.

[Alsos]

(08-31-2016 09:20 PM)RoastBeefCurtains4Me Wrote:  

"A Spaceship for the King" by Jerry Pournelle.

It's an older Sci-fi novel, and a little dated, but it's the perfect story for me. The key characters are from a planet that was left behind when the galactic empire broke down and left them isolated. They dropped down to Medieval levels, then the new galactic empire came back.

Now as a backward world, they are subject to being colonized, instead of joining the empire as a first rank world. The government recruits the key characters to go on an adventure that will enable the world to rejoin the empire with a higher status that allows them to retain some self determination.

It's the perfect sci-fi novel to me. It would make a great movie too.

Second this. One of the first SF novels I read, in 8th grade I think (as "King David's Spaceship"). If you like the fictional universe, "The Mote in God's Eye" takes place just after this novel, and is perhaps the finest exercise in science fiction worldbuilding ever published.

I'll also second the older recommendations for "Atlas Shrugged". I read it about every other year. Sure, it's ponderous and purple, but there are a surprising number of insights and spot-on observations embedded in the characters and plots.

One of my favorite SF novels is "The Wall at the Edge of the World". A thousand-plus years after a war killed all but a million or so humans, the survivors' descendants live in a wall-bounded area corresponding to northern California and western Oregon. It's a nice, peaceful, stable, harmonious community. Apart from the fact that anyone who doesn't develop telepathy at puberty or who loses it later due to illness or injury is summarily executed. The widower of one of the latter stumbles into a skill for keeping others from seeing his true thoughts. Mayhem and vengeance ensue.

[Laska]

The Brothers Karamazov.

[R_Niko]

Fight Club, Slaughterhouse Five, Shantaram, Tropic of Capricorn

[Fast Eddie]

Winnetou by Karl May, a late 19th century German author. This is the book I learned to read on as a kid and I suspect it had a pretty profound impact on shaping my outlook and goals for my life. I still haven't come across an author who makes 'adventure' come alive so vividly and appealingly as May does in his many novels.

I can also second Red Storm Rising and other Clancy novels. For sheer easy enjoyment, I don't think anything from the "modern era" comes close to vintage Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton.

[Herr Lucifer]

.
The Bible. Pure fiction.


.

[Frank Underwood]

Not much of a fiction reader, but A Clockwork Orange holds a special place in my heart. The version with the final chapter left in, which was removed in earlier versions of the American edition.

[dain_bramage]

I rarely read fiction. Most of my reading is non fiction and articles. Sometimes looking at sources on JSTOR or other sites. So the only real novels I have read recently are Dune universe books and currently I am finishing the LOTR trilogy and will read my copy of the Silmraillion. Children of Hurin was excellent too but I don't have a copy of it at home.

Two books I have read recently that I enjoyed are as follows:

Panzer Leader by Heinz Guderian
Stuka Pilot by Hans Ulrich Rudel.

One book I want to read again:

The Battle of Britain by James Holland.



I've also read some textbooks. In addition to them I have a first Canadian edition of the !984 by George Orwell, and also All Quiet. I haven't had the focus for months to actually read more than about 20 pages in one sitting of any book but I'm doing about an hour or so of reading here and there. I start classes tomorrow so I will not be reading just for pleasure.

[TheExperimenter]

Fountainhead, God of Small Things, Kafka on the Shore, Birdsong.

[nek]

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts - Spellbinding
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
100 years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter b Mario Vargas Llosa

[Monty_Brogan]

+1 for Shantaram

I have a top three for anyone that is into action/adventure/sci-fi. I would recommend these books to any vets and for sure anyone who served in the Corps.