I'll get to it....It's on The List.

Good mention. I need to go back and reread the Emperor series.

Speaking of Emperors, Muad'Dib will come for your children if you don't/haven't read Dune. The first book is enough, any more than that and he starts sounding like Robert Ludlum.

Avoid Robert Ludlum. The book is always better than the movie, unless it's Ludlum. Why? Because a movie is generally restricted to 2 1/2 hours on the high end. At the low end, that's what it will take you to get through a single chapter of the Bourne Trilogy, your head will feel like mush, and not much will have happened because for Ludlum masturbation doesn't involve a penis. It involves typing. Typing pages upon pages of blurred lines between flashbacks, inner thought, and (very little) outward happening while using 10,000 words where 2,000 might suffice just because it makes the word count OVER 9000!!!!

The Hunger Games is a decent trilogy about a girl who hunts animals, figureheads a revolution, and kills people while still maintaining the overall innocence and naivete of a puppy. Light reading.

For those of you who can bear some nerdiness, the Warhammer 40k Horus Heresy series is exquisitely delightful. In short, it's the multi-view, multi-author story of a genetically-engineered superhuman general whose daddy issues lead humanity into a futuristic dystopia. But as I said, it's delightful. Just don't read much of anything by Graham McNeill or you'll be wishing for an endless supply of Ludlum books. Read Horus Rising - if you like it, PM me and I'll throw you a couple of suggestions, since once you get past the first three books, the rest are mainly different views of near-simultaneous events that don't dictate continuity.

 

My favorite Ludlum book was "The Materese Circle". I went through a Ludlum phase years ago and read practically all of his books.

Two other authors I like: Trevanian ("The Eiger Sanction" and "Shibumi") and Nelson DeMille's earlier stuff ("The Gold Coast" "Catherdral"). Leon Uris is another favorite for historical fiction ("Trinity" "Battle Cry" "Exodus" "QB VII" and another about the planning and execution of the Berlin airlift whose name escapes me.)

 

For the longest time in my life, all I read was True Crime. Mostly Ann Rule. Now, I'm happy to say I've branched out into multiple genres. On the boy's recommendation I've started the Game of Thrones series. Fantasy wasn't always my thing, but since I watch the show religiously, figured I'd give the series a try.

Last book I read was Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. I very much enjoyed it, but if I wasn't already into the type of literature (it's about Thomas Cromwell helping Henry VIII depose Anne Boleyn) I would have found it dreadfully boring. I recommended it for my book club and they all said the same thing - the first 75 pages are horrendously slow but it picks up and ends very well.

I will listen to anyone that I know has diverse taste in literature. The book before BUTB was The Art of Fielding, which was suggested by the boy's friend, who is an English teacher. Believe it or not, the best book I've read in the last few months was The Hunger Games. Don't ask me why, I didn't expect to like it, but I couldn't put that shit down. Read the trilogy in a weekend. Also worth reading was Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened. Laughed my ass off.

I'm up for suggestions, TiB.

 

You would probably like James Ellroy's "American Tabloid" historic fictional account of events leading up to the assassination of JFK. It's book 1 of a trilogy, but 2 & 3 don't come close to 1. He also wrote "LA Confidential."

 

I've just started using <a class="postlink" href="http://www.goodreads.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">www.goodreads.com</a> on recommendation of a friend (also linked in that Cracked article). You sign up and then search down all the books you have read (which admittedly is pretty fucking time consuming, but im told the pay-off is worth it... im not even a 1/4 of the way there yet) and you rate them. It will then suggest new books based off what you have read and rated.

Its got a free iPhone app as well, which is handy for searching/rating books when you have a little downtime and arent near a computer.

Seems to be pretty decent, as ive started getting more books in there the recommendations keep filling up with other books ive already read. So it seems to be on the money with the recommendations.

Those who mentioned Conn Igulden's Emperor series should also read the Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough. I liked both but felt Colleens was more enjoyable and authentic (to an extent obviously) and it covers a wider period of Roman History than Conn does.

Conns Ghengis Khan series is really good as well.

 

I can't believe no-one's mentioned Frederick Forsyth yet. Icon moves slowly but it's a great read - at least, I thought so anyway. Many of Forsyth's books have been made into movies (e.g. The Day Of the Jackal, The Odessa File, etc.)

 

I always ask friends I think of as intelligent or people with good taste in entertainment what they are reading. I think that's how people have built reading lists since literacy became a common thing, though.

Alt focus: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. Super approachable compared to pretty much anything else of his I've read, and more entertaining to boot. Go read it.

 

I started this site a few days ago, and although I'm still filling in books, it's tits. I read the Alchemist (finally), and The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks based on this site's recommendations, and I enjoyed the shit out of both books. Take the time to fill out a few categories, it's well worth it.

 

That's interesting, because Mitchell was quoted (regarding Cloud Atlas) as saying that this is one of those rare instances where the film is better than the book.

Has anyone read "The Passage" by Justin Cronin?

 

Yep, I had it recommended to me by another board member actually. I loved it. The whole vampire thing made me hesitant, but Cronin pulls it off wonderfully. He sucked me in from page one. I'm looking forward to the sequel.

 

I hope you guys all know about #bookz. (Google if not)

I never really thought about it, but I read a retarded amount from K-12 pretty much - anything I could get my hands on. Tons of Stephen King, tons of Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Asimov, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke (big into sci-fi if you're catching on), young adult, encyclopedias, I mean everything. In college my reading material dropped to "only for class", and since has been zero, apart from stuff on the Internet. I've got to start reading again.

Generally I go by recommendations from places like this, with a focus on (lower-case C) classics and highly regarded contemporary works. My backlog is retarded. I'm about 200 pages into Ulysses, 2 chapters into Meditations, halfway through the Bhagavad Gita, etc.

For fiction, I highly recommend The Dresden Files. It's about a private eye in Chicago who's also a wizard and summons a T-Rex and fights a fairy queen and stuff. It's fucking awesome.

 

Oh. Can't believe I forgot these, but RCGT's post about the Dresden Files reminded me.

The Nightside series. These are written in the hard boiled detective style, and they follow the adventures of hard boiled detective John Taylor. However, they take place in the Nightside, which is "a place where dreams come true and nightmares come alive. Where one can buy anything, often at the price of your soul... or someone else's." They're an unusual blend of pulp, fantasy, and sci fi. Action packed, filled with likeable characters and genuinely funny dialogue. They won't appeal to everyone, but I love them.

The Hawk and Fisher series. These are written in a similar style to the Nightside books. They follow a husband and wife who are the only honest guards in the city of Haven. These are too funny to be considered dark fantasy, but the backdrop to the heartwarming love of the (not 100% heroic) heroes is this extremely corrupt, nihilistic society. It gives the books more depth than you would expect.

The Deathstalker series. From its wiki, "The Deathstalker series is partly a parody of the usual space-opera of the 1950s, told with sovereign disregard of the rules of probability, while being at the same time extremely bloodthirsty." This is the exact opposite end of the spectrum from hard sci fi. You will be entertained.

All of the above are by Simon Green. If you read the first chapter of any of the books you will get a good sense of whether you enjoy his writing style, and if so you've just found 20+ new books which are highly entertaining. Somehow, they are also more (I hesitate to use the word, but for lack of anything better...) meaningful than they have any right to be.

 

I haven't read Kerouac yet either but i can help with some recommendations for Thompson.

Theres obviously 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' but i wouldn't start there

Maybe go with 'The Rum Diary' first, i quite enjoyed it and its a quick easy read. 'Hell's Angels' is great as well.

I also really liked 'Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail' (y'alls election process fascinates me) but i wouldnt start out with that as your first book of Thompsons.

 

I just loaded it to the iPad because if I didn't do it now, I'd forget all about it. The sequel comes out next Tuesday, 10/16.

 

I just read John Green's novella Zombicorns. Not very well written or edited, but by his own admission, it was never intended to be. I found that it was a fun quick read, and it had a new (for lack of a better term) "twist" to the zombie apocalypse genre. I would really like to see him turn this into a complete novel.