Books

[BobTheFearlessFish]

ive noticed an increase in peopel talking about books in here recently. so i would liek to reccommend some books. get some reccomendations. and discuss them.

the first book i would like to reccomend is 'the wasp factory' by iain banks. his first published book. this is the same 'iain m. banks' who writes sci fi novels. i still think the wasp factory is his best.

there is also a series of books. supposedly written for children but entertaining for all ages (no not harry potter). the 'his dark materials' series by philip pullman:

1. Northern Lights (released as 'the golden compass' in the US)
2. The Subtle Knife
3. The Amber Spyglass

all excellent books. well worth reading. anyone read any of these? or would like to add anything else?

 

[MP_Lord_Kee]

Haven't read any of those (seems time is limited nowadays ). I used to read quite a lot a few years back, all kind of genres. A few worthy of a read:

- Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa. A classical samurai novel based on Miyamoto Musashi life. I just started to re-read it for..what 5th time or so

- Anything by William Gibson. My fav. are Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero.

- Anything by Tolkien. If you haven't read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, do so. It is worth the time. I seriously recommend reading The Hobbit prior to LOTR.

- Anything by David & Leigh Eddings. Some hate them but I have always enjoyed the works by Eddings. I especially love the detail of the fantasy world they write about, the wastness of the stories and they are able to tell the story in a convincing manner. I guess one major appeal to me is the fact that I hate it when a good story ends, Eddings sometimes seems to be going on forever

- Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett. Absolutely fabulous stuff. Hillarious. I seldom laugh out loud when reading sometimes but Pratchett has made me do so on several occations.

- Biggles books by Captain W.E Johns. My favourite as kid. Got over 100 of them. Still enjoyable to read when taking a dump or before bedtime. About Bigglesworth, a british pilot in all kind of situtations where airplanes are involved. (WWI, WWII, treasure hunting, busting criminals etc etc).

- Anything by Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is fantastic. As well as his other works.

- Rose of the Prophet trilogy by Margaret Weis. Arabic themed (Djinn etc) trilogy that I really enjoyed. Also the Darksword trilogy is worth checking out but it is no where as good as the Rose of the Prophet trilogy IMHO. Apparently Weis has written a lot of Dragonlance and such books, never touched them myself..

- Anything by Arthur C. Clarke. 2001 and the following in the series are great. Also other books by him are read worthy.

- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. The novel Bladerunner was based upon. There is also a Bladerunner 2 novel by someone I don't remember (I can check if requested) that continued on the story from the movie. Not classic but interesting enough.

- Anything by Isaac Asimov. Foundation trilogy is brilliant. So is his other works.

- Mack Bolan, The Executioner series created by Don Pendelton. About this guy who likes to snipe mafioso etc..I guess there are like 250+ books, only read a few but enjoyed them. Violent and easy to read

- Destroyer series. Remo rules. Guess one could start collecting these...

- Shogun by James Clavell. I was perhaps 10 when I read it the first time. There was this TV series of it as well..wonder if I can leech it from the net somewhere...About this english adventurer in feudal Japan.

- The Earth's Children Series by Jean M. Auel. About this man and woman relations thingie 35000 years ago when Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals existed at the same time. Has a lot of vivid descriptions of sexual encounters.

Ok, managed to waste 30 mins of this boring working day. Whee

//Kee

 

[Mappie]

Most of you have probably read this, but Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy is probably one of the best books that ive read. Its really good.

 

[Crowze]

Kee, you read almost exactly the same books as I do. I like Edding's books, but they always seem a little one-sided to me.

I'd like to add a few to the list, mainly being anything by R.A.Salvatore - the Dark Elf Trilogy, the Icewind Dale trilogy, and the Legacy of the Drow is one awesome series.

Weis and Hickman - definitely read the Death Gate Cycle. I'm not a great fan of the Dragonlance series, but some of them are pretty good.

Terry Brooks' Shannara series - very much in the LOTR style, but a lot more interesting, especially the second series (can't remember the name).

I'll also strongly reccommend anything by Douglas Adams. Highly entertaining. If you can, get hold of the original hitch-hikers guide radio series - it's quite different from the books.

EDIT: Mappie: I've been planning on reading some Tom Clancy books for years now, never got round to it...

 

[Cap'n Beeb]

I'll just paste this over from the Crudstone forums.

Necroscope series:


The series (13 books long.) starts off with a young Harry Keogh constantly finding himself lost in his own little word, drifting off into dreamland, and just generally acting strange. Worried, his instructors take him to the school shrink, who simply doesnt know what to do with him (if I remember correctly, the shrink shows him some form of complex math problem, and Harry does it no problem... just one of those "Are we pushing you hard enough" type tests), which then leads to alot of folks bullying and poking fun at Harry, who then later finds sanctuary in his, up to that point unknown, talent; being able to talk to the dead. Which this ability, Harry begins learning pretty normal things about life, death (Example: The dead keep on living so to speak, in a form of mental expansion. What the mind did in life, it does so in death), but also discovers that a looming threat is somewhere over the horizon, and Harry will prove detrimental (I think that's the word I want.) to keep humanity away from this new threat which comes in the form of some rather unpleaseant vampires that make the typical Hollywood blood sucker look like Mr. Rogers.

Word spreads of an interesting youth with some amazing capabilities, and these rumors and gossip-bits find their way to E-Branch, a British based organization who deal with all things super natural. E-Branch sends a few representatives to Harry's school, tell him what they think of them (They're basically soiling themselves over the potential this kid has, not to mention the concept of Earth being under vampire control), so they take him in, train him to further his talents and in other aspects. This takes quite some time, all the while the clock is ticking down.

Cut over to the USSR (Note: These books start sometime in the 60s/70s, and go into 2010 I think.), where commie bad-guy necromancer and generally not nice person Boris Dragosani has just begun to do his think... eviscerate and dissect someone high up in the political food chain, in search of the vampire leech. Dragosani sniffs, drinks, tastes, licks, and munches on the corpse in order to find the leech. After basically ripping the body to pieces and throwing the remains all around the "operating theater", he finds what he's looking for. Conformation of an unseen threat to the Motherland. Instead of wanting to destroy these things... the Red's are looking for a way to get some sort of vampire army going.

That's all I can really say without giving away a whole terrible lot... but the first three books take place here on Earth, 4-6 take place on the vampire's home ground, a parallel world in another dimension called Starside/Sunside, and from then on the series bounces between the two.

Good stuff

 

[TheShiningWizard]

Battlefield Earth

 

[das_ben]

-Fyodor Dostoyevski: 'Crime & punishment', 'The Brothers Karamasow' and, most of all, his masterpiece 'Notes from the underground'. Brilliant.

-Isaac Asimov: 'I robot'. A must read for every self-respecting geek.

-Ray Bradbury: 'Fahrenheit 451'. An anti-utopia novel.

-Douglas Adams: 'The Hitchhiker trilogy'. Funniest thing I ever came across.

-William Gibson: 'Neuromancer'.

-Philip K. Dick: 'Do androids dream of electric sheep?'. Very interesting, although I have to admit I liked the movie better.

-Elizabeth Wurtzel: 'Prozac Nation'. Different from what I usually read, but very good nonetheless. Autobiography of a clinically depressed girl in the States.

-Jeffrey Eugenides: 'The virgin suicides'. Short but enthralling.

 

[Freon]

MP_Lord_Kee, you've basically sumed up all the books I want to read but I don't find the time/motivation to

 

[Maetschikk]

My favorite author:
-Ephraim Kishon: "Mein Kamm" (don't know the english title). And the many many satires he wrote.


-Terry Pratchet: Disk World
-Douglas Addams: All "Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy" Novels
-Noam Chomsky: "Profit over People", "War against People", "9-11", ...
-George Orwell: 1984

 

[spm1138]

My favourite Iain M (he writes the sci-fi as "M" and the rest without the M) Banks is "Consider Phlebas".

Actually, although I am an enormous fan I wouldn't recommend all of William Gibson's books. Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition are probably the best places to start.

PKD... my personal favourite for sheer head****ing weirdness is probably VALIS. His short stories are brilliant as well. You will probably spot the inspiration for many, many films and episodes of your favourite TV shows in amongst them.

Douglas Adams' "A Trilogy In Four Parts" is something no bookshelf should be without.

Samuel R Delaney writes some really good sci fi. The Einstein Intersection is one of my favourites thus far. Dhalgren is something else.

I find actual memoirs by people who were there (wherever "there" was) as interesting as anything Clancy or other fiction writers can come up with.

Someone recommended "Notes from a bottle found on the beach at carmel" by Evan S Connell to me and I really enjoyed that.

I am sort of reading my way through as much Natsume Soseki as I can lay my hands on at the moment. I wholeheartedly recommend him as an author.

 

[Kuroshio Apocal]

Had to read Fahreinheit 451, 1984, and Brave New World.

I just finished Dread Empire's Fall: The Praxis, pretty good military sci-fi. Plausible physics and stuff like that.

A good one is The Shiva Option, but it drags on too much for it's own good.

Mack Bolan books are good for a long flight, but fairly repetitive. And later on in the series, they start making weapons that are nuttier than squirrel turds.

Anything Asimov.

 

[Keganator]

All those listed that I've read I agree with

One author not mentioned yet is Larry Niven. Both his sci-fi and three fantasy books are great, but the best IMHO is his book, Ringworld. He has a great future history, one that expands over many hundred years. The more books of his you read, the more you see how his stories intertwine. It's really fun to have read a story in one book, and open up another to find the new characters in that book making references to the story from the first Plus, there are little things between each book that, if you catch them, make you realize the full truth a bit sooner than the characters in the book. His stories...they're almost like mystery stories. They make you think and read on, trying to puzzle together what's going to happen next.

 

[LifesBane(4Corners)]

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. It even sparked a pretty good (but sleeper hit) Unreal engine game.

Heh, too weird...looks like Legend (from Unreal) created a game based off of the Death Gate cycle as well.

 

[BobTheFearlessFish]

i can read the discworld books. and they are occasionally funny. but i dont find them amazing. the stories are always going on about some greater power or something. or so it seems to me. i find it annoying. my girlfriend on the other hand. is obsessed.

i quite enjoyed rainbow six by tom clancy. but thought it was too long. he spends about 400 pages describing the runup to the actual plot. kindof nice action sequences. but i felt that the book kindof revolved around them. for the beginning anyway.

i love the the hitch hikers guide.

spm1138: if you like memoirs and biographies try a book called 'kitchen confidential' by a bloke whose name i cannot remember. very interesting and incredibly funny.

 

[ragingsamster]

Clancy is my boy! I love his stuff, Red Storm Rising has to be my fav. specialy the part where the weatherman smackes the russian in the neck hith the pommel of his knife and breaks his trachea<sp>

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is a good read too.

I made it through Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and would suggest it (if you can make it through the 30+ page speech without skipping pages you are a better reader than I)

Asimov's foundation series, Check out his non-fiction stuff it's awesome

Stephen Coonts Intruder series

And all books by Piers Anthony - especially the incarnations of imortality series

Made it through Tolkiens stuff

 

[Derelan]

-Godfather (slow in some parts, but enjoyable)
-The Day of the Jackal (true story, thriller)
-War of the Rats (movie is Enemy at the Gates, book first)
A few years back I was also a huge fan of the Christopher Pike books, the later ones are a good read for any age though.

 

[poaw]

How did all of you miss Robert K. Heinlein's StarShip Troopers?

The last two Clancy books I read were Debt of Honor and Executive Decision. I am intrigued by the premise of his new novel Teeth of the Tiger. But I have a lot of backreading to do to get caught up with what's going on.

For people who like books about really "being there", I highly recommend About Face and Steel My Soldiers' Hearts. Both are by Colonel David H. Hackworth, the most decorated American soldier alive today. About Face is his autobiography and Steel My Soldiers' Hearts is about how he took a completely ineffective battalion of draftees and made them into the BEST regular infantry battalion fighting in Vietnam.

 

[kanegs]

Some more suggestions...

Anything by Umberto Eco or Arturo Perez-Reverte
Anything by H.P. Lovecraft (except collaborations)
Gateway by Frederik Pohl
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

 

[Mr. Apocalypse]

The doom books, and diablo books are really good despite how bad they sound

 

[Bushwack]

The Enemy Papers by Barry Longyear
The Ender books by Orson Scott Card
The Tolkien books
Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers by Robert K. Heinlein {both were required reading by my geeky college English Professor} but i liked em anyways.
Animal Farm {that was Orwell wasnt it?}
The Day After Roswell by Col{retired} Philip J Corso
Behold a Pale Horse by William Cooper
Any of my technical REAL firearms manuals{for my Aks, my Glocks, my Hks, and my FN Herstals, the Mosin Nagant, the Rugers,and the IMI Uzi} , and the manual for the Universal remote {familiarity breeds comtempt}