Suggest a book to read thread

"At Home: A Short History of Private Life" by Bill Bryson

Interesting, educational-but-doesn't-seem-that-way book weaving history, science, and social studies together to answer the questions of how and why typical Western houses came into being.

Freakonomics

The Professor, The Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game Ever

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

Ender's Game

A Game of Thrones (first in a series, followed by Clash of Kings, Storm of Swords, and Feast for Crows)

Bounce

Talent is Overrated

More Fire

Train Hard, Win Easy

Lore of Running

The China Study

Giftopia

Run tough

Explosive Running

Healthy at 100

Stretching Anatomy

Run with the Champions

Best Efforts

Road Racers and their training

Running the Athlete Within

Dont Believe Everything you Think

Censored

Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior

The Black Swan

Fooled by Randomness

Supercapitalism

Deer Hunting with Jesus

Explosive Running

anything by Chomsky or Zinn or Chalmers Johnson

cat's cradle - kurt vonnegut

The Snow Leopard was awesome, I just finished it.

The Pillars of the Earth. Excellent. Also the sequel. Fiction/medieval history, but awesome...romance, death, war, human interest, good, evil . . . this book has it all.

The Bible - a very influential book.

'Yo Mama' by Herbert Rouchlen

This is a great novel studying the contradictions of the inner-city social structure. It examines the effects of the single parent household, the toll of the drug culture, and how teenage prostitution can serve to bring families closer together.

Lots of great ones listed already, Ill try and pick a few that I dont think were listed:

Kafka on the Shore-Murakami (my personal favorite of his)

The Wind-Up Bird Chronichicles- Murakami (prob his most famous)

Chilly Scenes of Winter- Anne Beattie (sp?)

If On a Winter's Night a Traveler- Calvino

Blood Meridian- Cormac McCarthy

The Alchemist- Coelho (my personal favorite book)

The Stranger- Camus

If you like short stories here are a few:

The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God- Keret

Marcovaldo- Calvino

My Name is Asher Lev - Potok. Outstanding book, maybe my favorite.

Dandelion Wine - Bradbury.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Heinlein.

Shogun - Clavell

Dune - Herbert (already suggested, but seconded).

It's better if posters only suggest one book per post. A long list clutters the thread and seems like a case of "I couldn't choose so I listed plenty of famous books to show off". Boring and impersonal.

Presently reading Oliver Sacks' "A Mind's Eye". More interesting stories of neurological problems. Reading about aphasia makes me wonder if Congresswoman Giffords will experience some of the issues I've read about in this book - issues with speech seem to be affected by problems on the left side of the brain.

NoFatty wrote:

Infinite Jest - Wallace

I just started it, so I can't comment on very much about it, but it is a hip book that has gone through the entire hip life-cycle (cool, played out, now ascending back to cool), so there is an opportunity there to use it as a substitute for a personality if that is the sort of thing you are looking for.

If you are going that way, I suggest "Consider the Lobster" a collection of DFW's short stories. Shorter, easier to read, better variety and all of the obscure vocab and footnotes you will need.

The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

Matterhorn, if you want to know what combat is like. Carl Marlantes.

Made in America, by Bill Bryson. Ostensibly about the development of American English, it is a fascinating social history of America. Did I mention fascinating, and entertaining and informative? These words that characterize anything Bryson writes. Among other favorites, Notes froma Small Island, Neither Here nor There, and The Lost Continent.

Miles from Nowhere, by Dayton Duncan. A study of the 130-odd counties in the U.S. with a population density of fewer than two people per square mile, i.e. counties that still fit the definition of "frontier" including Harney County, Oregon, where in 1990 two census takers canvassing a quarter of the county, an area twice the size of Rhode Island, for the 29 souls records indicated should be living there, went missing for five days, only to be spotted by aerial search.

While I'm at it, Let me plug John L. Parker's sequel to Once A Runner, Return to Carthage. I read Once A Runner when it first came out,as a rabid runner was expected to, andreread it within the past year. Both times I found it O.K. for what it was, namely a novel of young athlete coming of age and achieving success after trials and tribulations. But face it, that is essentially an adolescent genre.

Written some thirty years later, Again to Carthage again features Quinton Cassidy, but he, like us, and like Parker, has gotten older, dealt with career, loss, and the emptiness that comes in the wake of childhood dreams that have come to be the focus of early adulthood before eventually coming to fruition.

In other words, the athletic world that is always part of who we are is seen and grappled with through the eyes of someone who is no longer a stranger in the land of adult concerns. Parker's growth is no less impressive than Cassidy's.

NoFatty wrote:

Infinite Jest - Wallace

I just started it, so I can't comment on very much about it, but it is a hip book that has gone through the entire hip life-cycle (cool, played out, now ascending back to cool), so there is an opportunity there to use it as a substitute for a personality if that is the sort of thing you are looking for.

Having read this book more than once [for fun!], I can provide some other reasons to read it:

1. It's likely that Wallace is going to be remembered, at least in literary circles, as one of the foremost authors of this time. This being his "greatest" novel (his only other finished novel being an undergraduate thesis, which although unique is still a first novel written by in off-time by a philosophy major at the age of 21).

2. The book seems to describe many of the issues that Wallace struggled with in real life, including depression, inability to properly communicate with others, cultural differences, the future, and as many others as one could hope to fit in 1100 pages of writing.

3. It's an incredibly unique style, replete with Wallace's erudite diction, endnotes (as described by another commenter), dubiously reliable narrators, and some very well-fleshed-out characterizations, and supporting characters who are intriguing enough to make one wish the book was longer.

However, I will caution interested readers... the book is daunting. It's a commitment to try to read, both with the necessary focus, and the potential emotional investment you might end up putting into it. It will take a solid 200 pages at least to get hooked... and then it's about the best 600 pages you'll ever read, and then, really, a dead end. With that in mind, though, I think (for whatever my opinion counts for) that such an ending is truly fitting for the style and content of the book--and from what I understand from the Howling Fantods website, Wallace struggled greatly with how to properly end the book. So it might turn out to be a very frustrating read, on more than one level. And it might cause you to wrestle with some of the ideas presented therein. Not that any of that is a bad thing.

Now that I've completely saturated this thread with glowing praise, I'll suggest some other excellent works:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez-- One Hundred Years of Solitude

Dave Eggers-- What is the What

Toni Morrison-- Beloved (among others)

Truman Capote-- In Cold Blood

Tom Stoppard-- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Samuel Becket-- Waiting for Godot

Jeffrey Eugenides-- Middlesex

Douglas Adams-- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Khaled Hosseini-- The Kite Runner

Chinua Achebe-- Things Fall Apart

Jean Rhys-- Wide Sargasso Sea (after you've read Jane Eyre)

John Kennedy Toole-- A Confederacy of Dunces

Joseph Heller-- Catch-22

"I mention fascinating, and entertaining and informative? These words that characterize anything Bryson writes. Among other favorites, Notes froma Small Island, Neither Here nor There, and The Lost Continent."/quote

This must be Bryson ,himself, posting. Fellate thyself, you charlatan for that hoax you scrolled upon your mother's tampon, " a Walk in the Woods ".

Same for your conspirator 'Outside' magazine.

This douche claims to write an autobiography of hiking the entire Applachian Trail,only to abandon,with an assortment of fictional charachters.

Hey, Bill, you owe me twenty bucks ( hardcover),of course,plus interest . Go back to England ,c*********.

"The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins

AND

"God is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens

TWO fantastic books for atheists!

They really put the whole "religion" nonsense to bed for good.

Philip Carlo's biography The Ice Man

"true" story of mafia hitman

he tied people up in a cave full of rats to be eaten alive

he video tape it .....may be BS

he claims to hace killed everyone ....Jimmy Hoffa