Be Excellent To Each Other

This thread is officially non-canon!

What sort of thing do you like?

Can be tempted by anything, high-brow or low-brow, funny or serious, even *gasp* sci-fi!

I've got plenty of sci-fi and fantasy, being ex-Games Workshop staff/nerd.
The Eisenhorn trilogy is pretty good, as are the Gaunts Ghosts books. but as a stand alone piece of writing that requires litte/no previous GW knowledge Dan Abnetts Riders of the Dead is excellent. (if you like fantasy novels, like).

can't really think what else i've got off the top of my head, being at work and all......

It could be argued that i am still in fact a nerd......

Have you heard of this thing called "a library"? Wonderful idea, invented by the Scots.

I couldn't understand "Trainspotting" so I don't really think that is the place for me.

Heh!

Most of the best books I've read recently I borrowed from the library, so I'll have a think. Maybe you could while away an hour by posting a list of all the books you own, so we can choose for borrowsies?

You really don't get how I work do you?

I probably only have about 1/4 to 1/3 of my books in my pad at the moment, the majority are in my old bedroom at my parents' house. There's a lot of Terry Pratchett, Iain Banks, Dan Brown(!) and the like on those shelves, along with a multo other stuff. I could probably list all the stuff I have in my place within 20 minutes or so, will get onto it after dindins.

This. Support your local library! It's either that or another starbucks in its place.

If you're not prepared to make the effort of visiting your parents and writing a list, SylvanianBoy, why should we make the effort of walking to the post office? Quid pro quo, boyo, and I want my quid. Also - you should make more of an effort with your mother. Would it kill you to call once in a while?

I took her out for dinner* on Friday thank you very much. And who says I won't write a list of the stuff at my parents' house next time I go there? I was just saying why I won't be doing it tonight.


* daddy came too and paid

Well, fair enough then. You're a good boy really.

Try Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. It's a superb book.

Black Man by Richard Morgan is also very good.

Market Forces is a nice idea and well written, but doesn't really go anywhere.

High-brow: Do yourself a favour and get some Jorge Luis Borges collections. He only ever wrote articles, essays and short stories, but he packs more ideas and imagination into a few short pages than most writers do into entire novels. He will do things with language and story and form that will change your idea of what fiction (and non-fiction) writing can do.

Also, David Mitchell (novelist, not comedian) is well worth a read - Cloud Atlas is probably his high point, but Ghostwritten and number9dream are both worth reading (and if you like the latter, then the author it rips off - Haruki Murakami - is also worth looking up). Again, really imaginative, unusual narrative structures and a tendency towards magical realism.

Low-brow: I still really like Bill Bryson. Pretty much anything by him will be entertaining, interesting and easy to read.

Sci-fi: Give it all a miss, it's rubbish.

Urge to kill: Rising.

Don't discount short story collections, sometimes they are better than the author's novels.

OOI: Why can't you get a book from the library?

He's 'off the grid'?

Umberto Eco is my favorite contemporary writer. I can't choose any of his novels, they're all equally good. But if you want more meaty stuff go for "the focault's pendulum", if not, read "Baudolino".

From the classics, Edgar Allan Poe and Dostoevsky are my picks. I'm sure his books are in any library or someone you know has them.

And of course, 1984, probably my favorite book ever.

I just looked up where my libraries are, it needs a 20 minutes bus trip to get to my nearest one, so that means about an hour's round trip, and of course opening hours mean I would only be able to get to them on the weekend, when I am busy with stuff... the curse of not having a car strikes again.

Admittedly, I hadn't actually thought of them at all when I started this thread though, this is all stuff I looked up once Mr Chris raised the point. A sign of me being a product of the modern world I guess

Books I have to hand that could be posted super-quick for swapsies, in no particular order:

John Irving - A Prayer For Owen Meany
Ian McEwan - Atonement
Stephanie Meyer - Twilight
Mario Puzo - The Godfather
Some Poof - The Portrait of Dorian Gray
Dan Brown - The Da Vinci Code
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
John Grisham - The Appeal
Matt Ruff - Bad Monkeys
Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children
Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials trilogy
Franz Kafka - The Complete Short Stories (inc. Metamorphosis)
Luke Rhinehart - The Dice Man
Brett Easton Ellis - American Psycho
Marcus Zusak - The Book Thief
Chuck Palahniuk - Choke
Andrei Kurkov - Death and the Penguin
Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being; The Joke; The Art of the Novel; Immortality; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
JD Salinger - Catcher in the Rye
Alexandre Dumas - The Man in the Iron Mask
Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day
Isaac Asimov - Prelude to Foundation; Forward the Foundation
Michael Lewis - Moneyball
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment; The Idiot
Charles Dickens - Bleak House
Yann Martel - Life of Pi
Will Self - Great Apes
Terry Pratchett - Nation

Also, "Freakonomics" by some off-the-wall economic types, "Game of Shadows" by some probey dirt-raking baseball journalist types, and autobiographies by Marcus Trescothick, Chris Jericho and Chris Coste.

You're kidding. Someone left that round your house, right? Your young, teenage sister?

And RuySan, if you haven't read any Borges, if you're recommending Eco, you'll love it - he was a big inspiration to Eco, and Eco references him often - libraries and labyrinths are recurring themes in Borges' writing, for example, and the monk Jorge in Name of the Rose is named for Borges

I bought that for the missus after we watched the movie. She read it in about a week and even she said it was a middle aged woman's wank fantasy.

I bought it cos it was half-price in Smiths and I knew nothing about it, I expected something more gothic... it was fairly readable, but yeah, pretty weak and predictable bordering on trash.

I DID SAY I COULD DO LOW-BROW!

Good grief you have a smattering of books there.

Books I always recommend to people as I've read all of them many times

Anything by Raymond Chandler - and that's anything he's written, not the title of a book
The triple trilogy by Len Deighton revolving around the character Bernard Samson
Immortality by Milan Kundera
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

I know I've read lots of good books (and there are some I've forgotten to mention which should be in this list) but off the top of my head those are my lodestones I come back to and frequently enjoy more each time I read them.

<chuckles>

Post me a book or GTFO

Free book...here: http://www.mormon.org/freeBookofMormon/ ... 94,00.html

G. K. Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday'. Why? Because it's the best thing I've ever read.

Mix the Bible, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Monty Python, Sherlock Holmes, James Conrad, Graham Greene, Kafka, David Lynch, Hitchcock and - oh - everything awesome and you've got something like it. It's about a London poet detective who infiltrates a deadly anarchist council of whom each member is named after a day of the week - the monstrous superman Sunday prevailing over all. It was written in the 1890's, is fast, funny, romantic, thrilling, scary and lots of other things. Not that long either.

Please read it.

I would not mind reading in return Alexander Dumas' 'The Man in the Iron Mask'. I hear it's aces.

Oh, I can definitely recommend

'Have a Nice Day' and 'Foley is Good' by Mick Foley. Really great reads.

If it's good and it's not that long than I can't imagine it will sustain me for more than a couple of days, but regardless, you sir have a deal.

Anyone else?

PS. Pundabaya> "Have a Nice Day" is on my reserve shelf at parents, it was good but overlong, and he clearly thought he was a comic genius when he is only reasonably amusing... so in total, it was good but I wouldn't read another.

You know you're missing out on The Legend of the Penis Suplex, don't you?

It's cool, myp showed me how to do that once.

Shall we call this a deal then? I won't be able to ship tomorrow because I plan on smuggling it out on the work franking account, and I'm not in work tomorrow, but if you give me your address I shall take Man In The Iron Mask in with me on Thursday and send it so it should be with you Monday at the latest.

A long while ago Sinister Agent pointed me in the direction of the wonderful Project Gutenberg for free classic bookage. Worth a look.

He's in my wantlist for ages, but i usually just read the books that are in my parents house, and they don't happen to have any Borges, so i guess i will buy something when i've read everything in my parents living room, which will take a while:). One of my favorite writers, José Luis Peixoto, was really enthusiastic talking about Borges work one time i hard him on the radio, it seemed like the most awesome thing.

Regarding Eco, i heard he isn't going to write any more novels, which is a shame. Still, better than the countless of writers who write an irrelevant book every year.

Ultimately, in the greater scheme of things, all novels are irrelevant.

Take that to it's extreme, and I'm the world's greatest author.

By that thought, i can assume everything can be irrelevant.

Not so. Tatty bojangles, for example, are never ever irrelevant.

Ah, that's the one. I'm trying to get the missus to buy me Kindle or similar for my 30th bday, I knew there was a place with free books. You've saved me literally seconds on google.

And I shall now cause you to waste them by getting you to read this information- and joke-free post.

Much like all the others, eh readers?

Did you really mean to post your full name and address to The Internet then?

There was a writeup about this in Deathray last month. It said pretty much the same thing. INTERESTING.

Penguin Classics do two compendium volumes of his novels, three novels in each volume; as the original novels are quite short they aren't stupidly large books. I started The Big Sleep last night. I'd forgotten how much I love Chandler's prose.

I love these so hard I am going to buy them all again soon and read them right through. (For those who don't know, these books are in three trilogies with linked names. Game, Set and Match are the first trilogy; Hook, Line and Sinker is the second, and Faith, Hope and Charity is the third. They contain some of the greatest twists and reversals I've ever read.)

No, that was meant to be a PM. I was wondering why he hadn't replied

If you read it, burn your eyes. (although I expect to be putting up the whole board for the Manchester meet, so you could say I was just saving time)

Can I bagsy a space on the floor for that? I have looked very sternly at Mrs C and told her in no uncertain terms that I am brooking NO MORE INTERFERENCE IN MY BEEXMEET PLANS.

Wha-whuuu? /Prof Farnsworth voice.

Um, PM me your addy, again if need be. Got nowt.

Lol. Did she giggle? I'm betting she giggled.

Wait, MrC is coming to manchester?

*changes plans*

/ambiguity