Mr Chris wrote:
LOTR was ruined from the first part of the first book.
Tom Fucking Bombadil.
Also, Tolkien was clearly a failed historian. If you feel the need to write ten billion pages of background to a story, you're a shit storyteller. Frank Herbert created a far more compelling and original world (universe, even) from scratch without a single line of pointless exposition. Dune is a thousand times better than LOTR.
And Tom Bombadil was a hateful twat. I remember hearing some fans whinge about how he should have been in the film. When I got round ot reading the books I couldn't believe how stupid those people must be. He's less like an ancient sage of the woods and more like Graham Norton's campy priest out of Father Ted. I was stunned when he didn't pop up in the mines of Moria and squeal "I know! Let's have a
screaming contest! I'll go first - AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!"
I couldn't be arsed to read the second book, frankly. Although I do have the opening chapter all but memorised as my girlfriend sent a recording of her reading it aloud to me when she left the country, and I found that listening to it was the only way I could get to sleep for several weeks.
Anyway. Greatness follows:
George Orwell (
1984, duh, and
Keep the Aspidistra Flying - a brilliant prolonged rant about how the lack of money will fuck up a man's life, and how people who think writers and artists should reject money and live in poverty are sorely deluded)
H.G. Wells - a prolific writer whose ideas ranged from science fiction to satire, comedy, drama and political biopic. Too many great books to list, but I adore
The History of Mister Polly, The New Machiavelli*, and
The Sleeper Awakes. Man, I need to read the rest of his stuff. Oh, and
The War of the Worlds is great, obviously.
He also helped write the UN Charter, invented table top wargaming, and stated that he wanted his epitaph to read "I told you so. You damned fools!"
Oscar Wilde - Few people have toped him at writing dialogue. His ruin at the hands of a spoilt little shit and an ignorant puritan society was one of the greatest tragedies of the era. A brilliant thinker and poet with a great instinct for understanding human emotion. Some of his short stories are heartbreaking, particularly
The Nightingale and the Rose, and the
Canterville Ghost.
The Soul of Man under Socialism is fascinating and
De Profundis, his full letter to his cunt of a lover in prison, is one of the most profound and beautiful things I've ever read. Anyone who's ever been in love with someone who totally doesn't deserve it will sob like a child, I guarantee it.
Isaac Asimov - For the Foundation books alone, which I've started to read. Salvor Hardin is a total legend.
D.H. Lawrence - I've only read
Lady Chatterley's Lover, but it's ace. It starts poorly, I admit, but once it gets started it kicks arse. Mellors is an absolute legend. A great story of passion and outrage at an ugly, artless society.
Samuel Johnson's
The History of Rasselas, because it is impossible to read too many times. Somehow remains inspiring and touching despite its basic message that humans will never, ever be happy.
William Nicholson's
The Society of Others. A brilliant story about a cynical, apathetic young man numbed by ignorance and unfair expectations, who leave home just to be left alone and goes hitch-hiking without a destination and ends up in an unnamed country in Europe struggling under a restrictive police state. It perfectly captures the sublimation of idealism into apathy and cynicism, and fuck me how wanky did that sound? Anyway, a book that both scorns and criticises people for going on with their pointless lives in blind hope, and celebrates them for it. I totally love this book, and the priest in it is a legend. Even if the ending is a bit off.
Philip Reeve's
Mortal Engines series:
Quote:
"blah blah far future blah blah nuclear war, enormous mobile cities on metal tracks hunt and 'eat' each other across the wastelands of Europe, blah blah revenge, war, murder, etc."
I should go into advertising, I know. And then kill myself, obv. But really, it's a great book, and part of a series that wavers in parts but overall, I'm rather fond of. And, y'know, mobile cities. Enormous mobile cities. Hunting each other! Hunting! Enormous! Mobile!
Anthony McGowan's
Henry Tumour - awesome little story about a schoolboy with a talking brain tumour. It's funny, it's angry, it's clever and full of philosophy. Best of all, it does a damn good job of describing the complicated friendships people rely on in school, subtly and without resorting to tedious cliché or shitty american high school drama-isms.
P.G. Wodehouse - because you cannot dislike this man's books. Witty, charming and erudite, they're packed with tiny little throwaway lines that will have you chuckling throughout, and show how the simplest of things can be made entertaining if a little thought goes into their description.
Lemony Snicket's
A Series of Unfortunate Events - for arguably the same reasons as above. And I adore the film, as well.
Frank Herbert's
Dune - sheer fucking brilliance in every way. Even the usually tedious 'prophecy' aspect is turned on its head, as it's self-fulfilling, something planned long in advance and set up to happen, and the cynical manipulation of a people's religion and culture is in fact part of the formula necessary to make it so. Great political commentary, a philosophical and psycological masterpiece, a superb piece of storytelling that manages to convey everything you need to know about its world and history through context, full of interesting and plausiable characters (the main villain is both loathsome and charismatic, and extremely intelligent and cunning), and a damned exciting tale of murder, guerilla war and revenge to boot.
Matthew Reilly - he does ridiculous action books about people fighting off squad after squad of mercenaries and elite soldiers, drive tanks out of planes, fight submarines with a grappling hook, and fight some soldiers, then fly into space to fight some more soldiers, then fly down again to fight some more soldiers, all in the space of an afternoon. And they're brilliant. This man is what Hideo "FUCKING CUNT" Kojima wishes he could be (and thinks he is, thanks to thousands of witless fanboys). Epic, but no-nonsense and told at a cracking pace. Ridiculous, but so much fun to read that it doesn't matter. And the conspiracy theories and science fiction ideas are a nice bonus. And he's not American, so it's not all "YOO ESS AY! YOO ESS AY!" like some of his competitors.
... ahem. I could go on, you know. Pity the man who comes to me in a library and asks for a recommendation. I pretty soundly scared at least one person off.
*Not least because of this utterly stupendous passage:
Quote:
Hadn't I always known that science and philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the passion and narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness of their servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of contemporary things? Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of "that greater mind in men, in which we are but moments and transitorily lit cells?" Hadn't I known that the spirit of man still speaks like a thing that struggles out of mud and slime, and that the mere effort to speak means choking and disaster? Hadn't I known that we who think without fear and speak without discretion will not come to our own for the next two thousand years?
In order to assuage my parting from Isabel we had set ourselves to imagine great rewards for our separation, great personal rewards; we had promised ourselves success visible and shining in our lives. To console ourselves in our separation we had made out of the Blue Weekly and our young Tory movement preposterously enormous things - as though those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed the germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning. That poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposition shrivelled to nothing in the black loneliness of that night.
I saw that there were to be no such compensations. So far as my real services to mankind were concerned I had to live an unrecognised and unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be by the way. Our separation would alter nothing of that. My scandal would cling to me now for all my life, a thing affecting relationships, embarrassing and hampering my spirit. I should follow the common lot of those who live by the imagination, and follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the one good comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for ever; I should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand; I should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much absolute evil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and missed or misinterpreted. In the end I might leave one gleaming flake or so amidst the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem sympathy. I was afraid beyond measure of my derelict self. Because I believed with all my soul in love and fine thinking that did not mean that I should necessarily either love steadfastly or think finely. I remember how I fell talking to God - I think I talked out loud. "Why do I care for these things?" I cried, "when I can do so little! Why am I apart from the jolly thoughtless fighting life of men? These dreams fade to nothingness, and leave me bare!"
I scolded. "Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought I had a gleam of you in Isabel - and then you take her away. Do you really think I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in darkness and silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half dying?"
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and also his books on Incarnates
Hugely 
