What are your favourite novels?

[dollparts3000]

or any favourite books...

Just wondering :)

Some of My favourites are:

1. A Separate Peace
2. Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith by Gina B. Nahai
(A Legacy of Women and Magic in Iran) Very good!!!
3. A Tale of Two Cities
4. Shosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer (He writes a lot of dark/magic/demon stories)
5. The Alchemist
6. Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
7. Collected stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer
8. The Color Purple
9. Tess of the D'urbervilles
10. Bridget Jone's Diary

[QueenBee]

B...ooks? :spy: :laugh:

[Mossopp]

I don't read books as much as I used to. The last ones I read were 'Trainspotting' by Irvine Welsh and 'Stupid White Men' by Michael Moore.
By favourite novels are:
'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley
'1984' by George Orwell
'The Bell Jar' by Sylvia Plath
'Nausea' by Jean-Paul Sartre
'The Catcher In The Rye' by J.D. Salinger
'The Body' by Stephen King
'Fight Club' by Chuck Palanuik
'High Fidelity' by Nick Hornby

[zebu]

'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley
'1984' by George Orwell

those two are one of my favourites too

[Kappa]

Almost everything by William Gibson (Neuromancer being a big favorite).
'Tell No One' by Harlan Coben
'Bridget Jones Diary', too.

I want to read Stupid White Men! Oh yeah oh yeah!

[teeny]

"Dreamcatcher" - Stephen King
"That Was Then... This Is Now" - S.E. Hinton
"The Juror" - John Grisham
"Sleepers" - Lorenzo Carcaterra
"Circle of Friends" - Meave Binchy
"Guds blinde шje" - Jacob Bech Nygaard

[Lena410]

Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky (I *love* that book)
Jude The Obscure - Thomas Hardy
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
everything from John Grisham I read :D
Sleepers - Lorenzo Carcattera
Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt

a bunch of austrian and slovacian authors...Plus I'm sure I forgot a lot of the books I was delighted with..I love reading :D

[luxxi]

Robert A. Heinlein "Starship Troopers"
Steven Pressfield "Gates of Fire"
Guy Burt "The Hole"
Vladimir Bartol "Alamut"
Robert Harris "Fatherland"
William Craig "Enemy at the Gates"


Do memoirs count as novels?

:newyear:

[freddie]

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger In The Strange Land
Ray Bradbury - Martian Chronicles
Isaac Asimov - Robots Of The Morning Dawn
Jean Paul Sartre - Behind Closed Doors

[madeldoe]

Sleepers - Lorenzo Carcattera

oOh is that the same as the movie that brad pitt starred in?


Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne
The Rules of Attraction - Bret Easton Ellis
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
Tender is the Night - Fitzgerald
Lord of the Flies
The THigns they Carried - Tim O'brien
Warriors Dont Cry - Melba Beals

[thegurgi]

Hocus Pocus
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
Winesburg, Ohio - Andeson
Master and the Margarita - Bulgakov
and... for contrast: The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander

haha

[nasnedagoniat]

Paradise Lost - John Milton
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Civilization and its Discontents - Sigmund Freud

[russkayatatu]

This thread is kinda familiar...

A few I've found in the last few months:

The Stars My Destination, also published as Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester. Alfred Bester has not written anything that isn't marvelous; I like all of his stories too, but especially "Fondly Fahrenheit," "The Flowered Thundermug," "Adam and No Eve," "The Men who Murdered Mohammed" ... these stories, I don't know how to describe them, they are funny, and clever. Their structure is akin to Euclidian triangles compared to the shapeless mush of most fiction. I read one reviewer who said that an entire book could be written about literary technique in "Fondly Fahrenheit." Well, I think it'd be an awfully long-winded book; knowing academia, though, it's certainly possible ;) But it is a masterpiece, no kidding, anyone who hasn't heard of Alfred Bester is MISSING OUT in an unbelievable big-time way.

Well, and these are not novels. THE GLASS TEAT and THE OTHER GLASS TEAT by Harlan Ellison, columns on television published in the LA Free Press (the Freep) in the early seventies. Harlan Ellison is also amazing. I think though that he may not translate well to other countries; he's an American writer, and his American-ness permeates his world-view, the things he writes about, the way he writes about them. His essays are some of the best essays I've ever read, especially "Poisoned by the Fangs of Spiro," "Xenogenesis," "The Tombs," "The Common Man." The first and last are columns in THE GLASS TEAT, actually. "Xenogenesis" is about fandom and the psychological and psychotic natures of fandom in science fiction in particular. "The Tombs" is about the US legal system.

Oh yeah, and I like Arthur C. Clarke :done: I like Asimov and Heinlein sometimes ( not often). :hmmm:

[russkayatatu]

These are all books I've read more than once:

The Bond novels by Ian Fleming, especially Goldfinger, From Russia With Love, Octopussy
Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by Le Carre
Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

Genius, by James Gleick (biography of Richard Feynman)
Bird Lives! by Ross Russell (biography of Charlie Parker)

Recently I reread Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog - I remembered it as being kind of a grim story three years ago when I read it, but this time I thought it was hilarious ! :laugh: I also liked Definitely Maybe, by the Strugatsky brothers. These are books way beyond most stuff I've been reading lately - or maybe it's just that they approach in a different way.

And Jorge Luis Borges. One thing, by no means the most important thing I like about him, is that he's amazingly well-read in areas I don't know at all ... like Schopenhauer ! ... I read him and I get a glimpse from an outlook I don't know I would ever find on my own. This is kind of how I feel when I read Harlan Ellison. Because he writes of and through America, the America of the sixties and seventies and eighties that I know a little about, through my mom, through TV, through films, through books, but he introduces me to aspects I never saw. I'd heard of My Lai but when he writes about it the television was just beginning to show the pictures. One of his columns, about a talk he gave to students in Dayton, Ohio, is called "Poisoned by the Fangs of Spiro": Spiro is Spiro Agnew, vice president under Nixon; I didn't know that ! Now I think about television writing and shooting and protests and long-haired students in a way that is more varied and layered than the way I did before. I am not describing it very well ( I do not describe ANYTHING very well), but Mr Ellison has been an education, and a great one, that's all I can say. And he knows how to write. Even when he writes strange scenes, praises things I have no basis for, chooses approaches I find difficult to appreciate and doubt that they even should be appreciated, I am not sorry I let him threaten me with his gargoyles heading towards the Vatican, or his demented computer AM, or anything else that hints of chaeng.

All of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and novels. I picked up some of Dashiell Hammett's stories the other day, and read his biography ... I didn't know he was a Pinkerton man :eek: ... and then I tried to remember where I'd read about Pinkerton's, the famous American detective agency; first I looked up Felix Leiter in Goldfinger, but he's CIA - which I remembered, but Bond says something about his Pinkerton card, so maybe he's both after all? But I think I got it from Sherlock Holmes, from one of the novels, the one about McMurdo and the Masons.

So after reading about Dashiell Hammett and how he wrote with Lillian Hellman, I realized I didn't know anything she'd written and aimlessly wandered over to the DRAMA section of the bookstore a few days later and read "The Children's Hour," 1934.

Edward Albee, I actually met him at a play reading a few weeks ago - I was crazy about his play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" when I was in high school :10x:

I like Richard Matheson too, and Dorothy Fontana, and William Goldman, and John D. F. Black, and and Gene Coon, Jerome Bixby. They wrote a lot of screen- and teleplays. Between William Goldman and Harlan Ellison I think I'm learning a lot about screenwriters ... David Gerrold wrote some interesting stuff about that too. After reading his nonfiction I thought he was a writer I wanted to watch out for, but then I read one of his stories published in the magazine Fantasy&Science Fiction ... and it was ... ehh. I must be missing all of the good issues of these magazines, by the way - I keep getting the ones with stories with no point. Although on the other hand I haven't been reading all the stories, just the ones that look most interesting for whatever reason. But it's crazy that people would actually pay money for some of the things out there that get published :confused:

Sorry, I don't know how to stop talking about these books I read - I have very few friends who like to read and discuss books, and those who do have no time to read or don't want to read the things that so catch my attention ... most of the people I know ... place a book into their already framed reference of "like" and "dislike"; they work it into what they already know and understand ... whereas I try not to do that ;)

It reminds me of Huxley, I liked Point Counter Point especially :)

Has anyone read a lot of D. H. Lawrence? I'd been reading stuff on the level of Octavia E. Butler (not that she is bad; she's OK) and then started thumbing through one of his novels, something like Plumed Serpent - and the jump in the quality of the writing was something unbelievable. It reminds me of when I used to look at some stories on the web - which I still do if I'm in the mood to look at relatively mindless stuff and zone out :coctail: - and I remembered one story in particular that I thought was pretty good, and managed to find it again. And when I set down to reread it, enjoy it again, I realized with a shock that there was no story - all the good characters, the tension, I'd imagined all of it in my head from a few sentences and suggestions in the story. There was no point rereading: it was badly written, fake all the way through ... I'd read a few days before that that was the difference between bad writing and good writing: with bad writing you have to make it all up yourself, and disregard, if you have to, where the author is trying to lead you, his emphases, his phrasing. And it's hard work to simultaneously block out and create for yourself - which is why when I found Lawrence, it was a relief; I couldn't believe what I'd gotten used to.

I don't read all the time; I read fast, is all - faster than I type ;) Today, for example, I've hardly read anything, just a few Twilight Zone scripts. Anyway, I don't mean to ruin everyone's party with this and these ridiculously long posts ...

[taty994945]

russkayatatu, do you enjoy reading? :gigi:

[alight]

The Poem Of Shakespeare - William Shakespeare
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
Finders Keepers - Linnea Sinclair
The Change You Take - Linda Bleser
Wild Temptation - Ruth D. Kerce
Winter's Orphans - Elaine Corvidae
The Gunn Of Killearnan - Dorice Nelson

[Pop!]

Taking Lives- by some guy
Notes From My Travels- Angelina Jolie

I'm an Angie fan.

[freddie]

Forgot The Stranger by Albert Camus, and also "HitcHikers Guide To The Galaxy" by Douglas Adams. Maybe even "The Space Oddysey" by Arthur C. Clarke.