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Franklin
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Posted - 08 March 2010 12:47
Mainly Proust dabble in Kundera.
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Big Daves Gusset
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The Hungry Caterpillar
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SizzlerCheeseToasts
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Heh. My top five (fiction and non-fiction) for now in no particular order:
1) If on a Winter's Night a Traveller... (Italo Calvino)
2) A River Runs Through It and other stories (Norman Maclean)
3) Dispatches (Michael Herr)
4) Persuasion (Jane Austen)
5) I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)
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SizzlerCheeseToasts
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"several rofers are currently deciding which harry potter books they'd live without if they absolutely had to"
HPs 2 and 5 of course.
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St John
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The Talented Mr Ripley
Naked Lunch
The Compleet Molesworth
The Atrocity Exhibition
Gulliver's Travels
If I could only have one it would be the Molesworth.
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Merckx
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catch-22, joseph heller
catcher in the rye, jd salinger
the rider, tim krabbe
the stand, stephen king
still thinking about no 5
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Cernunnous
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1) The Female Eunoch - Germaine Greer
2) The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
3) The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
4) Intercourse - Andrea Rita Dworkin
5) The Big Book of Breasts
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SizzlerCheeseToasts
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Oooh, the Handmaid's Tale is a good one.
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Franklin
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Scoop - Waugh
Brothers Karamazov - Dostoyevsky
Homage to Catalonia - Orwell
Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
Most Chandler books.
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Weally Been
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thought that catch 22 was quite overrated really
most of mine would be russian but hemingway and something french might get in
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Cyprian
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1. The Hardy Boys: The Shore Road Mystery
2. The Hardy Boys: The Clue of the Broken Blade
3. The Hardy Boys: The Flickering Torch Mystery
4. The Hardy Boys: The Sign of the Crooked Arrow
5. The Hardy Boys: The Mystery of the Chinese Junk
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Lord Halifax
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Prayer for Owen Meaney
Handful of Dust
Unbearable Lightness of Being
Yeats: complete poems
Updike: Rabbit Books
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lightfantastic
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Franklin- Good choices.
Mine:
Love in the Time of Cholera (and also 'one hundred years of solitude)- Gabriel GarcĂa Márquez
The Sun Also Rises- Hemmingway
Giovanni's Room- James Baldwin
Things Fall Apart- Chinua Achebe
Paradise Lost- Milton
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minkie
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1. Mme Bovary - Flaubert
2. Portnoy's Complaint - Roth
3. A man in Full - Wolfe
4. Accordion Crimes - Proulx
5. Jude the Obscure - Hardy
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Merckx
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updated
catch-22, joseph heller
catcher in the rye, jd salinger
the rider, tim krabbe
the stand, stephen king
the leopard, giuseppe tomasi di lampedusa
apols for spelling of the last author, can't be arsed to google it
faod the main selection criterion is that i must have read the book at least 5 times
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minkie
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Oo yes The Lepoard! Did you ever see the film as well?
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Merckx
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naah. i never see the films of books i really like.
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Wangobangobongo
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1 - LOTR
2 - It, Stephen King
3 - Without Remorse, Tom Clancy
4 - Die Trying, Lee Child
5 - The complete discworld series, Terry Pratchett
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minkie
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I know what you mean but you really should - is by Visconti. Ravishingly beautiful with Burt Lancaster & Claudia Cardinale
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struandirk
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Which Tom Clancy is Without Remorse? Is it one of the Jack Ryan novels? I thought I'd read all of them?
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mighty celt
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These come to mind, so they are probably my faves:
L'etranger - Camus
One hundred years of solitude - Marques
Don Quixote - Cervantes
All quiet on the western front - Remarque
Catch 22 - Heller
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Wangobangobongo
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Sort of - it's the flash back to how John Kelly becomes John Clark
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struandirk
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Ah. I remember now. I read it when I was about 12, and I was ready to kill those drug smugglers myself by the end of it.
I really liked Debt of Honour/Executive Orders/Red October though (especially when I was still young enough not to realize that it was thinly veiled Republican propaganda)
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Franklin
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I really hated Catch-22, which dissapointed me. Made me feel dim, as if I'd missed the point.
Jane Austen has a special circle of hell reserved for her.
A Month in the Country and the Go Between are quite nice in a hot British summer kinda way.
I'm surprised all you folks read modern books, I always find I've got more classics I fancy.
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Wangobangobongo
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"especially when I was still young enough not to realize that it was thinly veiled Republican propaganda"
You say that, but I thought he had some pretty sensible ideas:
- solution to the israeli/palestinian conflicts over jerusalem (triumverate of an imam/rabbit/patriarch of constantinople ruling, backed up by swiss guard)
- sending real people into the senate rather than career politicians
- simplifying the tax system etc
I do wonder if he inadvertantly gave Al-Q the idea for 9-11 though...
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Showgers
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1. Any Human Heart, William Boyd
2. The Bridges of Madison County, Robert James Waller
3. Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
having trouble with spots 4 and 5, will revert
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WhiskersUp
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1. England, England - Julian Barnes
2. The Magus - John Fowles
3. Flashman at the Charge - George MacDonald Fraser
4. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
5. Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood
(and prob some more, too)
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Chad Michael Murray
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great Fowles shout
top of the head
- Margaret Drabble, the Ice Age
- HG Wells, the History of Mr Polly
- Joseph Heller, Something Happened
- Don de Lillo, White Noise
- John Kennedy Toole, a Confederacy of Dunces
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SizzlerCheeseToasts
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"Jane Austen has a special circle of hell reserved for her."
How come?
"L'Etranger - Camus": there's this great line in it, after the incident on the beach when the guys says something along the lines of "it was like knocking 4 times on the door of unhappiness", but erm, more eloquently than that.
Discworld: They're so samey though Wang. The best was "Guards ! Guards!" and he could have really developed those charcters but every subsequent Watch novel was all about Vimes being drunk and depressed. And there were ones that you just couldn't get through like the Hogfather.
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Wangobangobongo
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the fact that you don't like some of them doesnt't really affect whether or not i do, sorry
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Jetlagger
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1. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
2. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
3. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
4. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
5. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie
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SizzlerCheeseToasts
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I was engaging in a discussion (obviously with myself) not trying to change your opinion...
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DawnHandbags
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Struggling to list just 5.
1. The French Lieutenant’s Woman - John Fowles
2. The Lord of the Flies - William Golding
3. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
4. Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen
5. Philip Pullman's - His Dark Materials Trilogy
6. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
7. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
8. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
9. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
10. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
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Weally Been
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Lots of shouts for Catch 22, but nothing for Crime & Punishment or Moby Dick??
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Franklin
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"Jane Austen has a special circle of hell reserved for her."
How come?
Because all her books (I've read/attempted) are dull and clunky.
Someone above has reminded me how good Wyndham is.
Day of the Triffids is topclass.
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Wangobangobongo
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I also didn't find catch 22 very funny.
My number 6 would be The Count of Monte Cristo
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Cernunnous
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I found - and still find - Catch 22 very funny, but where I used to think Yossarian was an absolute hero, I now think he's just a bit of a prick.
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Cernunnous
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1. Lolita - Nabokov
2. Pale Fire - Nabokov again
3. The Code Of The Woosters - Wodehouse
4. Swing Hammer Swing! - Torrington
5. New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
Probably. For now.
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struandirk
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I didn't see the appeal of Catch 22 either.
As for Tom Clancy, I agree he had some very interesting ideas, particularly the Palestine stuff (and Ryan's idea in an earlier book - Debt of Honour I think about how to reopen the crashed financial markets after they were hacked - I won't give the spoiler away).
The rest of it - a flat tax instead of progressive taxation, real people in the Senate (because there were no career pols available) etc - is just so beyond the realms of practicality though..
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Mr Ronald Coase
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What are the rules here please, you are all making lists of fiction, does it have to be fiction?
My top 5 books are
To the Finland Station Edmund Wilson
The Classical World Robin Lane Fox
The Pursuit of Love / Love in a Cold Climate Nancy Mitford
The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis
Voyage to the End of the Room Tibor Fischer
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Weally Been
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My daily working life is Catch 22 esque - crikey that sounds twatish! - but all I mean is that it feels like they're always adding in more missions whenever I get near where I want to be... The only hilarious bit was when he marched around the square holding his gun upside down!
No Dickens on the list either - Great Expectations or better still Tale of Two Cities ... surely worth a shout
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Cernunnous
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Really enjoyed Hard Times, actually. The Dickens novel, not the ghey pron mag.
I also enjoyed Pride And Prejudice, though I failed to see the point in reading any other Jane Austen books after that...
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Scylla 3.0
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Count of Monte Christo
LOTR
The River God
Interview with a Vampire
All quiet on the Western Front
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Scylla 3.0
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*oh and Dangerous Liasions comes a very close 6
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loo read
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1. Lolita
2. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
3. Herzog by Saul Bellow
4. The Zuckerman books by Philip Roth
5. The Rabbit books by Updike
plus
Rushdie
Burgess
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gloria mundi
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"Master and Margarita" M. Bulgakov
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" G.G. Marquez
"Eugene Onegin" A. Pushkin
"Catch-22" J. Heller
"12 Chairs" I. Ilf and E. Petrov
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west
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good call on IT and the stand.
anyone read shantaram?
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mighty celt
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SCT. yes it was something like
"it was like tapping four quick times on the door of unhappiness"
wonderful stuff.
I loved Catch 22, but found Something Happened unbelievably tedious. An editor should have stepped in, saved Heller the embarrassment and us the pain.
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Mr Ronald Coase
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oh yes I forgot Saul Bellow. Ravelstein.
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Fat and Bones
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Lord Halifax Posted - 08 March 2010 13:21 Report as offensive
Prayer for Owen Meaney
top man
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Scylla 3.0
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Shantaram = unmitigated pile of self indulgent wank.
If I hadn't been stuck in the middle of Africa with no electricity at the time I would have thrown it on the campfire as that would have enlightened me more.
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Danny
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Roth (Joseph) - The Radetzky March
Jerome - 3 Men in a Boat
DeLillo - Underworld
Mann - Magic Mountain
Turgenev - Fathers and Sons
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Olaf Plori
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1. YOUR MONEY or YOUR LIFE by Dominguez and Robin (every lawyer should read it)
2. Serotic's The Only Way to Win At Lotto
3. Winnie the Pooh & The House at Pooh Corner by AA Milne
4. Molesworth by Willans & Searle (the Complete)
5. Animal Farm by George Orwell (and "1984" natch)
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Torchy
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There used to be four things I kept re-reading-----Buchan’s Richard Hannay; Sherlock Holmes; AChristmas Carol; Highsmith’s Tom Ripley quintet
time has taken its toll though, in so much as Hannay and Holmes are now a bit stale after all these years, but its taken a very long time
So....the TOM RIPLEY five are the winners for me [I re-read every c. 4 yrs say]
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DeadPartnerWalking
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no Wodehouse?
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Torchy
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of course every yr in late November I read again about wonderful old Ebenezer’s education at hands of dear old 7-yrs-dead Marley
a deeply life-enhancing read. every time. without fail
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Perfidious Porpoise
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If frequency of rereading is the criterion, then it would be the Adrian Mole books for me. They're like comfort food for me.
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Torchy
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Wodehouse I read all of at school, but it didn't capture me
prob because my old man loved all of it
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Torchy
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altho I watched Roderick Spode on Question Time at end of last yr
[thankfully sans his Black Shorts
!!
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chimp_
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Eugene Onegin is a masterpiece; Tom Clancy should be fired into the heart of the Sun
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Torchy
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lots of interesting stuff for me to follow up on on this thread]
a couple ofbooks I came across again in house just recently after about 20 yrs
one- God’s Fifth Column, by William Gerhardie
and
two- The Private Papers of Henry Rycroft by George Gissing
they’d been niggling away in back of my mind since first read, so that must mean something too
oh. and nearly all Graham green of course ---wonderfully insightful entertainments all
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Torchy
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a book every young person should read,in pursuit of getting an outrageous handle on what is possible, is MyLife & Loves, by Frank Harris [real life-affirming stuff, full of uber daring vitality and lies, but delicious lies! ---and it may all be true anyway....! who knows
and a book first published in 19sixties by ex-RAF chap called WMV Fowler, called Countryman’s Cooking ...it was republished a yr or two ago and Amazon had it
=fantastic fun
everyone seems to love it who tries it
[again, full of ego and vitality and the like
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shinyhappyperson
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1. The Complete Sherlock Holmes
2. The Complete Richard Hannay
3. The Three Musketeers
4. The Prisoner of Zenda
5. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
And yes, I like my swash buckled. Flatland is an extraordinary book though.
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Bentines
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1) beano annual 1977
2) beano annual 1978
3) beano annual 1979
4) beano annual 1981
5) homage to catalonia
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lonesome cowboy bill
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Proust – Remembrance of things past
Celine – Journey to the end of the night
Camus – The Fall
Buroughs (lonesome cowboy bill) – Naked Lunch
Dostoyevsky – Crime & Punishment
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DeadPartnerWalking
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random 5 in no particular order:
1. The Misfortunes of Virtue - Sade
2. Middlemarch - Eliot
3. Kim - Kipling
4. Anything - George MacDonald Fraser
5. The Wild Ass's Skin - Balzac
oh and Nana - Zola, Graham Greene, Le Carre, ........etc.
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DeadPartnerWalking
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Read From Russia with Love (Ian Fleming) recently - good read but not a great book, superb period piece - the original brand tart and superb (and completely without irony) "sexism"
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silence
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(1) Sentimental Education, Flaubert
(2) A Rebours, Huysmans
(3) Theft Act 1968, Parliament
(4) The Riverside Chaucer
(5) The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde
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Rusty Shackleford
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One hundred years of solitude - Marquez
2666 - Boleno
The Testament of Gideon Mack - Robertson
Hard Boild Wonderland & The Edge of the World - Murikami
Midnights Children - Rushdie
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Leetle Cat
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This thread has made me want to revisit some old favourites. Catcher in the Rye- yes, Catch-22 -also agreed, Onegin- definitely.
WHY do people rate Love In the Time of Cholera? 100 Years Of Solitude, maybe, but I wouldn't put that in any top 5.
I would definitely put Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke in my top 5.
And de Saint Exupery's Flight to Arras deserves a mention. As does Maupassant.
Never Let Me Go and The Alchemist got me though a horrid hospital stay once. Wouldn't re read them but they have a special place on my bookshelf.
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Rusty Shackleford
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agreed. really didnt like love in a time of colera.
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silence
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Leetle, is that Ben Jonson's Alchemist?
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monkeygirkl
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I'm looking at all the books on the shelves lining my walls, and I'm having one of those moments where the synapses in my head are exploding at rapid pace.
I cannot possibly narrow this down to 5 books.
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Morning Lark
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Book of the new sun- quintet.
Hyperion Cantos
Book of the long sun- quartet
Book of the short sun- trilogy
Amber chronicles.
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Leetle Cat
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silence- no, it was the chick lit one about omen this and omen that, fate and circumstance. Just the kind of thing you want to be reading on morphene.
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Ceiling Cat
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This is so hard and my memory is so bad and I change my mind all the time but, right now, in no particular order
1. A tale of two cities, Dickens
2. Death at intervals, Saramago
3. The war of Don Emmanuel's Neither Parts, Louis De Bernieres
4. Down and out in Paris and London, Orwell
5. The Count of Montecristo, Dumas
The His Dark Materials books would probably make the top 10 as would something by Hardy, and probably War and Peace. I also have a real soft spot for the Christophe Brookmyre books.
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AudereEstFacere
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Quite a tricky task this isn't it?
Agree with whoever said Shantaram was a pile of tosh.
In no particular order, and after much internal debate:
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
The Magus - John Fowles
Death and the Penguin - Andrey Kurkov
Underworld - Don Delillo
Sons & Lovers - DH Lawrence
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Mr Ronald Coase
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Sheridan le Fanu, Uncle Silas
Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness
Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy
Turgenev, A Nest of Hereditary Legislators
Huysman, A Rebours
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Mr Ronald Coase
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Frances Hodgson Burnett The Making of a Marchioness
Nancy Mitford anything by her including the biographies of Voltaire, Frederick the Great and Louis XVI
Evelyn Waugh anything by him
Sparkle Hayter detective novles especially 'Nice Girls Finish Last'
Cynthia Heimel 'If you can't live without me why aren't you dead yet?'
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Supes
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1. Foucaults Pendulum - Umberto Eco
2. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemmingway
3. LOTR - Tolkein
4. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
5. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Keysey
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Inyouit
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Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Shantaram - GD Roberts
Gold Coast - Nelson DeMille
Atomised - Michel Houllebecq
Just missed out:
Cannery Row - Steinbeck
Down & Out in London & Paris - Orwell
39 Steps - Buchan
Fear & Loathing - HS Thompson
Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
Anything by Irvine Welsh
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tuscan.
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i think i have 4
the alexandria quartet - lawrence durell
the golden notebook- doris lessing
the mandarins - simone de beauvoir
the brother karamazov - dostoyevsky
and then you start on all the others
i also cant decide whether the odyssey should go in the top 5. probably not
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Mr November
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Sandman Series - Neil Gaiman
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
American Tabloid - James Ellroy
Hitchhikers' Guide (although probably only the first 3) - Douglas Adams
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
(just missed out - All Families are Psychotic - Douglas Coupland, Farewell my Lovely - Raymond Chandler, The Damned United - David Peace, Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson, Dirt Music - Tim Winton, From Hell - Alan Moore)
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Mr Ronald Coase
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Michael Lewis, Moneyball
Po Bronson, Bombardiers
Eamonn Collins, Killing Rage
Thom Jones, Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine
Peter Woods, Hard Shoulder
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Mr November
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If we're including non-fiction, then A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan, Bad Blood by Jeremy Whittle, The Corner by David Simon, Easy Riders Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind and The Dirt by Motley Crue & Neil Strauss would be an entirely separate top 5.
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Rambling Peasant
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Hints for Travellers
The Bible
Complete works of Shakespeare
Compleet Molesworth
Any Flashman novel
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St John
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Good to see another two votes for the Compleet Molesworth - a book that gets better with age.
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Rambling Peasant
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Cave! A master approaches.
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Bored2Tears
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1. Beloved, Toni Morrison
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
3. Oryx & Crake, Margaret Atwood
4. Cloudstreet, Tim Winton
5. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
Short list: Oscar & Lucinda (Peter Carey), The Shipping News (E. Annie Proulx), The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins).
Philip Roth ought to be shot for American Pastoral.
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shalom82
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The Stand - S. King
1984 - G. Orwell
Portnoy's Complaint - P. Roth
The Malazan series - Stephen Erikson
Satyricon - Petronius
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Mr November
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Excellent - someone else who likes Tim Winton! I read Breath then just hoovered up the rest of his books.
I don't get Philip Roth - Mrs N loves him, so I've read most of his books, and I just don't understand why he's so venerated.
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Senex taedius
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Pride & Prejudice: Jane Austen
Just So Stories: Rudyard Kipling
Sword of Honour trilogy: Evelyn Waugh (greatly superior to Brideshead)
Alexandria Quartet: Lawrence Durrell (- Yay tusc!)
any of the Hornblower books: C S Forester
Honourable mentions: Nabokov and P G Wodehouse
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lonesome cowboy bill
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anyone got '1001 books you must read before you die'? done about 13%
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tuscan.
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yay ST indeed!! why has nobody read this??
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Refudiate THIS
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1. MR James collection of ghost stories
2. Excession - Banks
3. Pickwick papers
4. the Tom Holland history of the middle ages
5. twilight saga
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vladimir
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1. Balzac, La Cousine Bette
2. Sterne, Tristram Shandy
3. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
4. Milton, Paradise Lost
5. McCarthy, The Road
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Bored2Tears
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Forgot to mention Disgrace by Coetzee... definitely top 5 material.
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Marquis De Suave
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In no particular order:
1. 1984 - Orwell
2. East of Eden - Steinbeck (can't believe this hasn't been mentioned yet.)
3. The Mayor of Casterbridge - Hardy
4. Count of Monte Christo - Dumas
5. I, Robot - Asimov
The Complete Sherlock Homes, Middlemarch, Great Expectations, War and Peace and Far from the Madding Crowd aren't far behind
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