The Lemon Fool

Two books I always recommend are:

Silas Marner by George Eliot - I think it's a great story and even features a drug addict which given when it was written was extraordinary
Old Goriot by Balzac

I enjoy a lot of Dickens - unfortunately a lot of what he wrote seems to apply to this day and age

John Grisham especially Rainmaker, The Client, Pelican Brief
Lee Child - Jack Reacher
Ian Rankin - Rebus
Tom Sharpe - early stuff - Wilt + South Africa
P.G.Wodehouse - early Jeeves + Wooster
John Wyndham - main works

ukmtk wrote:Two books I always recommend are:

Silas Marner by George Eliot - I think it's a great story and even features a drug addict which given when it was written was extraordinary

Pedants corner - Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was published in 1821 and predated Silas Marner by some 40 years.

T7

ukmtk wrote:I enjoy a lot of Dickens

How do you get invited to them?

To be fair the books that I recommend tend to reflect what I have been reading of recent years.
I've also more or less stopped reading classics, though occasionally I can be moved to pick one up.

I've never read a bad book from Lois McMaster Bujold, but I should pick one.
Ok,

The Mountains of Mourning Available all over the place. It is very short however. It's a great introduction to her writing, if you don't mind reading books out of sequence. The only real spoilers of earlier books is that it's clear that they had happy endings.
I love re-reading A Civil Campaign The disaster of Miles dinner party has me weeping with laughter. The old phrase "all comedy is someone else's tragedy" is never more appropriate.

The seminal book
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is well worth reading. However it is LONG and you need to both cope with SciFi and have some knowledge of the the likes of Ur and Gilgamesh.

Other authors/series.

Lindsey Davis (Falco, Roman PI)
Jodi Taylor (St' Marys, time traveling historians )
Ben Aaronovitch (Rivers of London, magic division of the MET)
Charles Stross (The Laundry Files, The magical remains of the SOE)
Roberta Gellis (Magdalene la Batarde, Medieval brothel owner and detective)
Ellis Peters (Brother Cadfael, Medieval Monk and detective)

If you want mad, and are well read, then you can't beat Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series.

In the world of Thursday Next, literature is a much more popular medium than in our world, and Thursday is a member of SO-27, the Literary Detectives or LiteraTecs.

Ps Love the road sign
https://www.jasperfforde.com/subindex/tn6subindex.html

I think everyone should read Alone in Berlin by I think Hans Fallada.

So many good books, Matterhorn, Ivanhoe, anything by John Buchan, I could go on forever.

I'd have to look through my kindle for more recent recs as I just don't remember the books I've read on kindle the same.

Urbandreamer wrote:
If you want mad, and are well read, then you can't beat Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series.

I own all of Fforde's books, many of them twice. I would particularly recommend The Constant Rabbit and Shades of Grey. I have Red Side Story, the SoG sequel on my bedside table ready to go. I suspect he will remain forever the only person I have ever seen ride a tandem around a library.

DM

"Starship Troopers" by Robert Heinlein. Written in 1959 it's one of the most influential science fiction book ever. Seriously. Set in a future war for survival between Humanity and "The Bugs", a hive mind insect species.

The modern United States military has taken on board a lot of the attitudes, tactics and doctrine in Starship Troopers. Even equipment. On several occasions I've heard senior American officers and politicians talking strategy and tactics, and realise that their ideas come from Starship Troopers.

"Wall Street raiders and business tycoons still cite Sun Tzu's classic military treatise to explain preparation and tactical prowess. But if you really want an insight into 21st century warfare, you need to read Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Here's why"

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a13103/starship-troopers-is-the-new-the-art-of-war/

Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War" is worth a read. In some ways it's almost the opposite of Starship Troopers; an allegory of the Vietnam War.

And of course "Dune", a genuine science fiction epic set in a feudal future where computers have been outlawed and interstellar travel is dependent on a drug harvested on a desert planet (I much prefer the David Lynch film to the recent one)

Anything by Robert Harris.

BullDog wrote:Anything by Robert Harris.

And just to flesh that out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Harris_(novelist)

I only read non-fiction these days but favourite fiction books I have read are;
Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road
Martin Amis - London Fields, Time’s Arrow
DBC Pierre - Vernon God Little
JG Ballard - Empire of the Sun

Dickens- have read all novels except Tale of Two cities and Mystery of Edwin Drood
Le Carre- have read everything
CJ Sansom- read all Shardlake
Patrick O'Brien- read all Aubrey books
Bernard Cornwell-think I have read everything he has written

Frankly anyone- right now working through SJ Parris books (A touch like Shardlake)

I also go nostalgic every so often and dip back in to things like:
Evelyn Waugh
PG Wodehouse
Christie's Poirot books
Rankin (rebus)
Colin Dexter's Morse
CS Forester
RL Stevenson

Edit- missed the most important recent re read- Douglas Adams

My dad was correct, the only plus point of getting older is you can re read books not remembering the ending

The most unusual re read to date is picking up the Canterbury Tales to see if I could have a stab at reading it 40 years post university- it was very, very, slow with a lot of dictionary use and I only managed The Prologue.

I liked the Tale of Two Cities. It has the famous start/end lines.
I wouldn't recommend Edwin Drood - I have read it twice - and forgot that it just stops as it is getting exciting.

Guy de Maupassant deserves a mention. Master of the short story.

RC

Pretty much anything by Ray Bradbury still does it for me. The Illustrated Man (1951) is just ingenious on every level. And the Golden Apples of the Sun (1952) has so many short-format gems!

ukmtk wrote:I wouldn't recommend Edwin Drood - I have read it twice - and forgot that it just stops as it is getting exciting.

Maybe that wasn't too surprising, given that the author had died?

BJ

Hi All.

For me, this series

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Thomas_Covenant

I like most of his other series as well, but this one, in particular the first trilogy, is the creme de la creme for me.

Regards, Newroad