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Ok. So I just read the thread about what books everyone's reading. Now I want to ask everyone what book they would recommend I read. I have read many books and I do enjoy reading but to be honest, I don't think I could say I have read any books and could say "that book was a great book, possibly the best I've ever read". I must be missing out. Tell me a book I must read.

― ali (ali), Sunday, 16 March 2003 00:11 (twenty-three years ago)

Oh god... just one? "Namedropper" by Emma Forrest. Is it Forrest or Forrester? I forget. She's moderately trendy, anyway. But
this story... I must have been 16/17 when I first read it. It's,
at base, the story of a Jewish pop-culture obsessed girl
suddenly realising she hates all her friends. But it's just...more. It's the best examination of the teenage conditions since (you guessed it) "Catcher In The Rye". I know "Catcher In The Rye" comparisons in book reviews are as played out as Beck comparisons in music reviews, but... trust me.

― Dom Passantino (Dom Passantino), Sunday, 16 March 2003 00:15 (twenty-three years ago)

for airplane of bathroom reading:
FAST FOOD NATION

for reading at bedtime:
STRAIGHT LIFE: THE LIFE OF ART PEPPER

― pye, Sunday, 16 March 2003 01:30 (twenty-three years ago)

fast food nation was one of the most boring reads ever. 'they've got the neutron bomb' about early la punk was fun.

― chaki (chaki), Sunday, 16 March 2003 03:32 (twenty-three years ago)

Emma Forrest wrote an absolutely horrible piece in a book of essays about Salinger I have, and it's made me semi-loathe her ever since. she wrote an appalling hatchet job on Thora Birch some time ago too. every article I've come across by her (almost always a celebrity writeup) seems to ooze with undisguised contempt for the subject, which is interesting and repulsive at the same time.

I'm reading a book about Macbeth by Garry Wills that argues that the play's a response to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605; I'm simultaneously rereading the play itself, for a paper I'm writing for a class.

― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Sunday, 16 March 2003 04:38 (twenty-three years ago)

she wrote an appalling hatchet job on Thora Birch

as gorgeous as she is, from the interviews i've read with her it wouldn't have been hard - she comes across badly even when she's not being hatcheted

― electric sound of jim (electricsound), Sunday, 16 March 2003 04:50 (twenty-three years ago)

you should read "no longer human" by osamu dazai & "north", "castle to castle", & "rigadoon" by l.-f. celine

― duane, Sunday, 16 March 2003 05:51 (twenty-three years ago)

'they've got the neutron bomb' about early la punk was fun.

Yus. Kevin Murphy's A Year at the Movies = great fun (and I barely see any movies in theaters anymore).

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Sunday, 16 March 2003 06:28 (twenty-three years ago)

Best book ever is The Thousand Nights And A Night or The 1001 Nights or The Arabian Nights. Get an uncensored, full-length copy (around 2,500 pages). Almost every page is an utter joy, and it's full of wonderful stories.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Sunday, 16 March 2003 11:03 (twenty-three years ago)

'Death Mate' by Martin Caidin is the coolest book I ever read. It starts off with VC guerillas brutally torturing suspected traitors to death using disembowelment, forced autocannibalism and trained monkeys. So the US army trains this guy to be a killing machine who wipes out entire villages singlehandedly, along the way forcing some of his less-enthusiastic superiors to dig their own graves and wasting them. Back in the US he starts going apeshit and wastes about 500 cops with grenades and landmines, and garottes somebody in a hotel bar with piano wire, and it turns out he's part of a mind-control experiment but then he kills the mind-controllers in a huge cataclysm involving assault helicopters, napalm and a speeding truck filled with ordnance stolen from the local armoury. It's a bit lengthy at 180 pages but there's about 25 murders per page, so well worth reading!

― dave q, Sunday, 16 March 2003 12:15 (twenty-three years ago)

isnt that Rambo?

― chaki (chaki), Sunday, 16 March 2003 12:35 (twenty-three years ago)

any book by Amin Maalouf is worth reading. I say as someone who has read "The ROCK of Tanios" and is now enjoying "The First Century After Beatrice". His subjects are varied - the first book is set in 19th century Lebanon, the second is a John Wyndham-esque global disaster book. Other books of his deal with Mani (founder of Manicheism, obv.) and Omar Khayyam.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Sunday, 16 March 2003 14:34 (twenty-three years ago)

heh heh, they should get dave q to host 'reading rainbow'

― geeta (geeta), Sunday, 16 March 2003 16:57 (twenty-three years ago)

Wow, I would recommend the bend in the river by V.S. Naipaul, but it may be a tad unexciting in comparison with "Death Mate" as described so compellingly by dave q above. Bend in the River is about early 70s era post-colonial africa from the perspective of an arab trading post operator. The prose is fantastic, as Naipaul generally seems to be.

― webcrack (music=crack), Sunday, 16 March 2003 20:05 (twenty-three years ago)

Emma Forrest.

!!!

There was a spiked piece of her err.. writing that sat on the Guardian's editorial system for years as a kind of joke. The sub started off with a few polite question marks and got progressive bolder with his/her annotations until it got into the realm of 'what does this even mean?', '??this is not a sentence' and 'who employed this woman?'. It really was terrible stuff. Some kind of quarter-baked thing about black and white films or something.

― N. (nickdastoor), Monday, 17 March 2003 13:27 (twenty-three years ago)

six years pass...

In a different quality level:

http://awfullibrarybooks.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/looking-forward-21.jpg

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 16 December 2009 22:52 (sixteen years ago)

Too bad Kirkus Reviews is not around anymore to screen this sort of thing.

― Lord Soto Odin (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 16 December 2009 23:05 (sixteen years ago)

eight years pass...

Why are books so large these days
I want something I can fit in my pocket

― calstars, Saturday, 20 October 2018 20:34 (seven years ago)

Left my rucksack at work yesterday for convenience as I was off to the pub, and was chuffed to realise my current read could slip into my jacket pocket for the tram ride home.

I hate awkwardly carrying a book around.

― You (bleeping) need me. You can't Finn without me (fionnland), Saturday, 20 October 2018 20:48 (seven years ago)

Don’t know why I made remark about Kirkus Reviews which still seems to be going strong

― Harper Valley CTA-102 (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 20 October 2018 21:07 (seven years ago)

From OP:

I do enjoy reading but to be honest, I don't think I could say I have read any books and could say "that book was a great book

Sheesh. This person should read more adventurously and pay closer attention.

― A is for (Aimless), Saturday, 20 October 2018 21:12 (seven years ago)

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