10 to read before the apocalypse?

Only book you need to read is Naive.Super by Erlend Loe. Genius Norweigan writer. Nuff said.

Seriously though The Divine Comedy is worth checking out and is not too heavy.

There are so many and not enough time, I don't read as much as I should but off the top of my head

Lord of the Flies: reread it recently and it is a classic
Animal Farm
Catch 22
The Color Purple
The Crying of Lot 49
Ullysses
King Lear

Took the synopsis from Amazon

The Color Purple

Synopsis
Set in the segregated world of America's "Deep South", this work tells the story of Celie. Raped by the man she calls "father" and having had her two children taken from her, she meets Shug Avery - a glamorous singer and magic maker, and discovers the love and support of a woman.

I have never seen the film properly but The Color Purple is a powerful read. As far as I know, Spielberg cut out the sexual relationship between the two main female characters so i don't know what way that affected the film.

It will probably appeals more to women but it ain't Penny Vincenzi or cathy Kelly. Some have described it as anti-male.

written in a series of letters, The style of writing is brilliant, each letter contains the voice or the character who has written it and as they change and develop the style changes.

It questions race, relationships, religion, sexuality and the power structures that all these are based upon.

The Crying of Lot 49

The Synopsis
This short fable followed Pynchon's first novel "V." First published in 1966, it is a surreal comedy satirizing Californian life. Oedipa Maas, a recent heiress, pursues enquiries into the nature of her inheritance and the motivation of her dead lover and is led on an ambiguous trail of clues.

Don't know how to describe this. It is weird but wonderful. It is a commentary on the society of the 60's and the ideologys of the time. Part mystery novel and part everything else. Impossible for me to describe without thinking about for a week and writing a bloody essay. Deals with complex scientific theorys which i could not get my head around and yet I began to grasp some part of the concept.

At times you feel it is completely off the wall but it is hilarious and thought provoking and well worth reading....

I'll elaborate more when i think about what it means!

Magician by Raymond E. Feist

i would say just the first book would suffice - and when i say first book i mean the european version cos do u know in the US they split magician into 2 books Magician:Apprentice and Magicion:Master

Greatest story ever told

1984 -- George Orwell.
Consider Phleabas -- Iain M Banks.
The Wasp Factory -- Iain Banks.
Revelation Space -- Alastair Reynolds.
IT -- Stephen King.
The Player of Games -- Iain M Banks.
The Stand -- Stephen King.
FatherLand -- Robert Harris.
The Foundation series -- Isaac Asimov.
Neuromancer -- William Gibson.
Weaveworld -- Clive Barker.

Lolita - it's a masterpiece

Mmmmm, books!

1) The Temple Of My Familiar - Alice Walker.

2) The Lymond Series...there are 6 of them. They're clever, funny, beautifully written and put you right in the middle of the 16th century. - Dorothy Dunnett.

3) Anything by Stephen Fry cos he's hilarious.

4) The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera.

5)Solomon Gursky Was Here - Mordechai Richler. (Just a wonderful story...engrossing and very well written.)

6) A Skin Diary - John Fuller. (Story of a pregnant girl in Wales in the early years of the last century, written in diary format by the awareness of her growing child. Yep, sounds poncy but is something to go back to over and over again. )

7) Catch 22 - Joseph Heller. (Should be on the Leaving Cert list or somehow made compulsory reading!)

8) Do Calvin & Hobbes count as reading? If not, I think they should!

9) Tongue First - Emily Jenkins. Book about how we see our physical culture. For example, why is/was it seen to be okay to get your ears pierced but not your nose? She also looks at tattooing, sensory deprivation and drug use from alcohol to heroin. Not as stodgy as I've made it sound!

10) Anything by Mary Daly if you feel the need for mental gymnastics and can cope with the intense and militant feminism, not to mention the words she's invented to help elucidate on her ideas. Should all be read with her 'Webster Intergalactic Wickedary' by your side. (It's a dictionary she compiled to go with her writings.) Despite being ferociously intelligent and formidably academic (weeeeell, she only has 7 degrees...), she does have a wonderful sense of humour.

That was harder than I though it'd be....

Beruthiel : The Alchemist - Pablo Carbo

Just finished this book a few days ago (that's if you mean Paulo Coelho, sorry cheeky me!) and really enjoyed it. I might check out some of his other books - 'Veronika decides to die' looks interesting.

Originally posted by Sico
I'm not bothered to put 10 up, but I'd throw A Clockwork Orange in there to be honest.

DAGNAMMIT!!! I knew I should have given my list way more thought. A Clockwork Orange was GREAT so much better than the movie, though i have to admit parts of this book really grossed me out.....but then i was only 16 when i read it. What peed me off a bit aswell was that i picked up a later edition of this and there was an extra chapter at the end

Lord of the Rings
The Hobbit
The Silmarillion
Unfinished Tales
History of Middle Earth
Leaf By Niggle
Smith of Wooton... ok! ANYTHING BY JRR TOLKIEN

!984 - I don't really think its that good of a book, i mean half of it is reading another book, and the other half is them having sex. I read it when I was like 12 (16 now) so maybe i should read it again and maybe i'll appreciate it more, and being 12 I should have liked all the sex. But you should at least read it once, the ideas are great, and that makes it a classic. You can analyse it to death.

I've been told the wheel of time is good, but i haven't read it. Does anybody recommend it?
dw

The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
Lord of the rings
Perfume
Fast food Nation ( you never eat a hamburger again)
Get the picture (history of photgraphy)

Hope this helps...

1. Ulysses, James Joyce
2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce
4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
6. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
7. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
8. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
9. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
11. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
12. The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
13. 1984, George Orwell
14. I, Claudius, Robert Graves
15. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
16. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
17. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
18. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
19. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
20. Native Son, Richard Wright
21. Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow
22.Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara
23. U.S.A. Trilogy, John Dos Passos
24. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
25. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
26. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
27. The Ambassadors, Henry James
28. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy, James T. Farrell
30. The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
31. Animal Farm, George Orwell
32. The Golden Bowl, Henry James
33. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
34. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
35. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
36. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
38. Howards End, E.M. Forster
39. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
40. The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
41. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
42. Deliverance, James Dickey
43. A Dance to the Music, Anthony Powell
44. Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley
45. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
46. The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
47. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
48. The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence
49. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
50. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
51. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
52. Portnoy's Complaint, Phillip Roth
53. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
54. Light in August, William Faulkner
55. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
56. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
57. Parade's End, Ford Maddox Ford
58. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
59. Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm
60. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
61. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
62. From Here to Eternity, James Jones
63. The Wapshot Chronicles, John Cheever
64. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
65. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
66. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
67. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
68. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
69. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
70. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
71. A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes
72. A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul
73. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
74. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
75. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
77. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
78. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
79. A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
80. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
81. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
82. Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
83. A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
84. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
85. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
86. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
87. The Old Wives' Tale, Arnold Bennett
88. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
89. Loving, Henry Green
90. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
91. Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell
92. Ironweed, William Kennedy
93. The Magus, John Fowles
94. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
95. Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
96. Sophie's Choice, William Styron
97. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
98. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James Cain
99. The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy
100. The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington



Top 100 books of the 20th century!
I personally recommend #'s, 1, 2, 10, 16, 41, 43, & 93. They are classic and good.
Although LOTR is not on here, it is great, but start with The Hobbit and go from there!