10 to read before the apocalypse?

chrisc

Catcher in the Rye
Lord of the Flies
To Kill A Mockingbird
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Anna Karenina
Heart of Darkness
The Giver (yes, it's geared towards children, but it's wonderful)
Anything by Phillipa Gregory
Anything by Chuck Klosterman
Either Dave Eggers book, but probably moreso the one about a trip and not his autobiography.

AnBealBocht

< http://groups-beta.google.com/group/listowelcokerryireland >

wow sierra

Desperados Joe OConnor(plus everything else he's written!!)
Son and Lovers DH Lawrence
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
Perfume Patrick Suskind(100s of pages just on scents, creepy,weird,beautiful)
Birdsong Sebastian Faulks
Mayor of Casterbridge Thomas Hardy
Crock of Gold James Stephens
Amongst Women John McGahern
The Photograph Eamon Sweeney (great fictional telling of haughey era)
Not the end of the World Christopher Brookmyre(plus everything else he's written!!Really witty )

Jello

In no order:

Catch 22
Nineteen Eighty Four
Animal Farm
Lord Of The Flies
Fight Club
A Clockwork Orange
Lord Of The Rings (including The Hobbit )
To Kill A Mockingbird
Catcher In The Rye
Trainspotting

davyjose

the dice man wrote:

Totally agree Solzhenitsyn books are amazing. if you haven't read his book of short stories you should try and get your hands on it.

i'm not going to bother repeating books that people have already put down so a couple of more that i didn't see here already and are worth a read are

women: bukowski
i served the king of england: hrabal
diary of a madman: gogol
a heart breaking work of straggering genuis: eggers
zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: pirsig

Not to mention:

Old Man And The sea - Hemingway
American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
I, Lucifer - Glen Duncan
Midnight's Children - Rushdie

All books I've read recently. It's been a good year

is_that_so

here are a few more in no order

Hunger - Knut Hamson
Don Quixote -Cervantes
Of Mice and Men
Hamlet
Far from the Madding Crowd - Hardy
Alice in Wonderland
Toraiocht Dhiarmuid agus Ghrainne
An Evil Cradling - Brian Keenan
A Tale of Two Cities
Great Expectations

Psychedelic

1. lewis carroll - alice in wonderland & through the looking glass
2. j.d. salinger - the catcher in the rye
3. hunter s. thompson - fear & loathing in las vegas
4. john steinbeck - the grapes of wrath
5. joseph heller - catch 22
6. jostein gaarder - sophie's world
7. ken kesey - one flew over the cuckoo's nest
8. miguel de cervantes - don quixote
9. yann martel - life of pi
10. anthony burgess - a clockwork orange

BossArky

Psychedelic wrote:

1. lewis carroll - alice in wonderland & through the looking glass
2. j.d. salinger - the catcher in the rye
3. hunter s. thompson - fear & loathing in las vegas
4. john steinbeck - the grapes of wrath
5. joseph heller - catch 22
6. jostein gaarder - sophie's world
7. ken kesey - one flew over the cuckoo's nest
8. miguel de cervantes - don quixote
9. yann martel - life of pi
10. anthony burgess - a clockwork orange

Great list. Read all except for One flew over and Don Quixote which is in the to read pile.

Incidently I was in Madrid recently and clambered around the hindquarters of the statue of Don Quixote's horse. It is massive.

Psychedelic

don quixote is long, it's actually 2 books in one, but it's so funny you'll fly through it.

Kruk

A few books from me :-)

1. Anne Rice - Interview With A Vampire
2. Tolkien - Lord of The Rings
3. Mario Puzo - The Godfather
4. Orson Scott Card - Ender`s Game
5. Stephen King - The Shining
6. Johnathan Carroll - The Land of Laughs
7. Albert Camus - The Plague
8. Michail Bulhakow - Master and Margarita
9. John Irving - Hotel New Hampshire
10. George Jonas - Munich

FairyPrincess

I think I may be a bit damaged by all the chick lit, because I cannot read anything else these days.
Says she, who wants to become a librarian.
But books like Pride & Prejudice and Gone With The Wind are classics. Simple must-reads.

Backtoblack

1. No Logo, Naomi Klein (www.nologo.org)
2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (one of my favs)
3. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (am 60 pages from the finish)
4. The Pearl, John Steinbeck (booful)
5. Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell (I couldn't put it down)
6. Animal Farm, George Orwell
7. The Dictionary, Often.
8. The Corporation, Joel Bakan (Amazing writer!)
9. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
10. Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre (Loved it)

:rolleyes: B'ah, only 10!!

Backtoblack

Kruk wrote:

A few books from me :-)

9. John Irving - Hotel New Hampshire

I really enjoyed John Irving "The Fourth Hand" too.. if you've read it?

ANOTHER POSTER wrote:

Jane Austin P&P

Such a great book, must get the film out.

maidofthemist

That depends on the object of the game and the moment in life when you put your list together, doesn't it? Today my list would include

On Green Dolphin Street (Sebastian Faulks) for memorable characters and a sense of time and place and the tragedies of life. Birsdong - same author - for very different characters and circumstances but equally memorable.

Catcher in the Rye (J D Salinger) a great read, even better read aloud.

Jane Austen has to be on the list so I guess I'd opt for Pride & Prejudice

The Call of the Wild (Jack London) would make my list as a gesture to a friend who thought a lot of Jack London

Maybe Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights but I don't want to over do the 19th century

Harry Potter is of our time and worth thinking about but likely to get dropped from the final list.

The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon) like Harry Potter makes my list this week but I'm not sure if it is there for the long run

The Regeneration Trilogy (Pat Barker) ... does that count as three? If yes, then just pick one of them

Complete works of William Wordsworth

That's my list for today. Wordworth and Austen are possibly the only perennials on it though

loismustdie

i'd rrecomend the hobbit and lotr,
anything by paulo coelho and
terry pratchett.
if you haven't read or seen the da vinci code fon't bother but read dan browns book angel and demons
any of ann rice's true crime books
the diary of anne frank
harry potters (at least the first 4, i haven't read the rest)
david brinn - kill'n people
the dictionary!!!

Dante's Devise

Don't think I've at top ten to pick of the top of my head but some worth mentioning are:

The vampire L'estast - Anne rice truely magnificent can't wait to read the rest of the series

Harry Potter books have to be mentioned

The Alchemist Paulho Coelheo(is that how you spell it?) such a memerising book

Probably one no ones ever heard of it but Moonfleet - really emotional book can't rem who wrote it but I actually cried reading it

dubtom

Can't remeber 10 but here goes.
Lotr and the Hobbit.Tolkien

That they may face the rising son.Mcgeehan?
Most descriptive book I have ever read, honestly felt dissapointed when i finished it,becuase I had finished it.

Dracula.stoker

All the Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle.

The stand and a few more of Kings stuff, including the Tower's series.
Wonder if any of his recent stuff is any good?

Ulises, up to the chapter in the courtroom, stops me every time. Joyce.

Enjoyed all three of Dan browns books.

Looking for a good read at the moment,may check out some of the recomendations.
Forgot to mention, Secret history of the IRA, which is probably more a biography of Adams, but very interesting.

snb

Im not very up to date with the literary greats, so im just listing books I enjoyed that I would recommend :-

1. A Fine Balance By R. Mistry

2. The Notebook by N Sparks

3. Star of the Sea By J. O Connor

4. Wuthering Heights By E Bronte

5. To Kill a Mockingbird by H . Lee

6. Memoirs of a Geisha By A , Golden

7. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

8. On Beauty By Z. Smith

9. Shakespeare The Complete works of

10. Seamus Heaney

Im enjoying Anna Karenina, L. Tolstoy at the moment and I think it could be a contender for the top 5 !

My recommendation overall is A Fine Balance. The images conjured up by that story still make me think about the book regularly, one year after reading it.

WindSock

Pfff! Why read, when you can watch the film?

Killme00

1. Midnight Cowboy - James Herlihy
2. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
3. The Man in the high Castle - Phillip Dick
4. I am legend - Richard Matheson
5. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
6. The Art of war - Sun Tzu
7. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
8. Angry White Pyjamas - Robert Twigger
9. Moby Dick - Melville
10. The Killing Kind - John Connolly

lilwyrdsis

1. The Lovely Bones
2. The Wyrd Sisters - Terry Pratchett (cos if it's all over soon you will need a laugh)
3. Macbeth
4. 78 Degrees of Wisdom (Rachel Pollack - Tarot)
5. The Penelopiad - Margaret Atwood
6. Through a glass, darkly - Jostein Gardner
7. Piece By Piece - Tori Amos & Ann Powers
8. Frankenstein
9. Dracula
10 - Jane Eyre & Wide Sargasso Sea

loadabollocks

tale of two cities
1984
catch 22
remains of the day
count of monte cristo
sherlock holmes omnibus
the rubicon
dracula
third policeman
dr. jekyll and mr. hyde (very short but great none the less)

don.juanito

1. The Third Policeman - Flann O Brien
2. At Swim Two Birds - " "
3. The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
4. The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
5. Melmoth the wanderer - Charles Maturin
6. Love in the time of cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7. The Butcher Boy - Patrick McCabe
8. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
9. Animal Farm - George Orwell
10. Murphy - Samuel Beckett

Mrs. MacGyver

1. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole 133/4 - Sue Townsend.
2. A Place Of Stones - Deirdre Purcell
3. Broken Music- Sting
4. On the Road - Jack Kerouac.
5. All Creatures Great and Small- James Herriot.
6. The rise and fall of reginald perrin- David Nobbs
7. The Female Eunuch - Germaine Greer.
8. The Island - Victoria Hislop.
9. Salem Falls - Jodi Picoult.
10. Little Women - LM Alcott.

ashyle

These are my favourite books ...

1. Sophie's World- Jostein Gaarder. Basically, a novel about the history of philosophy. Breaks everything down into digestable chunks, each chapter is based on a different philospher. Great story too.

2. The Book Thief-Markus Zusak. Lovely long book, easy to read. Beautiful story about Nazi Germany. Made me cry-always a good sign

3. A Prayer For Owen Meany-John Irving. Poignant and hilarious, if there's one Irving novel I can reccommend it's this one. Owen Meany is the best character EVER invented.

4. The Outsiders-SE Hinton. tale about 50's America, featuring rumbles, Greasers, and Socs. I read this for Junior cert, brilliant book, lovely moral to the story too.

5. All of the Harry Potters- You must read these as I hate people who have only seen the movies. Pure escapism and good fun.

6. Catcher in the Rye- JD Salinger. Just cos everyone else has read it. Heh. But really a great rambling story, an antihero everyone can identify with and the use of the word phonie cracks me up.

7. Number 9 Dream-David Mitchell. Picked this up randomly in a second hand book shop. Weird fantasy/adventure book with a really detailed knowledge of modern Tokyo. Love the main character: what a loser!! Quite funny and imaginative.

dan719

George Orwell 1984
Plato's The Republic(read these one after the other, it will blow your mind)
History Of Western Philosophy By Bertrand Russel
The Unfolding Of Language by Guy D. Deutscher
The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Unstoppable Brilliance(cannot remember who wrote it)
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Waste Land by T.S Elliot
The Divine Comedy by Dante( I read it only because of 'Prufrock'- ignoble perhaps but at least he played some sort of a role 'intoduced a few scenes' as it were;) )

quarefellow

Ullysses
Ulysses?? I have TRIED at least 2 dozen times over the last 40 years, but never succeeded. Is there a human being on the planet who can put hand on heart and truthfully claim to have read it cover to cover?

brianthebard

Ulysses is fantastic, I haven't read it all because of other commitments but I'll finish it this summer.

ZorbaTehZ

wth, never noticed this thread before. . .

The Book Of The New Sun - Gene Wolf
The Age Of Innocence - Edith Wharton
L'Etranger - Albert Camus
La Peste - Albert Camus
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
The Call Of The Wild - Jack London
The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester
Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
Zorba The Greek - Nikos Kazantzakis
Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Tchocky

ZorbaTehZ wrote:

Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

galactus

ZorbaTehZ wrote:

(snip)
L'Etranger - Albert Camus
Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A great choice imho: "I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man...". I found this book quite hilarious and frightening. Not sure if that's supposed to be the case.

Can't agree with your choice of Camus though. Over-rated methinks.

ZorbaTehZ

Absolutely; I felt the same way.
Parts at the beginning were incredibly funny, but at the same time, very depressing. After I read it for the first time, I couldn't decide whether I actually liked it or not.

As for that comment about Camus - I disagree, to say the least.

Corruptedmorals

1. Chinese Cinderella- Adeline Yen Mah
2. Lovely Bones- Alice Sebold
3. My Sister's Keeper- Jodi Picoult (AND the rest of her books)
4. Malka- Mirjam Pressler
5. Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte
6. 1984- George Orwell
7. Geisha of Gion- Mineko Iwasaki (used to love Memoirs..but learning about geisha spoiled it)
8. St Clares- Enid Blyton (She IS a brilliant author. I re-read the school books every so often)
9. The His Dark Materials trilogy- Philip Pullman. Subtle Knife probably.
10. Echoes- Danielle Steele- for the sheer hilarity.

Yeah...I'm 18, but I've read lots of classics, this list looks ridiculous..

kashi

I can't believe no one mentioned any Mills & Boon!!! Only joking hehe.

Well as tough and all as this is, I have to pick:

LOTR

Anything by Anne Rice, esp The Vampire Lestat (even the porn she wrote was fab.........but a word of advice read it alone;) )

Dracula

Harry Potter

Pride and Prejudice

Any of the Horrible Histories........absolutely hysterical!!

The Story of O - Pauline Réage - amazingly explicit for the 50s and very interesting!

Roald Dahl.........I especially loved Horrible Rhymes.

That's all I can think of right now. I'm sure I'll think of more later!

kashi

SamHamilton

1. Of Mice and Men - Steinbeck
2. Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
3. Macbeth - Shakespeare
4. The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway
5. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
6. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

I'll have to think about the rest...

lecomte

At Swim Two Birds- Flann O'Brien.

Anything of Salinger's novellas on the Glass Family.

Kafka on the Shore- Haruki Murakami

Everything is Illuminated- Jonathon San Fran Foer

Emerson's Essays

Moby Dick- Melville

Leaves of Grass- Whitman

Blake, any collection.

100 Years of Solitude.

The Odyssey- Homer

Collected Works of Shakespeare

Could be a different list tomorrow. Those are the ones that occurred to me there. (They're looking at me from my bookshelf).

anthonyk

ENCHANTED WOOD enid blyton
1984 george orwell
HITCHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY douglas adams
TALE OF TWO CITIES charles dickens
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN james joyce
PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY oscar wilde
GRAPES OF WRATH john steinbeck
LAUGHABLE LOVES milan kundera
THE LOONEY spike milligan
HAMLET shakespeare

silvine

There's lots of great book mentioned above but I didn't see Audrey Niffenburg's The Time Traveller's Wife on anyone's list. And don't forget John Boyne's The Boy in the Stripped Pyjamas. Roddy Doyle's The Snapper is great too.

Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire is a cracking read as is Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series.

Now if you can excuse me I'll be in the book shop with my credit card.

AJG

This is an interesting one, although a little cruel. How can you condense a lifetime of reading into 10 choices. Well if you haven't read any of the following try and seek them out I would hope they wouldn't dissapoint.

1. The Process - Brion Gysin (This one may be a little harder to track down but its worth it. He was mainly known for his association with Burroughs and only produced a few works.)

2. Death on the Installment Plan - Louis Ferdinand Celine (Chronicles his early years and they were none too pretty.)

3. The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles (I'd also reccomend his shorter fiction too, his wife Jane was a pretty good writer herself.)

4. The Aleph - Jorge Luis Borges (A short story writer whose work stands on its own I doubt you will come across anything like it.)

5. The Immoralist - Andre Gide (Strange but compelling story. I haven't read anything else by him though. Any suggestions?)

6. The Bandini Quartet- John Fante (Technically 4 books but if you read one you'll be compelled to read them all.)

7. Trilogy - Samuel Beckett (Again 3 books but worth it. No one ever mentions his sense of humour.)

8.The Obelisk Trilogy - Henry Miller (Comprises the 'Tropics' and 'Black Spring' but for quality of writing he can't be beat. I've probably read more of Miller than anyone else.)

9. Dubliners - James Joyce (I feel he never really lived up to this one. I've read Ulysses but I felt it didn't really pick up pace until Molly Bloom's monologue at the end.)

10. Seraphita - Honore De Balzac (One of his lesser known works. Another strange tale but it left its mark on me so it makes the list.)

11. Siddartha - Hermann Hesse (Sorry, I couldn't let this one go. Extra special bonus choice. Another touching tale and one that will linger with you.)

Technically a choice of 17 and I barely scratched the surface.

SuperSean11

thedrowner wrote:

james joyce-ullyses



catcher in the rye (cant remember who its by...im a poet and i know it!)

Its by J.D.Salinger. A great read

Procasinator

Could name plenty of books but would just be repeating everyone else. A book I enjoyed was The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.

Sir Graball

In no particular order

Dickens 'Hard Times'
Capote 'In Cold Blood'
Plath 'Ariel'
Orwell 'The Road to Wigan Pier'
Joyce 'Dubliners'
Durcan 'Selected Poems'
Hemingway 'The Old Man and the Sea'
Dostoyevsky 'Crime and Punishment'
Camus 'The Outsider'
Thomas' Under Milkwood'
I just keep going back to these as they are timeless.:D

ZorbaTehZ

Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea is definitely a great one. That, and Fiesta are his best imo.

stolenwine

I know I have alot more to discover so I wouldn't laminate this.

In no particular order-

1. JD Salinger "The Catcher in the Rye"
2. Camus "The Outsider"
3. Philip K. Dick "A Scanner Darkly"
4. Plato "The Symposium"
5.Gabriel Garcia Marquez "Love in the Time of Cholera"
6. Oscar Wilde " The Picture of Dorian Gray"
7. Umberto Eco "The Name of the Rose"
8. J.R Tolkien "Lord of the Rings"
9. Patrick Suskind "Perfume"
10. Colm Toibin "The Master"

stolenwine

Glad to see someone added the english dictionary (Oxford)

jarmstrong001

1. Len Deighton - Bomber
2. Graham Greene - Our Man in Havana
3. Solzhenitsyn - Cancer Ward
4. Dickens - Pickwick Papers
5. Vonnegut - Galapagos
6. Daphne DuMaurier - My Cousin Rachel
7. Tolstoy - Death of Ivan Illych
8. Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
9. Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
10. John Steinbeck - In Dubious Battle

Lynibeth

Would have to say Stephen Hawking - A brief history of time is excellent

Zoodlebop

Gotta be:

Foundation (Asimov)
Dune (Herbert)
Alice in Wonderland (Carrol)
Hitchhikers Guide .... (Adams)
Hamlet (Bardy Boy)
1984 (Orwell)
The Illiad (Homer)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hugo [Best. Romance. Ever. Sniff.])
Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)
War and Peace (Tolstoy)

Zoodlebop

I really don't think that LOTR is a "must read before the apocalypse". I personally can do without it. It's a great work of imagination, but I didn't really make me resonate with any emotions, except courage maybe. Perhaps I recant...

dh2007

Not sure if this has been posted before but does anyone else try to discern whether a poster is male or female based on their favourite books?

Guess my gender:

1. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexander Dumas)
2. The Cider House Rules (John Irving)
3. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
4. The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy)
5. The Harry Potter series (JK Rowling)
6. Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)
7. Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Louis de Bernieres)
8. Jane Eyre - (Charlotte Bronte)
9. About the Author (John Colapinto)
10. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)