10 to read before the apocalypse?

The Stand - Stephen King
The Long Walk - Stephen King
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
All The Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
The Given Day - Dennis Lehane
The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
Open - Andre Agassi
Rough Ride - Paul Kimmage
Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

Off the top of my head:

• Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
• Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Master - Colm Toibin
• The Celestine Prophecy - James Redfield
• All The President's Men - Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
• Perfume: The Story Of A Murder - Patrick Suskind
• Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance - RM Pirsig
• Animal Farm - George Orwell
• A Game of Thrones - George R. R. Martin
• The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Mikhail Bulkagov: The Master and Margarita
Sofi Oksanen: The Purge
Bohumil Hrabal: Too Loud a Solitude
Bohumil Hrabal: I served the King of England
Michael Cunningham: The Hours

After recently finishing it I would have to put Vanity Fair by William Thackeray in here.

Confining this list to fiction, with one exception, and thinking how do I limit it to ten:
1. The Sportswriter – Richard Ford
2. Foster – Claire Keegan (really a stretched out short story but exquisite)
3. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
4. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
5. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
6. That They Might Face The Rising Sun – John McGahern
7. The Iliad – Homer
8. Ulysses – James Joyce (much more accessible than people might think)
9. The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx
10. Mimesis – The Representation of Reality in Western Literature – Erich Auerbach (very, very heavy but one of the best works of literary criticism I’ve read)

Would include Dante's Inferno if I was allowed 11, but that's cheating

Dharma Bums- Jack Kerouac
Down and Out in Paris and London - Orwell
Animal Farm- Orwell
Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Trainspotting- Irvine Welsh
Brave New World- Huxley
any of the Sherlock Holmes stuff
East Of Eden - John Steinbeck
The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
almost any Oscar Wilde

The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Odyssey - Homer
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
The Arabian Nights

And a sacred text of your choosing.

mcsean2163 wrote: »

"Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut"

Maybe I read this when I was too young but I thought it was pretty rubbish, deadpan, "so it goes". It don't understand how it has so many fans, it's like the emperor with no clothes.

May be you did, may be try again before you diss it. It's nominated with good reason.

I've read some really great books based on recommendations from this thread that I otherwise may have overlooked. Wish more people posted in it. I'll list ten now that haven't yet been mentioned yet or only mentioned a few times because we all know The count of Monte Cristo, Crime & Punishment etc are great books, its nice to stumble across lesser known greats.

Stoner - John Williams.
A forgotten masterpiece. It follows the life of a young farmer who goes to college and later becomes a professor, an inconsequential man who does the opposite of living life to the fullest. Its all very uneventful and yet its hard not to be captivated by it and feel so involved with William Stoner.

Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes.
A man with an IQ of 68 is chosen to partake in a medical experiment to increase his intelligence. His diary tracks the effects of the experiment on him and the lab mouse Algernon that was also experimented on. Astounding read.

The Magus - John Fowles.
A young English teacher moves to a remote Greek island to teach and becomes embroiled in a dark psychological game with one of the islands inhabitants, an eccentric elderly man. I thought about this novel for weeks after I finished it.

The New York trilogy - Paul Auster.
Three interconnected stories of detective fiction that blew me away. Its so much more than what it appears to be.

Wonder boys - Michael Chabon.
The story of a creative writing professor who can't finish his novel and spends most of the novel stoned and or drunk and generally making an ass of himself. I loved it.

The orphan masters son - Adam Johnson.
The story of a North Korean orphan who stumbles from a life of poverty to a job as a body double for a hero of the revolution during the reign of Kim Jong Il.

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace.
Its a struggle at times. Its gargantuan. I've never had to use a dictionary as much in my life as I had to when reading this book. And its bloody brilliant. I can't tell you what its about in a few words, just read it.

Times Arrow - Martin Amis
A novel in reverse. Amis is a great writer who doesn't always write great novels, this for me is definitely one of his best.

Wool omnibus - Hugh Howey
A post apocalyptic dystopian novel (yes another one) set in an underground silo hundreds of years after whatever event made life on the outside uninhabitable. It was originally released as one short novella and has exploded from there, I recommend reading the omnibus as it all slots together very well.

House of leaves - Mark Z Danielewski
First off, don't even try to read this in e-book format. It has to be read on paper. The formatting of this book is unique to say the least. It tells the story of a family who move into a small house where something is terribly wrong - the house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. This book will get inside your head. At different stages while reading it I had to put it down just to process what was after happening. I hated this book. Then I loved it. Then I didn't want to read it anymore. Then I couldn't put it down. The more you put into this book the more you will get out of it. It is not an easy read.

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Stoner - John Williams
For Esme with Love and Squalor - J.D. Salinger
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned - Wells Tower
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Beware of Pity - Stefan Zweig
Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell
The Outsider - Albert Camus

The Day of the Jackal.
11/22/63
The Green Mile
The Name of the Wind
Harry Potter series
Mistborn series
Stormlight Archive
Stalingrad
Red Alert
1984

Your Survival
by Dr. Bob Arnot and Mark Cohen

How To Stay Alive In The Woods
Bradford Angier

Larry Dean Olsen’s Outdoor Survival Skills

The Survival Handbook, by Colin Towell

When All Hell Breaks Loose
from Cody Lundin

Naked Into The Wilderness
by John and Geri McPherson

Peterson’s Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants

Tom Brown’s Field Guide To Wilderness Survival

The Outward Bound Wilderness First-Aid Handbook
by Jeffrey Isaac

Northern Bushcraft, by Mors Kochanski,