Time to agree with other people!
Adams and Pratchett are must-reads. Who knew how zany British humor could be? Not I, not then. You'd have thought Roald Dahl would've prepared me, but how quickly I forgot. Pratchett probably starts repeating himself after the first twenty books, but the handful I've read have been great. I can see how he's a fantasy Adams and so may not be "great" after
Hitchhiker's, but he's still enjoyable.
Hobbit and
LotR, sure, but I guess the earlier the better with all fantasy I started with Eddings and Feist and basically ended there). As absorbing as they were, I began to itch toward the end of LotR. It's probably to be expected, reading it all at once. (It's a shame I read Tolkien for the first time right before I saw the movies, though. I watched them through skeptical eyes, good as they were. And Bombadil was missed. They should have worked him in as the ultimate DVD extra.) I'm not sure I'd classify them as best books, though certainly best of class--but that applies to most of my recs. I haven't starting sorting for reals yet.
Oh,
Catch-22 &
Confederacy of Dunces.
On a more serious note, I'll throw out
A Hundred Years of Solitude before someone else does. Plato's dreamy (I was reminded of
Gorgias recently).
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
nAo, seriously? B/c I finished
Foucault's more as a test of will than for enjoyment, it was so dense. It's like
The Da Vinci Code (anyone else mention it yet?
), but kicked up a few notches. Dry as heck, perhaps explained by his being a professor. Then again, maybe it loses something in translation. I'm looking forward to finishing
In the Name of the Rose, though, if only b/c the movie was a pleasant surprise. It's what started my on him, actually. And I've got
Baudolino waiting on the shelf ($1 @ BN!).
Thinking back,
Siddhartha struck a chord.
Of Mice and Men, of course.
The Old Man and the Sea &
The Sun Also Rises.
I can't remember how much I liked
The Fountainhead. Anyway, too prententious a recommendation? :smile: I was pretty psyched when I first read her, but I'm glad I read that before
Atlas Shrugged. Not sure I'd recommend the latter; not as a pure novel, anyway.
Guilty pleasures? Clancy and Clavell (the earlier the better, natch). Ooh, and I only recently read
Snow Crash and
Zodiac and loved them. The Diamond Age, not so much, and I gave up on Cryptonomicon after reading a paragraph-long sentence early on. Like Clancy and Clavell, once they get popular, they get sloppier (and present fine arguments for an editor's worth).
geo, Shakespeare who?
