A Good Read?

[Agamemnon]

The historical fiction series about Rome by Colleen McCullough is amazing.

[Flame4Ever]

Read in French if you can:

The Count of Monte Cristo is a favorite of mine.
Around the world in 80 days.

English:
The life of Pi.
The Bourne series by Robert Ludlum.

Fantasy:
Legend by David Gemmel
The Original conan by Robert E. Howard

[Disco_Stu]

Originally Posted by Dominicwasalreadytaken

Non-Fiction:

Those are a few that I've really liked. I read more fantasy than anything else, but you didn't want that, so I left all of them off except Ender's Game. That one's just so awesome I had to leave it on there.

I have to agree. Ender's Game, one of the best non-fiction book that i've ever read. The rest of the Ender's series was pretty philosophical but that one was a non-stop good read. (The Bean series was pretty good as well).....

[Calgary Flames]

DAys of Infamy - Harry Turtledove. Alternate history of the Pearl Harbor attack, if the Japanese won.

[habernac]

I love a good sports book. Just finished a few recently:

Lance Armstrong's War - a good book on Lance, and not written by himself so you hear some not so flattering stuff about him as well.

Baseballissimo - Dave Bidini - the Rheostatics guitar player hangs out with a baseball team in the Italian minor leagues. Any Bidini book is worth reading.

[TheyCallMeBruce]

The Kite Runner
Life of Pi
Curious incident of the dog in the nighttime

last but not least

Memoirs of a geisha

[MrMastodonFarm]

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bordain
currently reading Jpod

[FireFly]

The Double
Blindness

both are by Jose Saramago who has recently become my favorite author

Never Let me Go, Kashuo Ishiguro (sp?)

[Flashpoint]

Funny?
(Anything by Paul Quarrington)

Hockey Related?
Logan in Overtime
King Leary
Tropic of Hockey

Sci-fi?
Enders Game
The Sparrow
The Children of God

Historical Drama?
Lunch with Mussolini
Lunch with the Generals
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Sole Survivor

Post Apocalyptic
The Last Canadian
The Stand
I am Legend (light reading).

Classics
The Count of Monte Cristo
Mary Shelly's Frankenstein
Bram Stoker's Dracula

Non Fiction
Clash of Civilizations
Shake hands with the Devil
Freakanomics






(I didn't have cable when the NHL was on strike)

[Maritime Q-Scout]

Originally Posted by @theCBE

Just finished Freakonomics.. pretty entertaining.. the Author makes a lot of assumptions but its pretty cool regardless.

You know I wasn't that impressed with it. I don't see how people responding to incentives is really "revolutionary"

Like you said lots of assumptions, some good points are raised, it's a good read, but I don't think it's the be all end all that it's made out to be.

[kootenayguy9]

If you are a dog lover Marley and Me was great.

[kermitology]

When I was in Ireland I picked up a book called White Teeth by Zadie Smith that was really well done. Apparently it's everywhere in the UK right now (came out in 2000 though).

Good story about the cultural problems with immigration in London. Some really good lines and the ending brought up something from the middle of the book that ended up being fantastic.

I highly recommed!

[Kybosh]

I'll second or third or whatever "A confederacy of dunces" because it is truly a great book. Very good dialogue.

As far as other books go I'm mostly a fan of fiction. The books I'll add to the list are:

1) The Rabbit series by John Updike (Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is rich and Rabbit at rest). The books follow the life of one Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom through life and into death. I highly recommend these books and consider them to be Updike's masterpiece.

2) Lately I've been devouring anything written by Charles Bukowski. His novels (Ham on rye, Factotum, Post Office, Women and Hollywood) basically re-enact his life through his alter ego Hank Chinaski. If you like blunt writing with some comedy, lots of drinking, lots of sex and some horse racing then these books are for you. He has also written a lot (and I mean a lot) of poetry if that's up your alley. Seriously, I only started reading his stuff a few months ago and he has quickly become one of my favourite authors. Bukowski is probably one of the most widely published authors that nobody has ever heard of.

[PowerPlayoffs06]

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Angels on Fire by Nancy A. Collins

The Myth Series by Robert Asprin is friggin' hilarious and all the installments are fairly short. I think the new paperbacks have 2 stories in each book.

[Mr.Coffee]

Goosebumps

Volumes 1 through infinity

[@theCBE]

Originally Posted by Maritime Q-Scout

You know I wasn't that impressed with it. I don't see how people responding to incentives is really "revolutionary"

Like you said lots of assumptions, some good points are raised, it's a good read, but I don't think it's the be all end all that it's made out to be.

I understand what you are saying. My expectations of the book changed after I read the first chapter. I realized it wasn't a book that was going to teach me something like I thought when I bought it. It did entertain me though and put some things in a perspective that I hadn't considered before.

I can see how someone going in with a lot of expectations could be dissappointed though. It did manage to take a subject though thats usually pretty boring and make it interesting.

[HelloHockeyFans]

The Rape of Nanking - Iris Chang

I think this is a must-read for Chinese people, but also, an important read for history buffs and people who would like to read tragic, but important facts of World War II.

A warning though, I was referred to this book by a friend who couldn't stomache to read any more after getting about half-way because she started to develop a prejudice towards Japanese people in general.

I've been approached twice already (I've only had the book for a week) by strangers who have read the book with comments on how "hard" the book is to read, but how glad they were they read it.

It talks about the "forgotten holocaust of World War II" where in the span of 6 weeks, the Japanese military killed over 300,000 Chinese citizens and soldiers in the old capital of Nanking. To put this into perspective, the estimated death toll of the two atomic blasts combined was 210,000. France and Great Britain combined for an estimated 169,000 civilian deaths for the entire war. The Japanese exterminated 300,000 in 6 weeks by methods unimaginable by many as confessed by Nagatomi Hakudo, a Japanese veteran of the invasion... "Few know that soldiers impaled babies on bayonets and tossed them still alive into pots of boiling water... They gang-raped women from the ages of twelve to eighty and then killed them when they could no longer satisfy sexual requirements. I beheaded people, starved them to death, burned them, and buried them alive, over two hundred in all. It is terrible that I could turn into an animal and do these things. There are really no words to explain what I was doing. I was truly a devil."

It's important in my opinion because it's an event in history that not many people are aware of. An excerpt from the book:

"In contrast to Germany, where it is illegal for teachers to delete the Holocaust from their history curricula, the Japanese have for decades systematically purged references to the Nanking massacre from their textbooks..."

"... And it is not just the fact that while Germans have made repeated apologies to their Holocaust victims, the Japanese have enshrined their war criminals in Tokyo -- an act that one American wartime victim of the Japanese has labeled politically equivalent to "erecting a cathedral for Hitler in the middle of Berlin." "

This definitely isn't a book for everyone, but from what I can gather, there are quite a few people here who are extremely knowledgable in history and would likely be interested in reading such a book.

[Coelah]

One of my favorite books is Breakfast Of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut.

If you want some light reading but have alot of time, The Stand - Stephen King, Imajica - Clive Barker, By Reason Of Insanity - Shane Stevens and anything by Elmore Leonard.

I know you said you weren't into fantasy but I just finished the sixth book of the series Malazan Book Of The Fallen, by Stephen Erikson. Very involved, detailed, otherworld. It's not the kind of fantasy like Tolkien. More gritty. The first book of the series is called Gardens Of The Moon and I would recommend it and the whole series. Might take a couple of hundred pages to get into because of the sheer mass of characters, but it's close to 800 long and worth the effort.

[Coelah]

Originally Posted by Eastern Girl

Pretty much anything by Hunter Thompson. I really like his writing style. Really paints a picture for you.

Oh yeah. Great writer. Fear And Loathing has to be one of the best books, at least for me. Right up there with Kerouac's On The Road.

[Engine09]

Reading "Tropic of Hockey" right now, been on my list for a while and finally picked it up from the library.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

The title says it all. Its basically all the science from the big bang to now present in a interesting and funny way. If you're remotely interested in science at all, its worth reading.

Awesome freaking book, have read it 3 times.