My personal opinion is anyone who wants to take reading seriously should crank out at least 4 cormac mccarthy novels.

musts: blood meridian, suttree
shoulds: all the pretty horses, the road, ncfom

of course, all the other stuff is fantastic as well, loved child of god

Only read "Room" of the list which is great. Woman kidnapped and kept in sound-proofed shed for 7 years. Had child with her kidnapper. Kid's whole world is this tiny room.

Has the same slightly claustrophobic/intense, but inspiring parent-child relationship as the Road.

Carlos Castaneda second ring of power

neoshamanism at its best

uh, why did i post this itt. my bad.

just about to finish JSFoer's Everything Is Illuminated. An amazing book.

ya and once your read the musts which are the meatiest prose wise, the other ones are even easier to read and understand the first time through. i had to read blood meridian like 3 times just to get a decent understanding of the whole thing. doesn't change the fact that the first time i read it i knew it was one of the best i'd read in a long long time.

but most of em weren't written in the last decade

I am a Murakami fan. I actually read Japanese, so I've even read 1Q84. Which is great until the end.

I liked Jacob de Zoet, but was disappointed in it overall. I didn't like that he introduced that British captain at like one of the most suspenseful parts of the book and then dared to expect us to give a **** about his gout and his dead son. Also, the red hair? Did anyone not see where he was going with that, like, immediately? Also, didn't care for the love story. Didn't buy it, really. I did like the writing, though, and if someone other than Mitchell had written this, maybe I wouldn't have been disappointed.

McCarthy's getting a lot of attention in here. Rightfully so. If we're going back (chronologically) to Blood Meridian, I'm also adding White Noise and Mao II by DeLillo, and almost any Kazuo Ishiguro.

"Blue Like Jazz" - Donald Miller
"You Shall Know Our Velocity!" - Dave Eggers

+1000 on Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Don Delillo's White Noise.
+1 on Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

White Noise is 1985 so I'm assuming that's the threshold here. Will add Douglas Coupland's Generation X. Also Ben Okri's The Famished Road.

Ditto on a lot of the books mentioned in this thread (Blood Meridian especially); thought I'd mention some that I've liked that haven't gotten much/enough press.

Concrete -- crazy old man who lived on a boat for ten years, founded the Romanian PR industry, and ran an underground beehive or distillery or something in Uzbekistan rambles incoherently about concrete through the millenia. Warning, don't read this book if you really need to learn about concrete. Bonus, great book for kids I think.

Sandokan -- fast-paced informal anecdote-filled (personal) history of the Camorra. According to my sources the guy who made the movie Gomorrah got into the subject by working for the author of this book.

The She-Devil in the Mirror -- corruption, infidelity, lies, murder, etc among the elites in San Salvador in the voice of a hot young rich evil sex-crazed drama queen who thinks it's all fun and games and she's living a soap opera. If you like this book though you're probably gay so safer not to look.

Have Lunar Follies by my bed dip into it now and then for rock-solid chuckles.

Man this thread just cost me a few bucks at amazon and a few trips to the library. I'll second Into Thin Air, and Blood Meridian. In the non-fiction type of reading I've also been a huge fan of Freakonomics (and Superfreakonomics) and some others in that style.

Superfreakonomics is aids.

Black Hawk Down (okay, 1999 but still - awesome, better than Lone Survivor which was also awesome)

The God Delusion

Under the Banner of Heaven (not as good is Into Thin Air)

Anyone who liked World War Z would probably get a kick out of
Day by Day Armageddon
Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile
Naval aviator makes a new year's resolution to begin keeping a daily journal. Shortly after, zombie apocalypse. I liked them because I agree with all the decisions the protagonist makes - he is smart about survival in the zombie world.

Born to Run was really good nonfiction imo
Isolated by the most savage terrain in North America, the reclusive Tarahumara Indians of Mexico’s deadly Copper Canyons are custodians of a lost art. For centuries they have practiced techniques that allow them to run hundreds of miles without rest and chase down anything from a deer to an Olympic marathoner while enjoying every mile of it. Their superhuman talent is matched by uncanny health and serenity, leaving the Tarahumara immune to the diseases and strife that plague modern existence. With the help of Caballo Blanco, a mysterious loner who lives among the tribe, the author was able not only to uncover the secrets of the Tarahumara but also to find his own inner ultra-athlete, as he trained for the challenge of a lifetime: a fifty-mile race through the heart of Tarahumara country pitting the tribe against an odd band of Americans, including a star ultramarathoner, a beautiful young surfer, and a barefoot wonder.

man if you liked Black Hawk Down, you should read Bowden's Killling Pablo

Killing Pablo is definitely on my short list. Black Hawk Down was just epic imo because it is basically non-stop edge-of-your-seat action from cover to cover.

I haven't read Super but Freakonomics was pretty bad. Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Opening Skinners Box, and Predictably Irrational are all much better.

I couldn't stand how ****ing condescending taleb was throughout fooled by randomness

In various book threads on 2p2 I keep seeing Black Swan. What is it? It's not anything to do with the movie?

yea killing pablo is sweet, pretty quick read too.

god taleb's writing sometimes is such a battle to get through. i'm about halfway through fooled by randomness.

also just picked up shantaram thanks to this thread, read about 50 pages so far and looking forward to it. hoping i finish it by the time my taxes are due.

lol shantaram is like 3rd on deck on my to read shelf atm

Nothing to do with the film. It's essentially about unusual events ruining certain kinds of predictions. Fairly interesting. Annoying writer.

& If you like those you'd probably also enjoy No Mean Soldier. Memoir of a mercenary, ends with the Pablo raid but there's lots more.

Ya I agree. Also, I retained very little from that book that I could apply to my worldview.

He's clearly a real smart guy, but his intense resentment for other people who made a lot of money taking big risks gets annoying.

I'm going to suggest the two books that I read last year, at the advice of my girlfriend, that got me back into reading novels, surprisingly neither of which I have seen mentioned ITT yet.



A story of a group of eccentric students at university studying Greek. To tell you much more of the story would ruin some of the best parts, however it slowly unravels much like a Greek tragedy itself. It is well paced and suspenseful, dark yet with some humour beneath it. If you've opened this thread, I guarantee that you will love this book.

Earlier in the thread I saw a recommendation for Tartt's next novel, titled The Little Friend, which I found much more of a chore to try to read and nowhere near as enthralling.



This book is simply a joy to read and I am sure will be remembered as a classic in the future. Great characters, a dash of mystery, romance and complex plotting that's easy to follow. It completely immerses you in the richly beautiful world of 1940's Barcelona.

This book makes me wish I could read Spanish, so I could read the pre-translation version. That is not to say that there is anything wrong with the translation, in fact it is a product of the translation being more beautiful and poetic than any other I have ever read.

well, in the limited amount of books I've read since 2000, I have to say Everything Is Illuminated is the best. Personal opinion from a small sample size (though I do believe I've read much more than the average person)