Play it as it Lays by Joan Dideon

Weird, not sure what I just read - Thought it was going to be about golf

Yes, it's that good.

As far as an emotional wrench from a short story that comes close, I can only recall my first reading of "A Clean, Well Lighted Place"

Those idiots put the order wrong. Lion should come first. Magician's Nephew was the sixth in the series. It takes place chronologically at the beginning, but that's no reason to read it first. Part of the enjoyment from that book would come from your knowledge of the future of the characters and the world.

Read it in "Original Publication Order":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chr...#Reading_order

Game Of Thrones.

Bought the book ages ago and never read it, watched half of the TV show and decided I haven't read a good series since the Harry Potter books when I was a kid. I'm going to read the lot, rather than watch it.

To be fair Lewis wrote (most of) Magician's Nephew second, just didnt get finished and published until later.

But I agree with you.

Anyone like to recommend some of your best books ever to me?

I want something that will keep me gripped, up late at night and not wanting to go to sleep.

I used to read all the time until I got a PC as a teenager and my attention span went downhill. ;S

Some of my recent favorites:

The Devil In The White City : Erik Larson
Blood Meridian : Cormac McCarthy
Ironweed : William Kennedy
Dog Soliders : Robert Stone
Ball Four : Jim Bouton ( about Baseball )
The Long Way : Bernard Moitessier ( about sailing solo around the world )

I'll 2nd Dog Soldiers. also rec Ask the Dust by John Fante

(neither is my favorite all time, but both are solidly underrated 20th century books... in my top 10 or 20, both of em)

Lost Horizon is maybe my favourite. Really fast read and a great story. Should be spoken of (more?) as one of the 20th century classics imo.

Since you mentioned Harry Potter and want gripping, you are on the right track with GoT series. Much more adult, but it is great. Also would recommend the Passage series.


Although I would not say gripping, some of my fav books:

Sun Also Rises
Catcher in the Rye
Things They Carried

And some non-fiction: Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow and Made in America

I'm currently reading Titan, which is about Rockefeller and it is great. Written much better than Snowball, which I read right before it.

Coincidentally, I'm re-reading Blood Meridian right now. So good, although the writing takes some getting used to.

I sped through Too Big to Fail last week, and it's a pretty good book, even if I had a hard time not seeing each person as the actors who played them in the HBO version. I think that Sorkin did a good job of capturing the absolute insanity that those weekends were like in 4Q08. While it's long on action, the book is not a good study on the causes of the crisis, which it pretty much glosses over. Gillian Tett's Fool's Gold does a really good job of that, though, and I recommend that as a companion to any of the similarly-themed more popular works, such as the Big Short, etc.

Man, Thomas Hardy can write. I'm reading Far From the Madding Crowd. I wish he would make a little effort to punctuate his sentences, though. Some incredible ideas, observations, humour often diminished or ruined with incredibly awkward sentences.

There is no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. If you write properly you shouldn't have to punctuate.

-Cormac McCarthy

i agree with that guy

-ee cummings

Finished Treasure Island, great adventure yarn.

Started Under the Volcano. Already many memorable lines. Fav so far (paraphrasing)

The town falling asleep was nothing like a big city. That was a giant removing bandages.

Or some such, very cool.

I've been trying to read this for a decade

Under the Volcano sounds really good, right up my alley. Thanks

Yeah, I gotta add that one to my ever-growing list as well. Added Flaubert's Parrot also.

I gotta give a quick due to Roger Ebert who passed away today. I never read what I was supposed to in high school and college. Then obviously I never read in my early 20s either. Until the day I looked up Roger Ebert's review of The Proposition, in which he referenced Blood Meridian. I never knew books could be "manly" and appealing to me in that way. That book changed me because it began my love for reading over the last 6 or 7 years, and reading has most definitely changed my life for the better. And, to a degree, I owe it to that Roger Ebert review.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/.../60509003/1023

Ebert on the Coen Brothers and Cormac McCarthy

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/...NTARY/70527001

OK

Favorite books:

Down River - John Hart *
The Hot Zone - Richard Preston


rest of top 10

On the Road - Jack Keroac
Kane & Abel - Jeffry Archer
Citizen Vince - Jess Walker *
Flood - Andrew Vachss
Black Cherry Blues - James Lee Burke *
The Brass Verdict - Michael Connelly
The Lincoln Lawyer - Michael Connelly
Playing off the Rail - David McCumber (only if you like pool)

I suggest you read:
All John Hart books **
Most Michael Connelly books *


* - won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery
** - has won back to back Edgar Awards

Before I post this on the puzzle forum (they're busy with my anagrams) I thought I'd run this by you book-heads:

I’m thinking of a portmanteau. An adjective. A dysphemism used to describe a strumpet.

I'm currently reading American Holocaust. It's a historical account of the Native American genocide (obvz). The opening chapter is really well-written for a textbook, and I'm looking forward to becoming further disenchanted with whitey.

ho-bag

Some stuff that doesn't come up much in this thread:

Life and Fate by Vassily Grossmann,
Anything by Ursula Le Guin - the Wizard of Earthsea series is the classic, but I thought that her most recent book, Lavinia, was extraordinary.

Reading this now. I'm hating half of it, not minding the other half, and just hanging in there in the hope of getting some good Buddhist stuff. It's the weirdest disjunction of voice and theme I can recall encountering - I've got little positive to say about books that are difficult to read, but somehow the tone of this book feels too light for what it at least purports to be about (you know, like reality and existence, man, and our own insignificance)

The half where the author writes about an author with the same name as her is ghastly. Why do writers do this? It's a hackneyed idea, it might be 'playing with fact and fiction' or some such BS from the author's POV, but I just find it tedious in the extreme.