Suttree is my number 1

I'm currrently reading Child of God for the first time. It's almost Twainesque.

Lester Ballard cracked me up.

Suttree is like Huck Finn grown older (but not up)

Winner! I really have to re-read that. Prob the funniest book I've ever read.

Simon Singh - Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe
Albert Mudrian - Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal & Grindcore
Esko Valtaoja - Kotona maailmankaikkeudessa (At Home In The Cosmos, sadly not available in English)
Nolan Dalla - One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey 'The Kid' Ungar, The World's Greatest Poker Player
Nikki Sixx - The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star
John Dicke - Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia
Nathaniel Fick - One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
Evan Wright - Generation Kill

one bullet away is pretty much the nuts for a war book nonfiction

probably the best one is The Good Soldiers (Finkel)

KaBoom (gallagher) is more jarhead-ish, and is a good hip read

still have Junger's WAR on my shelf to read

another nonfiction that I'll go ahead and rec for its content, though the authors style tilted me, is Dave Cullen's COLUMBINE. I wish he would have just stuck to the facts and left out the narrative style. whats in the book, and his analysis and theories are awesome tho, you won't look at the tragedy the same if you bought into the "bullied trenchcoat" media stuff.

and anything that mark bowden wrote in teh last 10 years is awesome, goes without saying

It is. But anyone who reads it should also read Generation Kill to realize how big difference there is in what a soldier and a reporter sees.

Thanks, my shopping list is now one longer.

what is the what, dave eggars
into thin air, jon krakauer (little over 10 yrs but good none the less)

+1 on this, very interesting story, with lots of adventure and lots of philosophy all at the same time.

I liked Generation Kill so I am definately have to check out One Bullet Away.

Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell was a great book on a SEAL mission in Afghanistan despite the outcome.

you might want to try KABOOM if you like GK. if you can find Kaboom somewhere, you could probably read a few pages (chapters are short) and get a feel for whether its your style.

Really liked Into Thin Air, my cousin gave it to me a while back. Like all of his books I've read but heard Under the Banner of Heaven wasn't very good. Definetly going to check out some of the repeated books like corrections,kafka on the shore, shantaram.

Really posted though to say I hated The Road. Yes I know I'm going to get flamed by everyone. I finished it 6 months ago and it actually made me not want to read for a while. Yes it was well written but to me was just brutally depressing. Reading it felt like I was mentally getting the **** kicked out of me from start to finish and not enjoyable at all. So if you don't like depressing and very dark books I'd avoid it. My uncle gave it to me, and he usually recommends great books, but I hated it.

even as a mccarthy fan, I found the road to be just decent by his standards

I had a similar reaction to it. He does a fantastic job of evoking a world where there is pretty much no hope for the protagonists. The result of this, at least for me, was that it was hard to get too emotionally involved in the story because you know everybody's ****ed anyway. As a result, I think the drama is a victim of his evocative skill and it's not that great.

Thinking about it a little more, the other McCarthy I'm familiar with (Blood Meridian and No Country) also features unstoppable destructive forces, but I don't think those books suffer for it nearly as badly as The Road does. I think this is mostly because making those entities into people is a lot more interesting than just having a big "**** you" from the world. The bleakness of Blood Meridian is also a lot different because there isn't really a clear cut protagonist - even the kid is mostly awful, and not in a standard antihero type way.

I think within the context of the novel, the ending of The Road is as hopeful as it could have been.

I would agree with that (and thought about mentioning it) but it's a long damn slog to get there.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one that was disappointed with The Road.

Simmons was mentioned earlier and his Hyperion series really is amazing. I almost never read sci-fi and I absolutely loved the books. Another good one of his is The Crook Factory, a historical novel about an amateur spy ring that Ernest Hemingway set up during WW2. The book follows the actual events pretty closely and even includes a number of FBI reports that are taken verbatim from actual files the FBI has on Hemingway.

Abraham Verghese's first novel, Cutting for Stone, has been making its way up the Independent Booksellers' paperback fiction bestseller list for the past year and is now #1 on the Indie list.

He rite good!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/bo..._r=1&ref=books

NYT Top 10 of 2010 - I've only read Freedom, which I really liked but I think is overrated in some respects, I think my enjoyment was hampered by the fact that I didn't really like a lot of the characters and the sexual denouements were often predictable.

The history of Cleopatra looks interesting (the author is on the Daily Show tonight, so I'll check that out), as does the autobiography of Cancer and "A Visit from the Goon Squad". Anyone read any of those?

(ps someone who can start threads here should start a 2011 books thread)

lol denouements

I'm almost finished with this and have really liked it, it was a little slow in the middle, but overall has been quite enjoyable, sounds like the 2nd book is out in a couple months and is a mammoth 900ish pages, he might be cloning GRRM afterall, 2yrs of delays, book size balloning

finished the Road about a month ago, took me a while to get used to Cormac's writing style(first of his I've read) but enjoyed it quite a bit despite it being so depressing

starting on Blood Meridian once I finish the name of the wind

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to mention this. Hands down the best fiction I've read for years - and quite possibly ever. Be warned - it starts out a bit slow and in a difficult to read 'period' style - however the book is comprised of 6 stories intertwined throughout time, each written in it's own pen.

HIGHLY recommend.

number9dream is also masterful. I've read all his novels and they're all enjoyable, but those two are the tops.

just added cloud atlas to my to-read list

You won't be sorry.

As far as other books mentioned itt, I enjoyed Pattern Recognition as it was well written, however I felt as though the writing was better than the story itself.

I very much enjoyed Lunar Park which was also mentioned, other than one detail (that I will put in a spoiler, tho I'm not actually giving any plot points away whatsoever)


I did not enjoy The Dice Man, I mean - I finished it - and it certainly brought up some interesting concepts, but overall I found it pretty lack luster.

I know this is out of context for this thread, but I recently read Slaughterhouse Five which I really enjoyed, as well as The Catcher in the Rye, which was also a fantastic read. Obv outside the scope of this thread, but thought I'd throw them in. In the same category is Angle of Repose, which is a very well done 'yarn' of a period piece, though it can be a slog at some points.

Currently finishing Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - which is very good. It almost seems too fun to be mentioned here, and with the amount of Vampire crap in pop media these days, I can see being a bit turned off, however Grahame-Smith does a wonderful job of weaving historical fact with Vampire motivated political logic. It's this interweaving that makes the book really good, instead of just a fun fiction read using a well known historical figure.

number9dream's particularly enjoyable if you're a Murakami fan.

I really liked his latest Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Change in direction for him, dropping the pastiche and fireworks.

Just finished Alone in Berlin. Written in 1947 but incredibly only translated and published in English last year, so maybe counts for this thread. An account of a working class couple who deop anti-Nazi postcards around Berlin and of the Gestapo's attempts to catch them. A work of genius.