For a graphic novel try–
Salem’s Lot is one of his better titles, IMHO. It’s just as long as it needs to be, it has an ending (a good one), and he did a good job with the characters. Plus there are some truly scary bits.
I haven’t run across any King readers who didn’t like Salem’s Lot. Same goes for The Dead Zone.
Since you liked Band of Brothers:
• Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day. The true story of the D-day invasion of Normandy in World War II.
• William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Best-selling account from a journalist who was there.
• James Michener, Tales of the South Pacific. Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction about people in the island-hopping campaign of World War 2.
All three are considered classics.
Omni - I like your approach to books/movies, esp. with regard to separating the two. Obviously, a movie can lead you to a good book you may not have gone to otherwise, in your case LOTR.
Anyway, I’m popping in again to do more recommending: The graphic book Maus, about the Holacaust.
The Count of Monte Cristo is indeed a great, classic, sweeping story, although a little hard to read.
Give To Kill A Mockingbird a try. It’s a favorite book of many for good reason.
and I enjoy non-fiction as much as fiction. In addition to the ones already mentioned, you could try some travel books, such as those by Eric Newby, Redmond O’Hanlon, or Bill Bryson. The best non-fiction book I’ve read recently was called Chasing the Sea , by Tom Bissell. Set in former Soviet East Asia, it was fascinating.
Some other fiction you may like:
• George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The nightmarish authoritarian state of the future, as Orwell saw it.
• William Golding, Lord of the Flies. An airplane full of English schoolboys crashes on a deserted island. If you like the TV show Lost, you’ll like this.
• Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles. One of the first great science fiction novels, a fantasia on the clash between explorers from Earth and the native Martians. Poetic, metaphoric, and unforgttable.
To Kill A Mockingbird, 1984, Lord Of The Flies and Fahrenheit 451 are all books currently sitting on my shelves because they were assigned reading in school. I’ve read parts of all of them and they do rank among those which were the least grating as a student. Still the loathing that comes from forced reading still taints them for me (and the fact I know the story/endings from Cliff Notes and group discussion). Someday I’ll revisit them with a more mature eye, probably not just yet though.
Along the fantasy theme, I thought I’d recommend some of my favorite fantasies:
Of the three I’m mentioning, probably the one closest in vein to Tolkien is Fritz Leiber and his series of Lankhmar stories involving Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. They go in and out of print (I think they’re currently in print), but there are enough stories to fill about four books. It’s good sword-and-sorcery fantasy (Leiber was the one actually coined the term “sword and sorcery”).
Probably the next closest to Tolkien is E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros. It’s more sword and sorcery, but it’s written in a Shakespearean style prose which seems to turn some off (I loved that part of it, by the way). In fact, it may arguably be closer to Tolkien than Leiber’s Lankhmar; Eddison imagined the world and story for about 30 years (starting when he was around 11 years old) before publishing it, so in that sense, it’s a fairly fully imagined world, just like Middle Earth (many compared LOTR to Eddison’s TWO when LOTR was first published). I read it fairly recently and consider it one of my favorites; the characters are mostly archetypal warriors and the like, but they’re great archetypes, and the dialogues are brilliant. This might be difficult to find in stock in a book store, but it’s readily available through Amazon.
Finally, still fantasy, but pretty far removed from Tolkien, is Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels. It’s set in a huge sprawling castle (Gormenghast itself) and is basically about the inhabitants of the castle (the Lord Groan’s family and his population of servants) and their rituals. What really makes it stand out for me are the characters, who are some of the most bizarre, grotesque, and memorable characters I’ve ever encountered in a novel. The first two books are essential, the third maybe not so much (I enjoyed the third, but many people didn’t, and I certainly agree that it’s not up to par with the first two).
Try Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men”.
A couple of my favorites:
Voyage, Sterling Hayden (Superior novel–You’d never guess the guy was also a prolific actor. Read it, read it, read it)
The Godfather, Mario Puzo (nothing I can really say/add here, but it is a very good read)
Let me second **Cabbage’s ** recommendation of the *Gormenghast * trilogy. The books move very slowly, but deliciously so.
Also, the classics mentioned in this thread are all well-deserving of their mention, and I’ll add *Dracula * – it’s one of the few books I’ve read that really made me think, “Wow! So that’s what they mean by a classic.”
If you’ve not yet had your fill of Stephen King after reading the novels mentioned in this thread, I also suggest his novella collection Different Seasons (which contain novellas that were made into the movies Stand By Me, Apt Pupil, and The Shawshank Redemption), as well as the short-story collection Skeleton Crew, which starts with the wonderful novella “The Mist.” When King limits his word count, he can be very, very good.
**Walloon ** mentioned James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific – it’s likely that Michener also wrote a 900-page book on a geographic area that you’re interested in, whether it’s the Chesapeake area, Poland, Colorado, Texas, Hawaii, Alaska, etc.
One thing I meant but forgot to mention about Gormenghast is that Peake is one of the best writers I’ve ever read as far as really painting a visual picture of a setting.
And so I’m not just rehashing what I’ve already posted, I’ll make one more recommendation I think you might enjoy. Flicker, by Theodore Roszak, is (without giving too much away) about a person investigating the films of Max Castle, who (in the book) was mostly a B horror movie director. Castle put subliminal images in the film (I’ll leave it at that). A movie based on it (directed by Darren Aronofsky) is scheduled to be released this year, but I’m not sure of the current status of that.
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card: Harry Potter meets The Hunt For Red October
In the sports writing category –
Fever Pitch, by Nick Hornby (it’s not like the movie)
Friday Night Lights, by ?? Bissenger (I haven’t seen the movie, the book was good)
Paper Lion, by George Plimpton (It’s a classic for a reason)
Funny, yet dark –
Hitman, by Lawrence Block (short stories about a philosophical hit man)
Bad Chili, by Joe R. Landsade (I can’t describe this well enough to do it justice – a Texas redneck, and his best friend, who happens to be a buff black gay guy, get involved with a crime on accident and then have to solve the crime to clear themselves. It’s a series and they all have the same plot, but boy are they funny.)
Oh, yeah. I completely forgot that one. It is excellent. The follow-on novels did come close to this one. One of my all time favorites!
I’d also like to recommend the novel “Shogun.”
Let me mention Good Omens, written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. It’s an easy read, it’s damn funny, and quite interesting. If you like it, it’s also a good introduction to Terry Pratchett’s style, mixed with the mythological stylings of Gaiman. If you read one book from this thread, Good Omens should be it.
Do not read the Dark Tower series. From your self-described tastes, I think you’d hate it. It has a good couple books, but, overall, it’s an incredible waste of time. Read It, instead. It’s a bit more like The Stand than the other King recommendations.
Try the Sandman graphic novels first, for a taste of his M.O., and then jump into his novels. Gaiman’s my favorite author (who hasn’t been dead for over 300 years).
Let us know how you like it. It may say alot about your future choices.
Nobody, but nobody, should pass through this world without reading A Prayer For Owen Meany.
I have read and loved many of the books in the OP, but this one will always stand out above the rest in my mind.
Another sports-related recommendation: the Mark Harris books, particularly the first two, The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly. Excellent baseball fiction, if a tad dated.
And an obligatory for me plug for the fantasy writer Guy Gabriel Kay, my favorite fantasy writer alive today. A great storyteller with a wonderful voice and a knack for memorable endings. Most of his work is usually called speculative fantasy - set in a part of a varaint of Medieval Europe. A Song for Arbonne is probably the best place to start.
For King I’d recommend IT. It is a great story though the ending could be better. There is also the great book by King and Peter Straub called ‘The Talisman’ which is wonderful. Whatever you do stay far, far away from ‘The Tommyknockers’. I disagree with Hamelt about The Dark Tower series. It is overall good though there are some weak spots. The first two books are outstanding IMHO, the third (and maybe forth) are a little weak and the last couple are pretty good. ‘The Eyes of the Dragon’ by King is pretty good if I remember correctly. King also writes some great short(er) stories. I’d recommend ‘Different Seasons’ which has Apt Pupli, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, which were all made into movies. Skeleton Crew is also a good collection.
I’ll second (or third) Enders Game. I’d also recommend the second book in the series, ‘Speaker for the Dead’.
For Clancy I’d ‘The Sum of All Fears’ and ‘Clear and Presnet Danger’. He has a couple other decent books but he starts losing it around ‘Debt of Honor’ IMHO.
There is another writer you might like, Tad Williams. He has an excelent series "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn’. The first book is ‘The Dragonbone Chair’.
Slee
Bloodsucking Fiends is one of my favorite books. It’s hilarious: skiing behind the floor waxer, the turtles, Perry, Tommy’s letter that he writes while waiting for Jody’s check. . .
I think the OP would really like it.
For Stephen King books, I recommend, in order:
Night Shift (short story collection)
Skeleton Crew (short story collection)
The Bachman Books (4 novellas)
Different Seasons (4 novellas)
Four Past Midnight (4 novellas)
Thinner
Misery
Carrie
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
I’ve read almost all his books, and they’re all highly readable. I liked the Dark Tower series, and actually like the fourth one that everyone else seems to hate. So really I’d say throwing darts at a list of his books would be a decent way to go.
In general, the shorter the story the better it is. (Except for The Stand, of course.) I think his short stories are the best stuff he’s written, followed by his four-novella collections, followed by his shorter novels. Thus, my recommendation list above. It (the book) was probably my least favorite King book, but even that I liked and read more than once.
Note: If you can’t find The Bachman Books, look for a copy on ebay or amazon or something. It’s fan-fucking-tastic, though King may have pulled it from circulation after the Columbine massacre.
Well that depends on what you want to go for. The story is powerful enough that reading a shortened and lighter translation will still be good. Personally I like the Oxford version which uses a translation from the 19th century so you get all the flowery stuff like:
Personally I think that such writing is totally kick-ass, but still the first version of the Count I read was 300 or 400 pages whereas the Oxford one is 1000 or 1200 or so pages–yet I fully loved the shortened version (though I would probably cringe now.)