A Confederacy of Dunces is a classic. I believe it was published posthumously after the author’s suicide.
Bill Bryson’s Walk Across America is naturally funny – nothing is forced.
The Tracker by Tom Brown changed the way I look at things. Easy reading but awesome!
Perfume – Creepy, unusual, extremely well-crafted. Don’t let the title fool you.
For non-fiction, I’d suggest Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, both by Richard P. Feynman. He was very smart and very, very funny. (YMMV) I’ll also second Diamond’s GG&S.
For fiction, I’ll second the Aubrey and Maturin series. Anything by P.G. Wodehouse would be good (especially the Jeeves and Wooster books) if you like British humour about upper-class twits and their friends. I also admire a sadly-neglected SF writer called Cordwainer Smith; there are few writers who can pull you into a strange and surreal world like he can.
try these…
survivor chuck palahniuk (he wrote fight club, anything by this guy is a sweel read)
if you liked on the road try more of kerouacs work
the acid house Irvine welsh
1984 orwell
siddartha hermann hesse
walden henry david thoreau
I also just finished a book called jarhead…it is a first hand account of desert storm written by a sniper. It was a nice quick read…its fairly new so it should be in your library…
Lamb-the Gospel according to Biff, Christ’s childhood pal. By Christopher Moore. Verry, very funny.
As For sci/fi, The Rainbow Cadenza, by J. Neill Schullman.
This is out of print, but well worth the effort of tracking it down.
And I second Jitterbug Perfume. An ex bought that for me on our first date. That book is now in tatters, and marinated in patchoulli. It’s even been overseas.
Oh, and the Vlad Taltos series, by Steven Brust.
I went to the downtown Phoenix library today (not my usual library.) Guns, Germs, and Steel, along with just about everything by Neil Gaiman was sadly checked out, but I got a graphic novel by Neil Gaiman called Orchid. Anybody read that?
Hopefully I’ll finish that tonight and hit my regular library up tomorrow for more GGaS, more Neil Gaiman (if this one is good) and Treasure Island :).
Sorry, that’s Black Orchid.
Read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Absolutely amazing.
Also read Dune. I’m on the third book, and I’m addicted.
And if you’ve seen the movies, but have yet to read the books, go out and buy Lord of the Rings. You owe it to yourself.
I’ve read Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion :D.
Another favorite of mine is Shogun but I haven’t had much luck getting into the rest of that series. I think the very next book takes place something like 260 years later if I’m not mistaken.
In the **20,000 Leagues ** Jules Verne first person dramatic action vein - maybe try East of the Sun, West of the Moon by Teddy Roosevelt - also Sand, Sea, and the Stars by St Exupery.
A negative vote for Guns, Germs, and Steel: Like a history of Ireland that doesn’t mention the potato, it could have used a critical editor.
Another vote for Shogun, which will keep you busy for a while. I just finished Gai-Jin (I believe the third book in the Japanese saga), and it is equally involving. Clavell is one of the truly great storytellers.
Michael Chrichton’s recent Disclosure is a fascinating story of corporate intrigue in the computer industry with lots of high-tech (but not too much for the low-tech mind – mine).
My pick in the sci-fi genre is Ringworld by Larry Niven. Imagine a man-made habitat in space, an impossibly immense ring scribing a solid orbit around a sun. And it’s dying.
If you like biography, David McCullough’s Truman is one of the best.
Here’s a seconding for A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. The writer was a New Orleans English professor, who was a semi-reclusive man and lived with his mother. He committed suicide at the age of 31 in 1969, which was also the year he finished his sole novel. His mother found the manuscript under his bed, and spent years traversing New Orleans publishers and universities seeking publication, until finally it was published in 1980, and consequently won the Pulitzer.
It’s a great read, btw.