I’ll just go ahead and list some favorites I can remember:
Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things (perhaps my favorite book ever) John Irving - The Hotel New Hampshire Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood Paul Auster - Leviathan George R. R. Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire (series) Stephen King - The Stand Haven Kimmel - A Girl Named Zippy
I don’t really like stories that strive to be too intellectual or arty at the cost of humanity and good pacing. However, one of my favorite chapters ever is “The Grand Inquisitor”, in The Brothers Karamazov. It’s a long-winded ideological tirade, but still amazingly powerful (just wish the entire book was nearly as good!). So, there’s always exceptions.
Anyway, along these lines, please recommend your absolute stand-outs (explanations are most welcome, too).
I don’t know if I am going to be scoffed at for the possibility of this being cliche, but Vonnegut’s “Slaughter-House Five” is probably my favorite book. I never see him get a whole lot of love on this message board, though–maybe everyone has outgrown him, or something.
In the book, though, he actually mentions “The Brothers Karamazov:” one of the characters says that it has includes everything there is to know about life. I tried reading it, but I kept falling asleep.
(P.S. There’s actually a very good possibility, the more I think about it, that the statement about TBK was actually in “Hocus Pocus.” I don’t know; one or the other.)
I just finished reading a two-book series (bilogy?) that my wife aptly described as a mix between George R.R. Martin and Ellen Kushner: Flesh and Spirit, followed by Breath and Bone. They’re very well-written, with an interesting protagonist and a great, move-em-along plot.
If you like Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire, I’d recommend all his other works, particularly Garp, Owen Meany, and Widow for a Year. He also did a collection of his short stories with commentaries written later called “Trying to Save Piggy Snead.”
*Grendel * by John Gardner. The Beowulf saga told, of course, from the perspective of the beast. Who is both very beastly, and much more human, than perhaps we would like.
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I don’t really know what to do with just a title; explanations for why a book is special would be most appreciated.
I’m interested in good stories, so non-fiction’s cool, too.
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry – I’ve never heard a negative comment about this book.
I just finished The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall – it’s been compared to John Irving (who isn’t a favorite of mine) but I think the comparison works.
If you liked The Stand, you might like Swan Song by Robert McCammon. I haven’t read McCammon for awhile though, and he might not be as good as I remember. I hated his recent historical effort, Speaks the Nightbird.
I love the Song of Ice and Fire books too – you might want to try Steven Erikson’s Malazan series, beginning with Gardens of the Moon. Or start with Midnight Tides, which is easier to get into.
I haven’t read A Girl Named Zippy, but for coming of age novels, you can’t beat Black Swan Green by David Mitchell.
Just about anything by James Ellroy, especially the four-part LA Series (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz) and a couple of his older stand-alone ones, Brown’s Requiem and Clandestine. Tough, poetic, vicious and intricate crime novels that are both horrific and beautiful at the same time, and blend recent history and personages into the fictitious action smooth and seamless.
Robert Ferrigno has written some damned good ones too, especially Horse Latitudes and The Cheshire Moon.
Then there’s Richard Price. His first four novels (The Wanderers, Bloodbrothers, Ladies’ Man, and The Breaks) are just fucking excellent, but the quality of his work falls off really sharply after that, IMNAAHO.
And if you’re up to going all the way back to the early-to-mid-20th, there are a few real choice ones you might have already read but that I’ll recommend anyway just in case. There’s The Pawnbroker, by Edward Lewis Wallant --which is depressing, but very good. Thieves Like Us,a 1937 novel by Edward Anderson, is one I just can’t recommend highly enough, it’s such an amazingly excellent book. And just about anything by Carson McCullers is great, especially The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter and* Clock Without Hands*. Going even further back, Nathaniel West wrote four novels before he got killed in a car wreck, of which The Day Of The Locust is very good indeed, I think; *A Cool Million *and Miss Lonelyhearts are pretty good but not as good as TDOTL, and the other one he wrote just stinks on ice, so you can skip it, even if you get one of those editions which collects all four of them.
Enthusiastically seconded. Also Martin’s Fevre Dream, a vampire novel set along the Mississippi River before the Civil War. Great atmosphere and delightfully chilling.
Gary Jennings’s Aztec is a terrific big blockbuster of a historical novel, about the Aztec Empire before and just after the Spanish arrive. Highly recommended.
I just read Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin’s Three Cups of Tea, a pretty good nonfiction book about building schools for impoverished kids in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a humanitarian imperative and a cultural counterweight to the pro-al Qaeda madrassas. It’s a pretty good book.