Recommend to me some things to read...

Cafe Society
1

I need some reading recommendations. Here’s what I’ve read lately and loved/liked:

Water for Elephants, The Life of Pi, Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, Stephen King’s The Long Walk, Let the Right One In. I like true crime and interesting memoirs, good horror, good apocalyptic fiction, good mysteries with twists like Derailed.

Here’s what I found unreadable lately: Footfall (a big disappointment since I liked Lucifer’s Hammer), The Widows of Eastwick, and The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, the very good movie notwithstanding.

So - any recommendations? I’ve got a few credits to swap…

2

I don’t know much about the books you’ve listed, so I’ll just take a couple of stabs at it.

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters. It’s a ghost story set in post WWII England and I picked it as the best book I read in 2009. Creepy.

Gentlemen and Players, by Joanne Harris. A mystery at an all-boys school.

3

You might enjoy The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Also, have you read The Red Tent by Anita Diamant?

4

The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane

5

Thanks guys.

Yes, I read The Road. It was good. I keep seeing The Red Tent and passing it up. Thanks for the recommendations - I’ll check them out! It’s good to get the names of ones I haven’t heard of.

6

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein is a great book and it received a good review by the author of Water for Elephants.

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman has been my recommendation to everyone lately. I wanted to devour the whole book in one sitting, but I forced myself to put it down after each vignette. It is truly a fantastic book.

7

NONFICTION: Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt. It’s about driving. not drugs.

8

These don’t strictly fit your criteria but all, IMHO, are worth reading.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Strange but True by John Searle
The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno
The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte
King Rat by China Mieville
Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallender mysteries.
Anything by Anne Tyler esp. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and the Accidental Tourist
Anything by David Mitchell esp. Black Swan Green and Cloud Atlas
Anthing by Walter Tevis esp. The Queen’s Gambit and The Man Who Fell to Earth (his best book “Mockingbird” is out of print, unfortunately).
Anything by Robertson Davies esp. The Deptford Trilogy and the Cornish Trilogy

9

For the classics, I loved “Rebecca” and “Babbitt” and “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn”

10

Any of Martin Cruz Smith’s “Arkady Renko” novels – Gorky Park, Polar Star, Red Square, Wolves Eat Dogs and Stalin’s Ghost. Each takes part during a different stage of recent Russian history, from the Soviet period through today. The great thing about them is that they are easily found in used bookstores or places like Salvation Army thrift shops and stores like Value Village.

If you like lighter reads, there’s always good old Mickey Spillane (especially the Mike Hammer novels), and a lot of new hard-boiled detective fiction from Hard Case Crime: http://www.hardcasecrime.com/

This is the kind of stuff I like to read when I’m not reading history or true crime.

Suggestions for true crime:

*The Steven Truscott Story *and *Who Killed Lynne Harper? *by Bill Trent, along with *Until You Are Dead *by Julian Sher, all having to do the the Steven Truscott case, which is a notorious wrongful conviction case in Canadian history.

Another Canadian case you might have not heard of: the Wilbert Coffin case. Books to check out here include Jacques Hebert’s The Coffin Affair.

There are also numerous books written around several famous cases which I’ve found interesting:

The Black Dahlia
JFK Assassination
The Harry Oakes case
The Profumo Affair

most of which can be found by researching online.

11

Zombie, by Joyce Carol Oates, is a short novel about a serial killer. Really messed-up.

Under the Skin, by Michel Faber, is beautifully written, and by turns sad, humorous, satirical, ironic, and disturbing.