Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. No one should have to go through life without reading this.
It’s just a gem of a book, isn’t it? It’s the kind of book where every time I reread it, I pick up on something new.
And I think The Dollmaker sounds right up my alley, I will definitely put that on my to read list.
That book can hardly be characterised as one that “nobody else ever reads”. I agree that it is great, though.
The only other book mentioned in this thread that I have read is Time is a Simplest Thing, and I’m not sure I remember it correctly. Is it the one where psychics mind-travel to other planets and one of them gets an alien back home with him?
I don’t know anyone IRL that reads. In the past, I have recommended A Simple Plan by Scott Smith, because it has a fascinating premise and it’s easy to read. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is another that I consider easy to get “hooked” on. I don’t think I’ve actually succeeded in getting anyone to read more than a page or two. 
For audio books, I like I Know This Much is True, by Wally Lamb, read by George Guidall…and it’s gotta be the audio version, because I really think Mr. Guidall’s performance adds so much to it. I did get my mom to listen to some of it, but she was going through a lot of life changes at the time and she said she couldn’t concentrate enough to keep up with the plot. Grrr!
Hmmm - I have read Morrow before (Only Begotten Daughter) but not read Towing Jehovah - have to pick it up. Thanks Birdmonster - and Handling Sin looks like a winner, too…
Mine are pretty broad:
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**Please Kill Me: an Oral History of Punk ** by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. An incredibly readable, fascinating, well-researched and definitive look at the evolution of punk rock from the Velvets, through the Pistols, co-written by the guy who coined the use of the word punk in the sense that it has come be known for in music, Legs McNeil.
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Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami - Murakami wrote Norwegian Wood, called the Catcher in the Rye of Japan, but getting him boxed-in in the 80’s with young turk lit authors like Jay McInerny and Brett Easton Ellis. This book - along with another excellent book called A Wild Sheep Chase - separated Murakami from that group and put him on a path to where he is one of the most respected authors working today. This book is a surreal mystery - a fun page turner with hints of violence and sex, and also an inquiry into who we are as individuals. The lead character gets sucked into a scheme to rent his memory to store facts (kinda like the old Gibson story Johnny Mnemonic) and his story alternates with actions in shadow world that is much more the calm interior of the spirit. How do these worlds intersect? That would be telling. Murakami’s stuff reads excellently in English…
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**Liege Killer **by Christopher Hinz - goes in an out of print. Strictly B-grade hard sci-fi, I have read it a few times and simply can’t put it down when I do, in an almost guilty-pleasure sort of way. It is a few thousand years in the future, there was a war that rendered Earth uninhabitable, so survivors live in space stations orbiting it. Re-introduced into this situation is a paratwa, a genetically-bred assassin that is two humans that share one brain - use of paratwas was what led to the destruction of the Earth previously. How did it get here? How can it be stopped? Tons of plot holes, but it reads, to me like a move screenplay for a Terminator-type of sci-fi action flik. Big, dumb fun - but a lot of fun.
My $.02
Hitman is truly great. I love genre-busters. 
Another truly great little book that I’ve never heard of anyone reading except me, but which I recommend continually: Zod Wallop Bt William Browning Spenser - it is sort of like Dr. Suess meets Philip K. Dick and Tolkien while on LSD … and at the same time, packs an effective emotional punch.
The Snouters by Harald Stumpke – translated from a German original. Sature describes the adaptive radiation of a variety of lage-nosed rodents living on an isolated island and evolving to fit into all the available ecological niches, a la the finches on the Galapagos that Darwin described. Except that the forms these rodents take on and the survival strategies they use are often outrageously unlikely, yet described in scientific earnest, and given real-sounding taxonimical designations. It looks as if they made some of the Snouterrs resemble their scientific colleagues – which sounds like a cute little in-joke until you read closely and discover that this variety traps its prey in its copious nasal mucous discharge, oer something. A real treat for Evolution nerds and Stephen Jay Gould fans:
And somebody eveidently wrote a sequel:
End Product: The First Taboo by Dan Sabbath. I have the only copy of this book I’ve ever seen or heard of. It’s a book about – well – shit. More than you ever wanted to know about excrement, and its place in history. A truly perverse read. And I’ve had occasion to quote and cite it on this Board. (Which says something about this Board):
By the way, I’ve read Wasp by Russell, too. It’s great, as is his novel Sinister Barrier, which has to be the ultimate paranoid novel. Both are available, and the NEFSA volume Entities has them both in one cover, with two other novels:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/002-0905487-8726459?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Eric+Frank+Russell
Had to put in an inter-library loan request. :o
Same here. In fact, I need to go buy another copy of the book because the first two I owned, I lent out to people who have not read it and not returned it. Argh!
Well, of course, with a handle like Dung Beetle you had to…
I’d add to Towing Jehovah both Bible Stories for Adults and Only Begotten Daughter .
My non-Morrow books would have to include The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe and Charles Stross’s first novel Singularity Sky . It’s kind of uneven in places, but there is so much imagination there it’s scary!
In my circles, my favourite book Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan. My family won’t read it because Sagan is an atheist. They will sit around at Christmas discussing the benefits of the Q-Ray bracelet*, but Satan might invade if they read a book by an author who doesn’t believe in the same god as them.
Throw in Hero With a Thousand Faces as another fave
*After nearly ruining a weekend at a resort in November by raising a big stink their opposition to gay marriage I felt I should keep my mouth shut over the Q-Ray. It’s just a fucking magnet and their $30, but it was still trying though.
I’m delighted to see another Donleavy fan on the board. When I read the OP, the first thing that came to my mind was The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival and Manners. This may be the single funniest book I’ve ever read in my life.
It’s a series of essays, some just a single line; other several pages, about all kinds of situations and the proper way to behave.
An example:
“Upon Coming Upon Two Citizens Engaged in a Fight
It is quite an enjoyable sight watching two suddenly infuriated guys really slam each other around, and you must take some pleasures where you find them. However good citizenship insists you do something. But first reconnoiter from behind an abutment and stay there if the antagonists are armed. If it is fists, advance closer and then you might, with appropriate sporting admonitions, make sure that fair play obtains. But on no account part the antagonists. Not only is there far too much peacemaking these days, but combatants will frequently turn in your direction and after beating the bejesus out of you, end up shaking hands and complimenting each other on the good job they did doing it.”
Two books which I turn to with great pleasure every few years, but which relatively few people I know have read (and, among Dopers, a mere handful), are:
George R.R. Martin’s Tuf Voyaging - a wonderful collection of interrelated science-fiction short stories about the phlegmatic captain, owner and sole crewmember of a gigantic starship. Haviland Tuf goes from planet to planet, hiring himself - and his ship’s awesome capabilities - out for ecological engineering. It’s got funny, whipsmart dialogue, great insights into politics, environmentalism and overpopulation, a cloned and very testy T.Rex, and telepathic cats. Good Lord, what a great book! A masterpiece.
Gary Jennings’s Aztec - Mel Gibson only wishes he could make a movie that captures a lost culture as well as this book. This huge page-turner follows the life of Mixtli, an Aztec peasant who rises to the top of Aztec society, and finds himself in the court of Moctecuzoma when the conquistadores arrive. Sex, warfare, architecture, commerce, sex, human sacrifice, exploration, romance, sex, more warfare, politics, intrigue, espionage and, oh yeah, some more sex and warfare. To say nothing of a trenchant critique of 16th C. Catholicism and the Inquisition. If you love historical fiction, you’ve gotta read this. Highly, highly recommended.
You’re on. I just reserved it at the library.
I know folks have read my favorite book, I just haven’t met any of 'em. Maybe the title makes it a hard sell, but I can’t convince any of my near and dear to crack open A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin. It’s not just about life in the trenches, it’s about an old coot professor emeritus of Aesthetics who tells his whole life story and it’s as beautiful as it is brilliant.
Read it, dammit!
(waving to Eve) I have JC’s “My Way of Life!”
My two obscure faves are Liz Renay’s “My Face For the World to See” (John Waters thought the sequel should be titled “My Ass For the World To Kiss”) and “A Guide To Elegance” - by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux. Miss Dariaux was a former directrice at Nina Ricci and as I learned a few weeks ago from an email inquiry I directed to Nina Ricci - still alive! Her book “Entertaining With Elegance” is great, too.
VCNJ~
It was John Griesemer - good book!
My favourite obscure rock’n’roll novel - Jambeaux by Laurence Gonzales.
The obscure books I find myself going back to read over again are all old and most are likely long out of print:
*House of Zeor * and the rest of the Sime~Gen series by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah - Some of these are starting to come back into print again, and it’s about time! Fantastic series by one of the original Star Trek convention organizers and uber-fans. It tells the story of a world where humanity has mutated into two sides, the Simes and the Gens. The Gens produce a substance that they don’t need, but the Simes do–the only catch is, the Sime usually kills the Gen when he takes it. Some Simes, called “channels” can take the substance from the Gen and “transfer” it to a normal Sime, but most of Sime society (at least in the beginning) considers this “perversion” and aims to end the whole practice. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it. Highly recommended.
The Hero from Otherwhere, a YA book by Jay Williams (half of the duo who wrote the “Danny Dunn” series). I actually enjoyed it much more than the DD books (which I liked as a kid but haven’t made the effort to revisit).
Change Song, a very obscure YA sci-fi book by Lee Hoffman. It’s so obscure, in fact, that during my high school days I actually did a bad thing and stole it from the library after not being able to find it anywhere else (claiming I’d lost it and paying for it, of course). Considering it hadn’t been checked out in like five years before I’d borrowed it, I didn’t feel horrible about it, but I did feel bad. (Please don’t anybody yell at me–I know it was wrong, I was 16, and I’ve never done it again in the 20+ years since.)
Tara Kane. I normally don’t like “romance” type books, but this one is more in the genre of Gone With The Wind set in the Yukon Territory during the Gold Rush. It’s also historically based. Lots of action and survival stuff to go with the mushy bits.
Strange Creations by Donna Kossy. I think anyone who is interested in biology should read this book.
How could things be any worse! Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah! Ok, I’m done now.
Love these kinds of threads - I find so many good books through them.
I’ve loved The Dollmaker for quite a while.
The book I’m always recommending is Kristin Lavransdatter the wonderful trilogy of books about a woman in medieval Norway. Some people on this board have read it, but I’ve never found anyone else in real life.
I also used to recommend Lawrence Durrell’s books quite often.