Your (least) favorite fiction books

Textkit Community Open Board
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Yes, this topic has been discussed before, but I don’t think it’s reached to the annoying point yet, has it?

I’m curious to know what kind of fiction you people digest (other than ancient Greek and Latin of course :slight_smile:). Have your favorite works actually influenced your life? I need to really make a reading list of fiction work. I am embarrassingly way behind in the fiction department. Also I don’t think I ever read a romance novel or a mystery novel. If anybody is well read in those genres or read something interesting/entertaining in those genres I’d like to know what you recommend. What was the worst thing you ever read? I actually would like to read them too. For some reason I find it appealing to investigate something that somebody reacted really negatively to…

Any time anyone mentions a book (fiction or non-fiction) in this forum, I usually investigate it. You know, it’s actually hard finding good fiction. You either read what’s popular or learn about books through book reviews… I wonder, how do you guys stumble upon your favorite stuff? I barely ever read book reviews… From my experience, the best books I’ve read were through recommendations -anyone one from an online diary writer to people I know in real life… I think having a discussion about books is much better filter than book reviews. Also, there is a lot you can learn (or conjecture :wink: ) about a person through their favorite books.

So please list away!

(Oh yeah, William, I’ve read the SF book entry already. I hope you don’t think I’m such a snoop. :wink:)

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My all-time favourite fiction authors are Thomas Hardy and Isaac Asimov. Asimov is sci-fi, of course, so if you are interested at all in that, check him out (see also Robert Silverberg… wow). Hardy is an old English author from late 19th, early 20th C. Amazing. Brilliant. Every book is a tragedy (I like tragedy) and often controversial (some were banned for being racy, though by today’s standards they are very tame). My favourite book of his is “The Mayor of Casterbridge”, but it was “Jude the Obscure” which first got me hooked. His poetry is great too.

I like all the old ones… David Copperfield, Middlemarch, Candide, The Brothers Karamazov, Robinson Crusoe, A Farewell to Arms… beautiful.

Oh, and just recently I read “The Life of Pi” by Yann Martel, which was Canada’s favourite book last year. I do recommend it… very different and intriguing.

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I have recently just thought of the same subject…

in Sci Fi, i like asimov too.
but my favourite fiction book is “the compass rose” by Ursula K. Le Guin.
it is a collection of short stories. it is categorized as Sci Fi, and that is an insult in my opinion. science fiction literature is considered lesser…
this book is a riddle to me. it is among the best books i ever read, and it is out of print! i just can’t understand why.
has anyone here read it?

i am a great Le Guin fan in general. have you you read the Earthsea series?
thats Fantasy.

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Ahhh!! Too many already. Hahaha. :laughing: But you don’t have to stop though. Please keep dishing them out.

heh heh, How come I’ve never heard of the US having a favorite book? (I’m not sure if bestseller counts.) I think I should live in Canada… Anyways, I keep seeing that book in bookstores and never bothered to open it up. I tend to ignore things obnoxiously displayed as adverstisements. I might take a better look at it next time though. :slight_smile:

have you you read the Earthsea series?

I’ve never even heard of Le Guin. :slight_smile:

Ok, Asimov has a double mention. Umm… so which book was the best of Asimov? I didn’t get to Asimov, I didn’t even finish Bradburry yet. Most sci-fi/fantasy stuff I’ve read are comic books when I was young. Ok, I must confess that I was mostly a comic book reader. I have no shame in that …maybe a little :wink:. Comic book format is an artistic media like any other media. Like animation, it is associated with kids. Somehow the idea that words and pictures combined is low brow art… boy, I wish I can find a cultural/historical explanation for that one …because Japan’s comic book attitude is very different. “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud is my comic book manifesto.

it is categorized as Sci Fi, and that is an insult in my opinion. science fiction literature is considered lesser…

And comic books even lesser. :slight_smile: Are you saying that you consider science fiction lesser or are you speaking in the third person context? Insults are getting more complicated in literature culture… So if I were to make fun of David Copperfield, I would say David is so SciFi …? :wink: Anyway, I don’t understand this haughty attitude towards SciFi. Why do the literary snobs look down at SciFi? I’d like to check out their silly arguments and chuckle a bit.

{edit: Heh heh heh. Just checked Will’s list again and ol’ Willy just mentioned Le Guin too. Should I be embarrased now?}

5

I meant considered by others.
although a lot of the sci-fi literature is not very good, i think it can be a most powerful tool.

i will now go to check the other thread you were talking about.
Cya!

6

Hey, I didn´t know how wicked guys are hanging around here! :wink:
I don´t read very much fiction these times, but I like SF the most.
My favourite ones are H.P.Lovecraft´s short stories. They´re like E.A.Poe´s, whom i also admire.
if anybody´s interested whether i like tolkien i say No, I don´t like him.
cliché, cliché, …

7

Of the classic English novelists, I would recommend Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. A hugely enjoyable, but alas recently deceased, modern novelist is the Canadian Robertson Davies.

From detective fiction, try P D James for the more traditional type, though, particularly in her later works she uses the form to explore all sorts of social issues. Ruth Rendell writing under her own name or as Barbara Vine has a good series of police procedural detective stories with her detective Chief Inspector Wexford. Perhaps the best detective story I’ve ever read is Barbara Vine’s “Asta’s Book”. Ellis Peter’s Brother Cadfael series is also excellent.

I assume you’ve read “The Lord of the Rings.” If not, remedy the situation at once. (aside: a lot of it is cliche because he’s had so many imitators. It wasn’t cliche back in the 1950s). I can also recommend C. S. Lewis’s SF trilogy, “Out of the Silent Planet”, “Perelandra”, and “That Hideous Strength.” For more humorous SF, try Douglas Adams’s “The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy” and its sequels.

If you want some novels set in Ancient Greece, I would recommend anything by Mary Renault. My particular favourites are “The King Must Die” and “The Bull from the Sea”, telling the story of Theseus, and her Alexander Trilogy, “Fire from Heaven”, “The Persian Boy”, and “Funeral Games”. Also set in the ancient world are Gore Vidal’s “Creation”, where you will meet everybody who was anybody in the first half of the 5th Century BC in Greece, Persia, India, and China, and “Julian”, based on the life of the Roman Emperor, Julian the Apostate.

That should keep you going.
:laughing:

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Ok, well Asimov has already been mentioned (try the Foundation series). And Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit… the Hobbit was the first book I ever read and so when I was about 11 I think I finally sat down and read the Lord of the Rings too.
Other SF and fantasy:
Olaf Stapleton’s Last and First Men (dunno if it’s still in print though), which is great, I think I recommended it here once before …
I’ve read a lot of other fantasy and SF books, but they often have a terribly bad ending (as in a stupidly happy ending, that wasn’t well thought out). Loads of books are written really well apart from the very end. Tad Williams Otherland series for example is great except for the end, same for Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Trilogy.
I really love Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, if you haven’t read the books, you really should, they are great. They’re still fantasy, although he originally started writing them to make fun of the classic fantasy genre.

Other fiction books: uh… that’s a hard one… :wink:
I’ve read others of course, but I can’t remember liking them much. I’ve nearly finnished reading Middlemarch, and there’s another one that’s promising at the moment but I haven’t finished it yet, so I won’t recommend it yet :stuck_out_tongue: .
But I’d certainly not recomment Charles Dickens. Just telling you now, because quite a few others did and I don’t agree. His characters are just so stupid! He can’t invent good ones :stuck_out_tongue: (at least that’s what I think).

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oh, reading these brought so many more ideas!

The Chrysalids is one we had to read in school… it is sort of a sci-fi, about a post-nuke world where the “normal” people obsess religiously about “mutants” and hate them and treat them as outcasts. Well there is a group of kids who aren’t obvious mutants but who are telepathic… the book is about them and about religion and normality, excellent and thought-provoking.

You mentioned Bradbury, and of course Farenheit 451 is one of my favourites.

If you want to get started with Asimov (he has so many books!) then I recommend The Ugly Little Boy, which he co-wrote with Robert Silverberg–they wrote a few together, all of which are fantastic. The Ugly Little Boy blows apart the idea of sci-fi being lame, as it deals more with the human story than with the science. It’s a beautiful and heartwrenching story.

oh, and Madeleine L’engle’s stuff was great too… there’s a trilogy I read when I was a kid, including “A Wrinkle in Time”, “A Wind in the Door”, and “A Swiftly Tilting Planet”. I remember loving them but haven’t read them since I was about 12.

The Life of Pi is about a boy who is stuck in a lifeboat with a Bengal Tiger. It sounds bizarre and it is, but the book is fascinating and claims that it can make a reader believe in God… and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was true in many cases. As for Canada having a favourite book, this one won some awards but it was also one of the books chosen for a national book club program thing they were doing last year, so lots and lots of people have read this book and even now, a year later, I hear about it all the time from various people.

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Wow, what a topic. I’m unsure of where even to begin.

I havn’t read a lot of Sci-Fi (been meaning to check out Asimov though…) but I must recommend Orson Scott Card, he wrote a series of books (well…two series really but one’s a spin-off), the first book being Ender’s Game. It’s really well done in my opinion and interested me as a non-Sci-Fi fan.

The Chrysalids is one we had to read in school… it is sort of a sci-fi, about a post-nuke world where the “normal” people obsess religiously about “mutants” and hate them and treat them as outcasts. Well there is a group of kids who aren’t obvious mutants but who are telepathic… the book is about them and about religion and normality, excellent and thought-provoking.

I have to second that recommendation heartily as its probably the only school assigned book I’ve really enjoyed. I warn you though, it’ll make you think.

Despite all the Canadian hype, I personally found Life of Pi to be slow and unengaging. Course thats my personal opinion and judging from all the awards I’m clearly not in the majority.

For general fiction I have to recommend anything by Pauline Gedge (known mainly for her books on ancient Egypt), I’d start with Eagle Against the Raven first (its about the Roman invasion into Britannia but told from the Celtic perspective.). Colleen Mccullough is fantastic as well, she has a historical fiction series on the Romans, I cant recall the first book but one in the series is The Grass Crown. Her books are meticuously researched and thus ring authentic.

In terms of your more well known authors, I’m a fan of John Grisham (best one is The Chamber IMO) and Steven King (read The Green Mile, book outdoes the movie by far!).

A book that received a ton of press attention this past year was The Lovely Bones by Annie Sebold, I thought it was great too. It tells the story through the perspective of the fourteen year old girl from heaven.

Dickens has been mentioned multiple times, he isn’t fantastic but Great Expectations and Oliver Twist were the ones I enjoyed most by him.

I’m also a huge fan of Bruce Courtenay, his best IMO being The Power of One which is one of the best book I"ve ever read. He also did a trilogy called the Potato Factory trilogy, the main character being the man Dickens appartently based Fagin on in Oliver Twist. He’s written others that are very good too, didn’t like his latest couple though.

If you dont mind reading 1000 page books or so try out Edward Rutherford, he takes a place (e.g. Stonehenge, or London or Russia etc.) and traces back its history multiple generations and then tells the fictional story of the family lines throwing in tons of the historical and socio-economic stuff along the way.

Wilbur Smith is also awesome, his best known stuff is a series about the Courtenay family in South Africa. First book is When the Lion Feeds. He has quite a bit out now but has traced the family from about the 1600’s to present day. Quite a man too!

There are tons more but I’m sure you’ll get more than enough reading suggestions on this thread.

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Do you mean the blog entry?

For non-SF I think every classicist should read Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (it has nothing to do with the recent film). A woman has a son who turns out to be a genius, so there are Homer lessons on trains, and conjugations of interesting Arabic verbs while he waits for the arrival of the next candidate to be his father (mom will not say who it is). The narration is very nonlinear at first, then settles down.

I also always recommend C.J. Cherryh, who once taught Latin. There are no Latinist aliens in her books, but she has a great sensitivity to language, much better than most SF/Fantasy authors. I’m not the first to suspect that she spent a lot of time reading Latin historians. Her books are almost always full of complex politics.

(The next time you read some fluff SF/fantasy note how the languages work: bad guys always have lots of gutterals (g,k,x,kh, etc) and huge consonant clusters (ptkogh!), and the airy elves get all the vowels, l and r. Apostrophes are decoration. Magic is always conducted in Old High Blahblahblah.)

To avoid: White Apples, by Jonathan Carroll. I just read this for the SF reading group in town I belong to. It’s awful and infuriating.

(To rimon-jad (what in the world does that name mean?): I agree on Tolkien. I find his sentiments sententious and the prose over-wrought. Having said that, as a language inventor, I have to respect such an amazing work of imaginative philology. I just need a huge insulin injection after exposure to his writing.)

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yes, annis, tolkien is nothing but a thief. he kidnapped folklore of severe german nations, put it into his simple minded head and made a mixture which cannot be called “literature”. :smiling_imp:
he was a kind of linguist, though. if he hadn´t waste his lifetime with such fables, he could have achieve something. the languages he created in the middle-earth, i mean, he really created them.
for all hebraists know what rimon-jad means. :sunglasses:
rimon - pomegranet (literally grenade)
jad - hand
thus rimon-jad is HANDGRENADE

P.S. i think it´s weird if anyone´s seriously interested in C**P lit.
average is 3000 books per life

USE YOUR TIME WISELY :exclamation:

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hehe, finally will you have to unveil!

pm me if you advance, dear pomegranate.

i thought i am the only one!
thanks god.

14

How could i forget “Shogun” by James Clevell (spelling?)?
it is a most wonderful book about japan in the 16th century.
i even read it when i was experiencing a Reader’s block.

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I don’t read at all. The last novel I read, I was forced to read it by Peter Dickinson about 2 years ago called “The Ropemaker”. I usually hate such far fetched stories. It was class.

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Do you mean the blog entry?

Yup. :wink:

Heh heh, I knew someone had to mention Tolkien. I’m glad that there is a difference of opinion. I’ve read the Hobbit and most of the first book of LTOR. So far, I’d say I’m in between people who like his work and dislike it.

I’m going to check out White Apples now. Heh heh.

That’s funny, I didn’t even mention what I liked. Well two books come to mind at the moment. James and the Giant Peach. Catcher in the Rye.

I’m surprised no one mentioned Ayn Rand yet. :wink: But I do enjoy her books even though it’s a bit preachy at times. Sometimes she does piss me off because of her writing style. Example: “Mr. Blah hates to drink water so much that he likes it.” “She loves him so much that she hates him.” Sometimes I agree with her fans and sometimes I agree with her critics. I guess you can say I like her and hate her. :slight_smile:

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I hated all the books I had to read at school, for some reason we only read terrible stuff. The only book I liked at all of the ones we had to read was Hesse’s Unterm Rad (dunno the English title, sorry).
Lol, no one has mentioned Harry Potter yet! :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway, in defence of Tolkien: yes, he did base his stuff on old legends, so what? I think it’s great the stuff. But the most important thing is his writing style. After reading the Lord of the Rings you should take a brake before reading any other book I think - otherwise you’ll just cringe at their writing style and use of words. Tolkien writes so well, you don’t notice it though until you pick up another ‘normal’ book after reading Tolkien.

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Huh, I don’t know where to begin. I loved all of James Clavell’s Asian Saga; he is able to weave remarkable storylines and the character development is the best. Shogun was the first one of his I read and I was hooked after that.

Poe is also one of my favorites, though his stories are either melancholic or bizarre. But he also had poems to add to that, needless to say.

Hiero’s Journey was highly recommended to me, but I never came around to reading it. Has anyone here done so? Other authors where mentioned before me, so I need not reiterate.

I also must defend Tolkien. He wrote the books because he felt that England had no good myths and legends of its own, and I have never heard it to be derivative from other Germanic myths.

I don’t see what’s wrong with him “wasting his life” on his books. He liked writing them and he wrote them for his own satisfaction. Honestly, it’s not as though he lived to serve the populace; he didn’t even expect them to be popular. And if you’re a fan of fantasy, you have Tolkien to thank, for he brought it to life.

Calling him “kind of a linguist” is demeaning to him! He was deep into Greek and Latin at the age of 15, where he proceeded to learn more throughout his life! And Emma makes good point. When I last finished reading the Lord of the Rings, my brother convinced me to read some Terry Brooks and I just couldn’t enjoy it, it seemed so simple in tongue.

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As for fantasies, I liked “die unendliche Geschichte”, by Michael Ende, quite much. I got a strong impression with the book. Full of metaphors and rhymes, and a great twist (which is like that of Matrix), too.

The book I hated myself to read it was Arthur Clark’s “Rendezvous with Rama” series. The first book was okay, but the following sequels were pushed into a christian judgement day plot.

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Is he really pushing a Christian plot? I’ve always assumed he just likes to think BIG, and destroyes planets, galaxies and universes for fun and dramatic imact.