I'm in dire need of new reading material, so what are some of your favorite books? Short plot previews would also be appreciated.

If you haven't read Stephen Kings Under The Dome yet do so before the mini series hits tv in a few months. I read the book a few years ago and loved it.

my wife just read that, she said it was really good. I'm a huge King fan but haven't checked it out yet.

I love band biographies. even if you don't like the artist they are still worth reading. the Violent J from ICP and Marilyn Manson ones are great.

I enjoyed the Greg Graffin (Bad Religion) one, Anarchy Evolution. It's on my mind because I just read it last month.

-spence reads at a 10th grade level, hes ahead of his class!

-mark r is asian and probably read a book in the time it took me to type this post

Spence....read anything by Bernard Cornwell. My favorite is the viking series.

Jake

Truly shocked no hilarious funboy said Mein Kampf yet.

Molly Fyde series by Hugh Howey if you like sci-fi. I'm about to start book 4.

First Blood, David Morrell
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Bad Seed, Ian Johnston (Nick Cave biography, 1995)

If you dig shorts, I'd recommend Raymond Carver. 'Cathedral' is a great collection and the titular story is amazing. He writes gritty/dirty realism.

Snow Crash.

This.

Also, yes, I'm a huge King fan, but why fuck around? Go straight for the Dark Tower series. One of the best things that's ever happened in all of existence.

Big +1. I've been meaning to re-read this one and The Diamond Age, which I liked even more than SC.

Books mentioned that I have read:

Dark Tower series (well, read the first four books anyway.)
Dracula (spent probably an entire month on it in my senior literature class)
Cathedral (read in my Creative Writing class)
The M. Manson autobiography, Long Road Out of Hell (I may hate him and his music, but it was a good book and a friend got it for me back when I was in middle school)

Everything else here I will definitely check out. Thanks for all the recommendations!

I take it Booktal Archives is down for Spence?

So, you didn't read the series...................................................................................................................

I agree with Spence, Dark Tower got ridiculous after the first four books. By that point I was too invested to give up, even though I should've.





Also:

Hail traveler! If I may, I would suggest "The Lusty Argonian Maid".

OK, I also am on the "first four books" Dark Tower train. I have read them twice and I greatly enjoyed them, especially Wizard and Glass. I have actually decided that I will never read 6 and 7. I'm taking the "journey is better than the destination" stance on this one. It will forever be a good story whose ending is shrouded in mystery to me. Never knowing seems fitting, somehow, for this series.

I can't read books anymore. Too boring.

lol @ Dark Tower when Stephen King writes about Roland finding Stephen King writing about the Dark Tower. Still loved the series though.

For a recent series, The Passage was great, though The Twelve (sequel) that came out a few months ago was pretty good.

Clive Barker Books of Blood mentioned a few posts above is a good read, William Burroughs Naked Lunch, and almost all Hunter S Thompson books.

hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
psalms of isaak by ken scholes
anything by neil gaiman, american gods is especially good

Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of the most overrated books ever. It's written poorly and very boring.

Brilliant idea!

Wizard and Glass was definitely my favorite, but I can't understand not finishing the series if you're that far into it. Maybe I'm too much of a faggy King fan boy to think the last three books were awesome as well.

if you dig non-fiction stuff around travel, geopolitical shizzz, history, or music shit check out some of these that blew my mind:

Black Earth - a journey through Russia after the fall (totally bleak and captivating)

Miles Davis' autobiography is great, he's the biggest asshole in the universe

The Real Frank Zappa book is awesome, tons of great opinions

Guns, Germs, & Steel is heavy reading but is worth it (it's a dense history of how different civilizations adapted to their surrounding environments and resources, enabling different speeds of development, ending up in heavy technological imbalances)

Travels of Marco Polo (the actual book he wrote like 700 years ago) is mindblowing, he just passes through and describes all the old cultures he encounters, endless amount of obscure groups of people and practices...

Behind the Urals - an American communist traveled to the USSR in the 1920's to support the cause, worked as a welder at a steel plant in the harshest conditions imaginable, stuck around until Stalin's purges, and documented the whole thing.

The Hunter, the Hammer, Heaven - this journalist documents his visits to three totally fucked up places... Sierra Leone, Chechnya, and Bougainville, wicked harsh and heavy reading but awesome....

God is Not Great - great reading for people who are opposed to religion, god, etc... Christopher Hitchens was the man.

'Asterios Polyp' is outstanding. It's a graphic novel, though.

Favorite books ever? Off the top of my head...

Ham on Rye - Charles Bukowski
The Confession of Nat Turner - William Styron
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (not kvlt, but whatever it rules)
Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
House of Leaves - Mark Danielwski
Where the Red Fern Grows - Wilson Rawls
Hide & Seek With Grover - Grover

The downside of turning a 60+ minute work commute into a 15 minute bike commute is that you don't get to read or listen to music as much anymore. Will be raiding thread for book suggestions.

Fantastic Four #45-50
Reprinted in Marvel Masterworks Vol 27

shutup fagget and read these:

Dune series - Frank Herbert's ecological thesis turned into imaginary vistas beyond your comprehension.

I second the Hitchens' God is Not Great. Find the audio book.

Skip Bukowski and read Céline.

a bunch of those books like God is Not Great, Letters to A Christian Nation, The God Delusion, are better in audio form than book. they are interesting to read but i feel like i was agreeing too much, they are made more for people who share opposing viewpoints. The audio for interviews, speeches, audio books, etc. is far more entertaining

Yeah I bought the audiobook and am listening now. Support.

Good thread. One thing I like about seeing book lists from different people is how the more frequently mentioned books fit in with a lot of varying themes and concepts based on the reader. It's interesting to me. That being said:

E.R. Eddison - The Worm Ouroboros (Easily my favorite fantasy novel)
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Brett Easton Ellis - American Psycho
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
Ken Kesey - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
Homer - The Iliad / Odyssey
Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Neil Gaiman - American Gods
The Eddas (Havamal, if I had to pick a favorite)
Jack Donovan - Androphilia
Julius Evola - Metaphysics Of War, Men Among The Ruins
Pentti Linkola - Can Life Prevail?
Sun Tzu - The Art Of War
Ted Kaczynski - Unabomber Manifesto
Robert Svoboda - Aghori (trilogy)
The Bhagavad Gita
Dave Brockie - Wargoul
Johnny Cash - Autobiography

Additionally, pretty much anything by Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard.

Wolf and Iron by Gordon R. Dickson - A post-apocalypse American travel story based on actual wilderness survival and animal behavioral science, and not zombies or radiation. Good read, Dickson has written other scifi stuff which I haven't checked out.

I suck at reading Fiction, it takes me forever. I've been reading my girlfriends copy of the Giver for like 2 years and I still can't finish it. However, my favorite writer is Bukowski and I just picked up 'Pulp'. I like non fiction stuff bout music and sports. I've rolled tons of joints on my Oil Can Boyd biography but still havn't dug in yet. THAT'S ALL I GOT FOR YAH KID.

Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics

Dorsai/The Childe Cycle is entirely amazing military science fiction if you're into that.

lol reading

Growing up, I was the exception who always greatly preferred Lloyd Alexander to J.R.R. Tolkien. It may be a bit simpler, but to this day I would enjoy Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain series as among my all-time favorites:

The Book of Three
The Black Cauldron
The Castle of Llyr
Taran Wanderer
The High King

Must be read in order, and great storytelling for helping even those who aren't always the best at visualizing while reading a book (like me) to see the story and the characters vividly.


For a non-fiction bio, I would also recommend, regardless of someone's politics:

Dreams From My Father


Honestly the best book I have read as an adult.

Pseudo-scientific horse shit.

LOL - it ain't conclusive, but horseshit? wouldn't go that far... i read some of the criticisms after finishing the book, even if his theory is off it's packed w/ tons of fascinating anthropological and historical tidbits, highly enjoyable if you ask me. the dude admits himself it's a borderline impossible thing to prove.

I just read Crytonomicon, and am currently reading REAMDE. (both of which are also by Neil Stephenson (i think i spelled his name wrong, but I'm too lazy to even open a new tab and check.) His shit's awesome, big big fan.

Here's a list of what I've read in the last couple months, it's ALL fantasy, so if you don't like that, then go away.

Joe Abercrombie
- The First Law Trilogy (the blade itself, until they are hanged, last argument of kings) Are all fantastic.
-Also by him is "Best served cold" which i was TOLD was a standalone book.. but is basically just book 4 of the First law books. Sure, it doesn't follow the same main characters, but MOST of the characters in the first trilogy are in this book.

Brandon Sanderson
- Mistborn Trilogy. (This shit's really good in the beginning, and the end, but a lil' slow in the middle.
-The way of Kings (first book in the stormlight archive, very very good. But alas, it's the only one in the series out yet, so it'll just frustrate you if you read it now.

Steven Erikson
-Malazan book of the fallen series (which i believe clocks in at nine books.. holy dark, dark, awesome stuff.)

Glenn Cook
-The black company series (or really the first three books "the books of the north") are fucking badass, and a fast read... actually, these are the only fast or quick read of any of the things I've mentioned.

Robert Jordan
READ THE WHEEL OF TIME SERIES - the last book in the series came out in january, and was awesome, so you have 14 books to go.

George R. R. Martin
The song of ice and fire series (because if you haven't heard about this/read it yet, then you either don't read fantasy ever, or you have really bad taste.)

it's OK, Metal Bystander is a eugenicist.

pretty good book written about art heists of Rembrants a lot of the stories are from museums here in mass. One of the theifs, Al Monday currently sells cars in the framingham area. A lot of local landmarks mentioned in mass if that intrigues you. It tells the story of the infamous Gardner heist, all the way back to heists from the 16th annd 17th century. it's actually written by the (current) director of security at the Gardner. Good read.

Reading Murder Machine by Jerry Capeci and Gene Mustain right now..pretty good but I think I like Brother's Bulger more minus some of the William Bulger parts. Be interesting who would 'win', Whitey or Roy Demeo.

Cunt- feminist book
Jim Carrol-At the movies
Rape of the Nan King
Virginia Woolf- Room of one's own

Now give me shit on feminist books.

Just finished The Road a little while ago, this sounds like my next read. Lots of good suggestions in this thread, I might have to get back into audiobooks.

Check out Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy if you haven't already. Also Dworkin's essays, especially the ones about classic literature, are really engaging.

Fun factoid: Jared Diamond (supposedly) set the field of membrane physics back a decade or two for being so opinionated and loud that no other academics would challenge him, and he ended up being proven wrong many years later.

Huge king fan and am now really interested in under the dome...

Go read his dark tower series before that gets made into TV or a movie. So good.

i haven't read this, but i can only imagine what it's like.

Who the fuck is Nan King?!??

... who recommends you indoctrinate yourself with the works of the Italian "anti-fascist" and SS "scholar" who opposed Mussolini's and Hitler's parties as too populist/modernist(!) and not focused enough on racial mysticism (!!).

you don't read fagget

Of course Poe.

Feminism is the best.