Books you have read and would recommend.

[Tank]

Shane by Jack Schaefer

I read this book when I was in my middle teens in English class. It was the first book I recall that caused me to cry. The scene where Shane is bullied out of the bar because he won't kill was one of the most powerful I had ever read up to that point. The book is an excellent morality tale.

[KDbeads]

Kaffir Boy, Mark Mathabane
http://www.amazon.com/Kaffir-Boy-Autobi ... 0684848287

It's a banned book in many places in the south but a damned good one.  I think I was 15 when I read it first.  There are a ton of people who think it's 100% propaganda against 'whites' but it's told by a kid who lived in hell.

[Sireal]

As a former bookshop owner I love this sort of thing.

Politics: Glen Tinder-Political Thinking: If you want to say anything about politics read this first!

Economics: Human Action-Ludwig von Mises A read that ties all the thread of human action together, very worthwhile read.

Ancient Egypt-Light of the World-Gerald Massey: Massey's works remain unrefuted yet conspicuously absent from academic reading lists. A well thought out academic history of the origins of Christianity/Islam, exposing them for the thieves they are. Kessinger puts oout an iexpensive reproduction of this work. A collection of his essays can be found here: http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/Gerald_Masseys_Lectures.pdf

R.A. Schwaller deLubicz-The Temple of Man: Again an author left out the mainstream loop and unrefuted. This is a heavy/Thick read. If this Work were considered seriously Egyptology would need to be re-written in its entirety which is suspected to be the reason it is negatively viewed by most Egyptologists.

The two later works above basically re-write the history of western Religion and should be on every thinking persons book shelf IMHO. I will ad more to this list as time permits, enjoy.

[Tank]

Universe by Freedman and Kaufmann

Don't be put off by the fact that this book is an educational text, it is incredibly well written. It can be read at three very different levels, it explains everything in plain language, then there are specific mathematical descriptions that expand and refine the text and finally there are self test elements for the determined or masochistic reader.

This book really is a work of scientific and literary art.

[Melmoth]

I'm not sure what I'd recommend for you... I'm not big on Westerns, but for moral complexity I'd go for any of the earlier stuff by Ian McEwan, especially The Cement Garden. His later books get a little bourgeois for me, rather like the Guardian newspaper. They're good but slightly sycophantic - he panders a lot to the middle class, intellectual vanity of his readers. I swear, if I come across another oh-aren't-I-clever reference to Schrodinger's bloody cat in another book, I'm going to kick right off. That fucking animal seems to be everywhere at the same time!

The Dumb House, Glister and The Devil's Footprints by John Burnside are also favs of mine, especially the first one. Beautiful and macabre. He's not for the feint hearted but he asks some very profound and interesting questions.

If you want American writers, you'd probably like anything by Cormac McCarthy, because everyone likes anything by him.

American Psycho, if you can see past the violence, is much smarter than you might expect (and better than the film, obviously).

Moby-Dick is a bloody slog to get through, largely thanks to Melville's strangely erratic, undecided writing style, and it can bore you senseless in places, but trust me when I say it moves you just as much in others, and more than anything else it haunts you. It's a book that leaves a mark on the mind.

If you want water works, then I'd recommend The Things they Carried by Tim O'Brien. It's a series of loosely connected, semi-autobiographical short stories about O'Brien's experience of Vietnam. He was a liberal college student when he got drafted, and there's a particularly heart-wrenching scene in one of the stories, as he's trying to escape across the Canadian border, but I don't want to give away too much. I read this one recently and it tops any other Vietnam-related book or film that I know of.

I don't like Raymond Chandler or his smart-arsed narrator Philip Marlowe, particularly... I find them both annoyingly glib, with too much conservative, moralising sub-text; but some people can appreciate them for the genre. There's a certain appeal to the whole private detective thing, I guess.

Er... I've given you a slightly random jumble there but I could narrow it down for you, if you like. I'm literally just glancing at the book shelf next to my computer and picking the first things that catch my eye.

[Tank]

American Psycho is probably the one I'll read next as one of my daughters has a copy

[Whitney]

Ishmael  (then read The Story of B and My Ishmael)

[Byronazriel]

Neverwhere, and the Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman... Or anythinng by him for that matter.

Good Omens is one of my personal favourites, it is by Neil and Terry Prachett author of the Discworld books... Which I also heartily reccomend.

Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium, and its equels are good too. I also liked Fell Cargo, and the Malus Darkblade series.

Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw was a good read, as was The Cicada by Inge Meldgaard. (I may be biased on this one because helped the author with its sequel...)

[The Magic Pudding]

I enjoyed Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Anatoly Rybakov, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hess, Mailer, Tolkien, Patrick Obrien, Fank Herbert, Orwell, Durrell and Douglas Adams.

Solzhenitsyn, Kafka and Camus weren't as much fun, I'm less likely to persevere with tedious stuff these days.

If I have to find authors that still breath, Alistair Reynolds does sensible sci fi. Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is good for a laugh, Tim Winton's Dirt Music and Cloud Street are just very good.

[Melmoth]

Solzhenitsyn, Kafka and Camus weren't as much fun, I'm less likely to persevere with tedious stuff these days.

dems fightin words!

You might like The Third Policeman, if you don't know it already, which is very probable. It has a queesy, surreal, alice-in-wonderlandesque edge to it that's similar to Kafka's writing, only it's much more fast-paced and fun.

[Twentythree]

I rarely read fiction but I would like to offer a suggestion:  â€œHouse of Leaves”  by Mark Danielewski.

I stumbled across this book in a box of free books that someone just left in the hallway of my apartment building a few years ago. It is one of the most impossible books to describe. Finding it at random and reading it without any prior knowledge of the book probably enhanced my experience with it somewhat, but I have little doubt that anyone with a rational mind propensity toward logic will not find this book enthralling.

As for a recommended nonfiction, “The Red Queen” by Matt Ridley

This was the first book that I read that truly cemented the ideas of non liner evolution. Or the idea that evolution is not a means to an end but rather a constantly changing system of sustainability. This book focuses on gene recombination (sex) as an evolutionary tool, to keep organisms competitive in an ever changing environment filled with parasitic threat.

[Tank]

I rarely read fiction but I would like to offer a suggestion:  â€œHouse of Leaves”  by Mark Danielewski.

I stumbled across this book in a box of free books that someone just left in the hallway of my apartment building a few years ago. It is one of the most impossible books to describe. Finding it at random and reading it without any prior knowledge of the book probably enhanced my experience with it somewhat, but I have little doubt that anyone with a rational mind propensity toward logic will not find this book enthralling.

As for a recommended nonfiction, “The Red Queen” by Matt Ridley

This was the first book that I read that truly cemented the ideas of non liner evolution. Or the idea that evolution is not a means to an end but rather a constantly changing system of sustainability. This book focuses on gene recombination (sex) as an evolutionary tool, to keep organisms competitive in an ever changing environment filled with parasitic threat.

My wife is actually anonymously quoted in The Red Queen but didn't know it until she read the book as part of her PhD research!

[Twentythree]

Wow really? Do you know which passage?

[Tank]

Wow really? Do you know which passage?

No. She showed me when she found it but that was years ago.

[proudfootz]

If you're looking for a good defense of Naturalism I'd recommend Richard Carrier's 'Sense and Goodness Without God'.

I don't read much fiction nowadays, so I'm not up on newer stuff.