Book Recommendations

Here is a thread to recommend all those books you think everyone should read.

The Sword of Truth Series by Terry Goodkind
"Wizards First Rule" is the first of the 11 novel series.

Anything by Dean Koontz is great but I suggest you start with one of the following titles
Strangers
Watchers
Dark Rivers of the Heart
False Memory
From the Corner of His Eye
One Door Away From Heaven

The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini
Eragon
Eldest
Brisinger

The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon
Outlander is the first novel in the series.

I am David by Anne Holm
They Cage the Animals at Night by ? (I forget)
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks.

Lady of Hay by Barbara Erskine

I'm glad to see Sword of Truth and the Outlander series on your list, Beauty! I think the Outlander series are the only romance I've ever actually liked.

As anyone who knows me knows, I would recommend everything Mercedes Lackey has ever written to anyone living, dead, or currently in a form of limbo.

I would also recommend the following authors:
Terry Pratchett
Carl Hiaasen
Sara Gruen
Khaled Hosseini
Robin McKinley
Robin Hobb
Andre Norton
Anne McCaffrey

I haven't read a great deal of Dean Koontz, but I have read some because he's my mother's favourite author. Two books of his I particularly liked that didn't make a list yet were Seize the Night and Fear Nothing.

Come to think of it, although it's been while since I read anything by him, I also thought Clive Cussler's books were great.

I really loved the Sword of Truth series, my brother and I both read it at the same time and he bought me the last one in the series last Christmas.

I have got stuck on the Outlander series but may get back to it later.

I have just read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and couldn't put it dowm! I started it on a 9 hour night shift and finished it when I got home! Best book I have read like that in a long time.

My very own list of marvellous books to read (constantly updated and may therefore be edited multiple times):

1) Children‘s / Teen‘s fiction:
Lewis Carroll, Alice‘s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Morris Gleitzman, Two weeks with the Queen
Kerry Greenwood, Journey to Eureka
Melina Marchetta, Looking for Alibrandi
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden


2) Fiction

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan, The Bonesetter‘s Daughter
Kathryn Harrison, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society
Tracy Chevalier, The Virgin Blue
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Quarry
David Malouf, Remembering Babylon
Boris Vian, I spit on your graves
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never let me go
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
Jane Austen, Sense & Sensibility
Kate Grenville, The Secret River
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Dorothy Porter, The Monkey‘s Mask
Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes / Return of Sherlock Holmes / Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Pearl S. Buck, Pavilion of Women
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Anthony O‘Neill, The Lamplighter
Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Rosalind Miles, I, Elizabeth

3) Biographies
Mineko Iwasaki, Geisha of Gion
Frank McCourt, Angela‘s Ashes
Li Cunxin, Mao‘s Last Dancer

4) Drama
Jack Davis, The Dreamers
Lisa Loomer, The Waiting Room
Arthur Miller, The Crucible
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Visit

I just finished reading "Confessor" by Terry Goodkind, the last book (so far) of this series. All in all it was very good, but unfortunately some of that "preaching and pontificating" I had ranted about in other posts is very prevalent in spots. The character of Richard can be very, very, long-winded.

As far as novels to recommend? An excellent series you might want to check out is the "Camulod Chronicles" by Jack Whyte. It is a retelling of the Arthurian legend, based more in actual history than in fantasy. The first book is "The Skystone". The concluding novel, which came out in paperback not too long ago, is "The Eagle". Highly recommended.

I am also a big fan of the "Song of Fire and Ice" series by George R. R. Martin. The scope and detail of these novels is staggering, and the characters are all incredible. It is heads and shoulders above most other fantasy series. Unfortunately, the author is only four novels into it, and he is taking his sweet time in releasing the fifth. Still, if you start reading this series, it will grab you.

"The Wheel of Time" series by Robert Jordan is also excellent, but unfortunately the author died before the last novel in the series could be completed. Supposedly another author, one hand-picked by Jordan (who had known he was dying), is going to finish it, but who know how it will turn out, or when it will be released.

Anything by Neil Gaiman is also good, especially "Neverwhere".

That's it for now. I may be back with more.

I have just finished listerning to an unabridged recording of The Reader by Bernard Schlink and thought it was excellent! Highly recommended!

Another recommendation: Bought and read "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" yesterday, and thought it was fantastic - very depressing, but gentle and warm. Love it. Definite Must-Read (at least if you plan on watching the movie).

Finally, after months (weeks? whatever) of not reading books (with the exception of schoolbooks) my friend was kind enough to lend me a great book called "Hard Love" by Ellen Wittlinger. I love it so far and it's urging me to create a zine of my own.

I have been fortunate to have read some really good books lately.

Diva's Don't Knit by Gil McNeil was so laugh out loud funny and I have just started the sequel which is as good too.
Thats Needles and Pearls.

I also enjoyed Marked by PC & Kirsten Cast very much and just got the next one Betrayed in the series too. I know is a YA and about vampyres but I have really enjoyed it.

I also read The Circle Trilogy by Nora Roberts. Morrigan's Cross. Dancing The Gods and Valley of silence which I couldn't put down at all till I have read them.

I am rereading "Lord of the Flies" at the moment, because it's one of the novels that we often use in school. I am so taken in by it, I love it, I can hardly put it down. Definite must-read!

As I have said in the "Damn, I hate being alone" thread, I'm hooked on "The Blood Confession" by Alisa M. Libby. I must buy it. Better tell daddy-o.

Les Miserables! I'm reading it now. It's a very good book. Jean Valjean is one of my new favorite characters!

Wild Cat by Laura Black

Catorina has the nightmare so many women fear: on her very wedding night she discovers that her husband is really a stranger-a drunkard, a sadist. She flees into the night, hides among gypsies, witnesses a murder. Now she is hunted by two adversaries. To whom can she turn? Her parents? No-they feel her marriage to Lord Carnmore is ideal. To Benjie the gypsy boy? Perhaps even to Sir Richard Grant, who now occupies Cat's old ancestral home. No-she's sure he loathes her as she does him. But she must find help somehow or she will be either dead or a prisoner in a hideous, perverted marriage.


Set in the Scottish Chighlands in the mid-nineteenth century, Wild Cat has all the drama of love, violence, and mystery and all the suspense and surprising-even shocking-turns of events that have made Laura Black a rising star among popular fiction writers today.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Okay, that is the write up on the inside flap of the dust jacket. Now, permit me my two cents.

As many of you know, I'm not much into "romance" novels. This is like a romance/adventure far more adventure than romance. I re read this book often. I think many here would greatly enjoy it.

Laura wrote:

Another recommendation: Bought and read "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" yesterday, and thought it was fantastic - very depressing, but gentle and warm. Love it. Definite Must-Read (at least if you plan on watching the movie).

I read it on Wikipedia a few weeks before the movie came out. I really enjoyed it.

I finished Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (by Fannie Flagg) on Friday.

Recommended! It has that small town, folksy feel which I love.

I am now just finishing up "The Terror" by Dan Simmons. It is a fictional take on the actual Franklin Expedition of 1845 to look for the Northwest Passage. There were two ships involved, the Terror and the Erebus, and neither ship, nor any survivors, were ever found. Skeletal remains believed to be sailors from these ships were found many years later. Dan Simmons spins an engrossing tale using many of the actual people known to be involved, depicting their hardships in the brutal cold with spoiled rations, along with a mysterious creature out on the ice that is picking them off one by one.

It is a thick book, over 900 pages long, but I have long found Dan Simmons to be an excellent writer, and this book is no exception.

Paul wrote:

I am now just finishing up "The Terror" by Dan Simmons. It is a fictional take on the actual Franklin Expedition of 1845 to look for the Northwest Passage. There were two ships involved, the Terror and the Erebus, and neither ship, nor any survivors, were ever found. Skeletal remains believed to be sailors from these ships were found many years later. Dan Simmons spins an engrossing tale using many of the actual people known to be involved, depicting their hardships in the brutal cold with spoiled rations, along with a mysterious creature out on the ice that is picking them off one by one.

It is a thick book, over 900 pages long, but I have long found Dan Simmons to be an excellent writer, and this book is no exception.

That sounds really interesting - it is fictionalized, but authentic, I guess?

Laura wrote:

Paul wrote:

I am now just finishing up "The Terror" by Dan Simmons. It is a fictional take on the actual Franklin Expedition of 1845 to look for the Northwest Passage. There were two ships involved, the Terror and the Erebus, and neither ship, nor any survivors, were ever found. Skeletal remains believed to be sailors from these ships were found many years later. Dan Simmons spins an engrossing tale using many of the actual people known to be involved, depicting their hardships in the brutal cold with spoiled rations, along with a mysterious creature out on the ice that is picking them off one by one.

It is a thick book, over 900 pages long, but I have long found Dan Simmons to be an excellent writer, and this book is no exception.

That sounds really interesting - it is fictionalized, but authentic, I guess?

The premise is authentic. There really was a Franklin Expedition that sailed into the arctic looking for the Northwest Passage in 1845 and then disappeared with no known survivors making it out of there. The novel is a fictionalized "what if" type of a story. It is a very good read and highly recommended.

I have now finished "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck, and I still love it. It's very emotional, and really draws the reader into it. Especially the sad story of O-Lan touched me, while I had some trouble to sympathize with the protagonist Wang Lung, at least sometimes. But the title is well chosen, and the metaphor is employed throughout the novel. It can not be analysed by using technical methods, though. It needs emotions and empathy to be thoroughly understood, and that alone will open up the true meaning of the novel.

I finished The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak today. It's the story of a young German girl living with her foster parents, and it's narrated by Death himself.

I really loved it, and I cried at certain scenes.

I really recommend Candide by Voltaire to y'all. It's a complete satire on almost everything. It's hysterical at some points, but harsh at others. It's a very easy and short read--just 98ish pages, depending on the edition you get.

I read it in English, but I totally loved it!