Essential Reads?!

Just wondered what books everyone considers to be essential reads and why?

I'll put mine up when I don't have an essential disertation to write !

Sarah xx

In anticipation of the weighty intellectual novels that I'm sure will be recommended shortly I'd just like to give my essential trashy read.
Out of all the books I've read (and I've read a few) the one thats touched me personnally the most has to be IT by stephen king, I know its trashy horror but if you let it work its magic you really do fall in love with the chacracters and their individual journeys. OK thats me done.

F*cking hell, i could be here all day with this one. Here's just a few starters for ten as it were.

Perfume - Patrick Susskind: absolutely f*cking wonderful, it's my favourite book ever and believe me i've read a f*cking lot of books. Impossible to describe, really, it's a kinda baroque tragi-comedy set during the French Revolution and is, quite simply, like nothing else you will have ever come across. Read it, read it, read it. And if you already have, do it again.

Armies of the Night - Norman Mailer: this is one for all you aspiring journalists. It's his chronicle of the march on the pentagon in October 67 when the hippies tried to raise the pentagon off the ground by standing around it and chanting. It puts a whole different spin on the writer/subject relationship and is a must read for anyone with a remote interest in serious journalism. It's wamr and funny but deadly serious at its heart. If you want a critique of the American Dream in the second half of the last century, the only writers you need are Mailer, Hunter S Thompson and Thomas Pynchon, with an honourable nod to Updike's 'Rabbit' quadrilogy.

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon: not for the faint-hearted but well worth the effort. If you gave James Joyce a sh*tload of acid and told him to write a cross between Moby D*ck and Catch-22 then this is what you'd get. The depth and breadth of knowledge and different stylistic devices is totally staggering. It is riotously funny but the satire and social commentary that he offers is incredibly astute. Watch out for the sh*t-eating scene about a hundred pages in though. It is truly stomach churning.

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte: one of the most passionately written books you could ever come across. It might just be cos i can see the Bronte moors from my house, but i love this book, a tale of gothic romance spanning time and space. Haunting, atmospheric, utterly, utterly wonderful.

Is This A Man - Primo Levi; he was an Italian Jew deported to Auschwitz in 1944. He survived it and wrote several books (of which this is the first) about his experiences. It's remarkable in that he remains completely dispassionate about the subject, the objectivity he displays is frightening considering what he went through. He killed himself in 1988 some say because he was crushed with guilt at the fact he survived when so many others went under. "We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses," he wrote. He was, in my humblest of opinions, one of the great philosophers of the twentith century.

That should put you on for a bit, i'll probably be back at some point with some more of these. Man, i can talk about books till the cows come home. I didn't study English and American lit at uni for nothing!

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre... It's been my favourite book for 15 years now. Nuff said

The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter

The first book i ever read by her. Its a collection of modernised fairy tales and has nice descriptive passages and skillfully subverts tradition. The Magic Toyshop also by Carter is a good read. She's one of my favourite authors.

Quote: Iris

The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter

The first book i ever read by her. Its a collection of modernised fairy tales and has nice descriptive passages and skillfully subverts tradition. The Magic Toyshop also by Carter is a good read. She's one of my favourite authors.

I'm with you all the way on that one, Angela Carter is brilliant. Pretty sinister in places but i think that's what makes it so good.

Good topic. I presume you want fiction books/novels.

I recommend the following:

One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest - Ken Kesey
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Waves, To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Unbearable lightness of being - Milan Kundera
Nausea - J P Sartre
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Anything by Jorge Lois Borges

Brave New World's a top book. If you want a kinda counteropint to it check out Island (also by Huxley) which focuses on an undiscovered Utoipan place that ends up getting raped by the mutli-national oil companies. It was one of the last things he wrote before he died, it works as a companion piece to BNW and it is wicked.

the glass meneagerie is ace. check out the film version with john malkovic. Special.

Don DeLillo - White Noise - Hard to explain but really enjoyable in it's description of the mudanity of life and its porttryal of how much the media has invaded our lived to the point nothing seems real unless it's on TV.

Paul Auster - The Country of Last Things
Dark and very disturbing at times, but fantastic distopian novel.

Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose, heavy going at first but worth the initial struggle for a tale of intrique and murder in a monastery.

MG Lewis - The Monk, a real old fashioned Gothic tale.

I also happen to love bothe Dracula and Frankenstein, having studied them at uni. There are many many others I could list, but will leave it at that for now.

It depends what you have read by him - some of his stuff is a little hard going and pretentious, but I enjoyed Country of Last Things and also New York Trilogy by him. The only dissapointing thing in Dracula is the death scene, otherwise a fantastic read.

Quote: TinyShine

Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte- I know it's been said before but this has been a favourite of mine since I was 11, when i started reading it whilst skiving from P.E! Just a less conventional love story. Characters who aren't super beautiful or wonderfully charasmatic but yet something very endearing about them.

That's exactly what I love about it too

Well maybe tis just you then Not to worry, everyone tastes differ. I personally hated Jane Eyre, and thought she didn't stop whining through the whole novel and just needed a good slap.

Quote: tallwales

Books I'd recommend-

The World According to Garp - John Irving
Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder
High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
The Hunt For Red October - Tom Clancy
The Stand - Stephen King

Books to avoid at all costs -

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Ulysses - James Joyce
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe

I think Ulysses is a wonderful book, but you've gotta know what you're doing with it. If you think that's mad, you should have a crack at Finnegan's Wake. It is, in one sense, nonsensical and unreadable, but therein lies the beauty......

I kinda did both with Joyce. I read Ulysses when i was sixteen and liked it so much i did my A-level English lit coursework about it. I try to read it every couple of years or so cos there's so much there, you find summat new every time you read it.
I did a course on Ulysses in my final year at uni. Twas very informative but i'd already researched a lot of it myself anyway. Chapter fifteen when they're in the brothel is one of my favourite bits of writing in all the world, with the black mass and all the rest of it. Tremendous stuff.

I know what you mean about studying ruining stuff though, if you've got your analytical head on all the time it can detract from the enjoyment of the words on the page, which is what it's all supposed to be about, really.

Quote: Dave

I think that's what killed Joyce for me doc. If I'd just picked it up randomly and read it I could have taken my time and looked things up. But studying it means doing it at a certain pace. I just ignored it for my coursework and exams at uni. I did other books on my course.

It wasn't part of the set course, i did it for me persoanl choice coursework so all the study was self-directed, that why i enjoyed it at the time, and then the uni course was ace cos it was so in depth. You could try Dubliners, his book of short stories, that's really good and completely straghtforward.

Nah it wasn't just you. it was a hugely important book at the time, massively con troversial (it's still banned in some US states) but by today's standards it's proper tame.

I didn't really see what all the fuss was about either, but Haulden Caulfield paved the way for generations of anti-heroes so you'ver got to give it credit for that.

- "The Beach" by Alex Garland. - It is my bestest book ever, I think - it is really funny and smart and exciting.
- "Bright Young Things" by Scarlett Thomas.
- "Naive. Super" by Erlend Loe.
- "The Wind in the Willows" by Kenneth Graheme. - It is really funny and sweet, but also lots of bits are really dark too. Also, it is lots of ideas how lots of changes and new technology are pretty scary.
- "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley.
- "The Eyre Affair/Lost in a good book/The Well of lost plots" by Jasper Fforde. - They are pretty silly and goofy, I think, but also they are really really smart and creative and funny.

Also…
"Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland.
"The Hole" by Guy Burt.
"The Moth Diaires" by Rachel Klien.
"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen.
"The Time Traveller's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger.

Quote: the_doc

You could try Dubliners, his book of short stories, that's really good and completely straghtforward.

Dubliners never fails to depress me. Especially "The Dead". I really loved Eveline and Araby though

if i haven't already mentioned it, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

It's amazing. Intensely psychological and set in and around a surprisingly vivid image of St Petersburg swathed with murder and self loathing.

Quote: Pet_Sounds

if i haven't already mentioned it, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

It's amazing. Intensely psychological and set in and around a surprisingly vivid image of St Petersburg swathed with murder and self loathing.

Ace, i reckon, but not for everyone.

Russian stuff is f*cking mad, cos of all the patonymics and stuff, every character has three or four different names.........

Great book though. The Idiot is even better (in my opinion), but if you wabnt an intro to Dostoyevsky, try Notes From Underground.

If Willhy LOman (Death of a Salesman) and Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye) are the godfathers of the anti-hero, the guy in that book is the divine creator.

Time to add a few more I think.

1- Romeo and Juliet
One of the few Shakespeare plays that is truly enjoyable.

2- Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
An interesting study into youth with some obvious repressed homosexual tendancies.

3- Frankenstein
A book worthy of the title classic even if it does start slowly.

4- Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham
You'll never look at gardening the same way again.

I'll add more at a later date. Just want to see what other people think about some of the books that I love.

My favourite shakespeare play is Twelfth Night I think it's because it's kind of amusing and easier to read than some of the others. And also it's so far fetched and i love things like that because they make me giggle! Easily amused...

Sarah xx

Birds of prey by Wilbur smith is absolutely fantastic, i also reckon the rats trilogy is essential reading youll never want to go into an underground station again!

I reckon everyone should read The Autobiography of Doctor Martin Luther King Jr as well, the single most inspiring book I've ever come across. It's not actually a 'straight autobiography' so to speak because he was dead before he got to write one, but it's made up of diary entries, letters and stuff like that.

If you want an interesting case study, read it either before or after The Autobiography of Malcolm X (co-written with Alex Haley) to get two differtent approaches to solving a single problem. The Malcolm X one isn't nevessarily essential though, but the Martin Luther King one should be read by everyone.