Your favourite 3 books

[bogeyman]

It varies, but at the moment...

1) Down and Out in Paris and London - Orwell
2) Germinal - Zola
3) Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt

[Xerxes]

My great uncle lived on the road in Limerick featured in Angela's Ashes and knew the McCourt's well. He always says the book is a load of mostly made up nonsense. Things were no where near as bad as they were painted. In fact, he reckons they were some of the best fed people in Ireland as the soldiers in the barracks always gave then their leftovers.

[malvolio]

'Stranger in a Strange Land' - keep reading and re-reading it, although I could probably write out 90% of it from memory by now.

Anything by Ian M Banks (sic!), who refuses to treat his reader as anything other than an intelligent adult, but 'Feersum Injun' is a work of art in any genre

'The Stand', by Stephen King (the full edition, not the trimmed down first release) - not so much for the morality tale, but becuase the 20-odd main characters are real people and I still want to find out what happens to them.

And for slightly less challenging reading I love Clavell's Asian books, from Shogun through to Noble House, and anything by Le Carre, Leon Uris or Tom Clancy. Plus another couple of dozen on the bookshelf ranging from Brickhill's 'The Naked Island' to Niven's 'Lucifer's Hammer'

[bogeyman]

My great uncle lived on the road in Limerick featured in Angela's Ashes and knew the McCourt's well. He always says the book is a load of mostly made up nonsense. Things were no where near as bad as they were painted. In fact, he reckons they were some of the best fed people in Ireland as the soldiers in the barracks always gave then their leftovers.

Yes, Xerxes. I suspected there was a fair bit of baloney in McCourt's tale, but it's still a very good read.

Sort of reminds my of people of my grandparents generation who never missed an opportunity to tell you how fecking poor they were, on the one hand, then without any trace of irony, told you how happy they were when they 'had nothing' and that 'we made our own entertainment'.

"Bejeesus! we were poor as dirt! but happier than you'll ever be!"

[stackpole]

"Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart. Predates the Stand by some years, but very good.

I bought my copy in Woolies for the princely sum of 1/6d... remaindered.

Actually that's five books so far zeitghost. How about this for number six - a book on primary school arithmetic?

Or do giant alien lizards have a different concept of numeration?

[stackpole]

Foundation - Asimov
Foundation and Empire - Asimov
2nd Foundation - Asimov

I've decided that 3 isn't nearly enough.

I read one of the Foundations when I was a nipper. The one with a giant alien mule in it. Do you giant alien lizards star in any of them?

[malvolio]

Fascinating thing about the 7 books of the Foundation Trilogy (huh?) is that the good Doctor wrote them out of sequence and over a period of 45 years when he was doing other work ranging from writing SF to lecturing in higher maths, and they still fit together seamlessly. And unlike Heinlein, he hadn't written out a 50,000 year future history to base his work on.

[cojak]

I was an Asimov geek at school and got through my science exams thanks to his factual books (Tragedy of the Moon, etc). I still love them but lost a lot of them in a move.

I did feel though that the 3rd & 4th Foundation books got weaker and lost focus and couldn't bring myself to read the others - should I give them anothers a go?

[DaveB]

No way I can limit it to three but as far as Authors go, and in no particular order.

Ian M. Banks - All of it.
Roger Zelazny - Amber series in particular, Damnation Alley also.
Michael Moorcock - Cant belive he's not had a mention yet.
Frank Herbert - Dune et al.
Bernard Cornwell - Sharp rather than the Arthurian stuff.
Stephen Baxter - What hard sci-fi schould be.
Robin Hobb - Assassins Trilogy

[stackpole]

It seems we're now entering the "load of obscure sh1te" phase of the thread.