Books everyone should read
There are far too many books out there for anyone to be able to read all of them (although I'd be happy to spend my life giving it a bloody good try...) so this is your chance to tell the kinda wired world which books they shouldn't go through life without reading. My first choice (and it's only first because someone happened to ask to borrow my copy last week) is The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, by Jean Dominique Bauby.
This book was written by Jean Domnique Bauby after he suffered a massive stroke which left him paralysed and unable to move anything but one eyelid. With that eyelid he communicated with the world, and dictated his book. It's not a long book, unsurpisingly, when each letter was dicated by blinking his eyelid a certain number of times, but it's amazing. It's quite easy to see why this would be an insirational book and why it would be unbearably poignant, moving and beautiful. It's less easy to put into words how uplifting his stor manages to be. This is a book about life, and everyone should read it.
I believe it's being made into a film, and while I'm sure that will be wonderful, I still think that everyone should read the book itself. It's very rare that anthing this remarkable is written, it's a one of a kind book, and it deserves to be read by as many people as possible.
There are far too many books out there for anyone to be able to read all of them (although I'd be happy to spend my life giving it a bloody good try...) so this is your chance to tell the kinda wired world which books they shouldn't go through life without reading. My first choice (and it's only first because someone happened to ask to borrow my copy last week) is The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, by Jean Dominique Bauby.
This book was written by Jean Domnique Bauby after he suffered a massive stroke which left him paralysed and unable to move anything but one eyelid. With that eyelid he communicated with the world, and dictated his book. It's not a long book, unsurpisingly, when each letter was dicated by blinking his eyelid a certain number of times, but it's amazing. It's quite easy to see why this would be an insirational book and why it would be unbearably poignant, moving and beautiful. It's less easy to put into words how uplifting his stor manages to be. This is a book about life, and everyone should read it.
I believe it's being made into a film, and while I'm sure that will be wonderful, I still think that everyone should read the book itself. It's very rare that anthing this remarkable is written, it's a one of a kind book, and it deserves to be read by as many people as possible.
It's pretty obvious why everyone should read this, I think it's one of the best books ever written, and one of the most important novels of the 20th century.
Its a hard book to read first time. But persevere. Once you have read it once leave it a year and go back to it and it grows on you. its a great story very well told. With so many layers really. I have read it half a dozen times and I am still finding new depths to it.
Is my other recommendation. Mocking Bird aside it is my favourite book. Simple story about a survivor of a globally destructive plague. About how he survives with a few other survivers and how his 'tribe' evolve. I love post-apocolyptic books. And this is a fantastic read.
And this is one of the funniest books I've read, it still makes me laugh 20 odd years after I first read it
Quite simply the best book ever written IMO. I loved Joe Heller's response to a journalist who accused him of not having written a book as good as Catch-22 since. "No, but neither has anyone else." Amen to that Mr Heller!
Iain M Banks comes very close, but for my money Dan Simmons is the king of space opera. Hyperion is a metaphysical sci-fi twist on The Pilgrims Progress, as pilgrims to a far distant temple give accounts of their tales in an effort to better understand why they were chosen for the trip. All against a background of interstellar war and malignant AIs. Read the entire Cantos for the ultimate sci-fi tale. His Ilium and Olympos aren't bad either!
Speaking of Mr Banks, it was a toss-up between this or Wasp Factory but, so as not to spoil the surprise for the book cyclists, I'll go with Crow Road. Banks has a great skill wherein he seems to write about nothing in particular, but does it so well it is great reading. You'd be hard-pressed at times to find a compelling plot in his non-sci-fi works, but they're just so damn well written you'll forgive him.
The movie 300 could have been. Apparently it was this book that was going to tell the story of Thermopylae on the big screen until someone at Legendary Pictures optioned the graphic novel. Much better storytelling and much truer to what happened too probably! Not a crab-clawed man in sight!
And also Trainspotting. It's brilliant.
