Off the top of your head.
1.No Country For Old Men
2. Red Harvest
3. Wild Sheep Chase
4. Slapstick
5. Game of Thrones
6. Breakfast of Champions
7. The Crying of Lot 49
8. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
9. The Sun Also Rises
10. Fharenheit 451
1. It Came from Below the Belt
2. My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes!
3. Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy
4. Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You
5. Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face: A Novel
Crap. Can't think of five more.
Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas
American Psycho
Kiss Me Judas
The Great Gatsby
Crash
Invisible Monsters
Trainspotting
The Sun Also Rises
The Contortionist's Handbook
Drive
If I could pick 11 I'd pick Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy
Thanks, guys. Sorry. I've been feeling troll-like lately, but in a good-natured way. Red Harvest=AWESOME
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
Heart Of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
The Killer Inside Me - Jim Thompson
A Hell Of A Woman - Jim Thompson
Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
The Violent Bear It Away - Flannery O'Connor
McTeague - Frank Norris
A Confederacy Of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
(all novels, excluded short story collections of which I could choose ten as my top books)
(chosen by how many times I've reread and how they all stick in the memory and influence me)
No Country fer Ole' Me is a great book.
I'll do (including novellas)
1The Long Goodbye
2Car
3Red Harvest
4Lord of the Flies
5Red Dragon
6Faucault's Pendulum
7Eaters of the Dead
8Wonder Boys
9All The Beautiful Sinners
10A Boy and His Dog
What Boone said too.
Is Car about the guy who eats a car?
Is Car about the guy who eats a car?
Yep.
Kiss Me, Judas
Lullaby
The Stand
Dark Tower series
Lord of the Flies
Catcher in the Rye
Animal Farm
A Seperate Peace
The Bell Jar
Mall by Eric Bogosian
Yeah I liked Catcher In The Rye. I don't care what anybody says!
I think I got to where he was farting in church or whatever and was like fuck this book
Farting in church???
Do you think everyone makes top ten lists because that's how many fingers we have?
I think we need a challenge to write those five books in @Bradley Sands post. Or short stories at least.
1. The Name of the Wind
2. The Hobbit
3. The Graveyard Book
4. A Song of Ice and Fire Series
5. Neverwhere
Just a few off of the top of my head.
Panda - Serious? Damn, and my new year's resolution was to stop making an idiot of myself and everything.
Um, I'll just crawl away quietly and be a noob somewhere else . . .
(Apologies, Bradley!)
Reasons to Live, by Amy Hempel
Survivor, by Chuck Palahniuk
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
Sandman, by Neil Gaiman (if taken as a whole)
Lone Wolf and Cub, by Kazuo Koike (writer) and artist Goseki Kojima (artist)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson
Concious Dreaming, by Robert Moss
Contortionist's Handbook, by Craig Clevenger
Batman: Year One, by Frank Miller
The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
Off the top of my head without thinking about it. I'm sure i'm missing some (already I could name 3 more that just popped into my head.) Also, counting is for old women*.
*I think that's a quote from the movie Cobb, but I can't remember if that's where it's from. It happens after the character is asked how many beers/drinks he's had. Might be a different movie, but I hear it in Tommy Lee Jones' voice.
I haven't read ten books! Oh wait...
In no certain order:
1. Franny and Zooey
2. To Kill a Mockingbird
3. Revolutionary Road
4. The Things They Carried
5. The Great Gatsby
6. Hearts in Atlantis
7. For Whom the Bell Tolls
8. Memoirs of a Geisha
9. As I Lay Dying
10. A Theory of Relativity
That was harder than I thought it would be. I could probably swap a lot of those out with others. I tried to think of ones that I have read more than once.
@ Cassandra
http://www.amazon.com/Bradley-Sands/e/B002BMA294/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1332951597&sr=8-1
You should order Rico Slade, find out just what you've been missing.
My list. Not ordered in any particular way.
The Rules Of Attraction - Bret E Ellis
Marabou Stork Nightmares - Irvine Welsh
Rant - Chuck Palahniuk
The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldrich - Philip K Dick
Dune - Frank Herbert
Lisey's Story - Stephen King
The City And The Stars - Arthur C Clarke
Pixel Juice - Jeff Noon
The Silence Of The Lambs - Thomas Harris
The Complete Robot - Isaac Asimov
That could all change next week though. Ten is not enough.
A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby
The Brother Grimm
The Wheel of Time series - Robert Jordan/ the other guy....B. Sanderson
The Dark Elf trilogy - R.A. Salvatore
The Black Company series - Glen Cook
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Lamb - Christopher Moore
On Writing - Stephen King
The Days are Just Packed - Bill Watterson
The Things They Carried - Tim O'brien
This is not all inclusive. Some are great to me because of the people who referred them and others because they can affect my daily mood.
Nice list Martin!
None of these lists are surprising when looking at each of your own writing styles. Especially Bradley's.
There is no way in hell that I could ever construct a hierarchical booklist model. And these are just some books in no particular order, and not a best of or anything. I love so many of the books above (Lullaby, L.O.T.F, etc.), so I will not repeat, just throw out some from my 'others' list.
- Lean on Pete by Willy Vlautin
- Habibi by Craig Thompson
- A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell
- Feed by M.T. Anderson
- The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Fault in our Stars by John Green
- The Shack by Wm. Paul Young
- Rock And Roll Will Save Your Life by Steve Almond
- Wicked by Gregory Maguire
- The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
"The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett"
Good one.
Thanks Panda. I'm enjoying everybody's lists here and taking them down as recommendations.
I can't believe I forgot To Kill a Mockingbird. But, I guess that's why it's a 'top of your head' list. If I tried to actually figure out my top ten, I'd never be able to accomplish it.
American Gods- I own the original hardback, a paperback (for lending), the audio book, and the new 10th anniversary audiobook edition (author's prefered text). So, that one would probably stay in the top ten.
Just looked at Neil's blog and found this tidbit:
Currently I'm mostly writing the HBO American Gods first episode. I'm really enjoying it, partly because a lot of what I've written isn't in the book. It's implied in the book, or talked about generally, or referred to obliquely, but it's scenes I hadn't written. So I feel that I'm doing new work, even if it's not new. If you see what I mean.
And, strangely, it seems to be feeding in to the next American Gods book, which is what I'm sort of working on right now. (Actually, I'm writing a short story that comes after Monarch of the Glen and before The Next Book. But it feels organically needed.)
Rude?! Not at all! No apologies needed at all!
Gaiman is the man.
Hmm...top ten books...what That influenced me? That I can read over and over? That I would take with me in the apocalypse? I know, I'm being difficult. On with the list...
1. Fight Club
2. Bringing out the Dead
3. Choirboys
4. Lord of The Rings
5. Day By Day Armageddon
6. The Road
7. Jarhead
8. Blackhawk Down
9. Choke
10. The Great Gatsby
THE TOP TEN!
Lanark by Alasdair Gray
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
The Brothers Karamazov by Professor Dostoevsky
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
The Implacable Order of Things by Jose Luis Peixoto
The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
BONUS! SOME MORE GRAND BOOKS!
Foam of the Daze by Boris Vian
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago
The Counterlife by Philip Roth
V by Thomas Pynchon
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
Contempt by Alberto Moravia
The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. by George Steiner
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
Black Spring by Henry Miller
Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz
You've been recommending Lanark for years Phil, and I've been meaning to read it since the first time you recommended it. Still haven't...
Yeah man, I've been raving about it since 2006 when I was a year-old Cultie.
It's fantastic, but not for everyone — VERY postmodern.
In no particular order:
- A Clockwork Orange
- Cosmopolis
- Rant
- Less Than Zero
- The Great Gatsby
- White Noise
- Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Vermillion Sands (Although any collection of Ballard's short stories will do)
- Glamorama
- Invisible Monsters
In no particular order:
1. All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
2. Nightwood by Djuana Barnes
3. It by Stephen King
4. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
5. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick
6. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
7. The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
8. 1984 by George Orwell
9. Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker
10. Bangkok 8 by John Burdett
Couple others that almost made it- Horns by Joe Hill, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. Fight Club, and Contortionists Handbook are also close.
@ Bill.
Yay, another Palmer Eldritch fan. Such a crazy book. Did you ever read his short story The Days Of Perky Pat? That story had a lot of elements that made it into Three Stigmata. I almost put his collected short works on my list but seeing as it's four volumes long I thought it might be cheating.
Palmer Eldritch is the closest thing to acid in a book. It made me feel crazy to read it. I probably have read The Days Of Perky Pat, but its been so long since I've read all those short story collections that I can't remember what any of them were about exactly.
Three Stigmata is very trippy. Hard to deal with a story changing setting mid-sentence. Odd stuff. Really, really good though. Dick was the paranoid master.
Perky Pat is like a condensed version of the stuff about taking the drug and becoming submerged in the lives of the dolls. If you read the collected stories then you'll almost certainly have seen it. Basically it's an embryonic Three Stigmata,
@DanielSoul77
Man, I love A Separate Peace. It was a big reading moment for me in high school.