I like Fantasy Science Fiction so my top pick would be.....
The Bible.
This one is definitely not for everyone as it is authored by numerous different authors.
And has been transcribed from the original languages.
Causing problems with consistency throughout the book.
The basic storyline is actually very good.
We have a bored omnipotent being, who decides to build a planet and huge Universe. (The main character called God)
On this planet he places a man (Adam) in a garden that by the reading sounds better than Kew.
Of course the man gets bored and asks God if he could have someone to play with.
At this point the God character really shows his scientific knowledge by cloning a female from one of Adams ribs.
Spoiler alert God doesn't put into his creations any concept of right and wrong and waits with glee until the female (Eve) gets the munchies and punishes them extremely harshly IMO when she eats an apple.
You have to stretch your imagination a bit (as if God creating the immense Universe hasn't already,) as this couples descendants go on to populate the whole planet in a very short time scale.(Oh and try not to think about them having two sons first, I'm not sure whether the hinted at incest was intended.) No surprise one brother kills the other. (Rejection of homosexuality?)
The story drags on a bit in parts, but livens up a bit when the villain appears, the cool named (Satan).
Calling him the villain may seem odd as throughout the book he kills very few people.
Whereas God commits genocide on a terrible scale killing and telling his worshippers to kill. (God even makes parents kill there own children! And in the battle scenes God tells his followers to kill everyone including babies)
When this book was recommended to me, I was told it was about love and understanding, and caring for your fellows and loving the creator.
What I found was a book about a sad bitter lonely old omnipotent being, that seemed to take great pleasure in making his creations lives as miserable as possible, who also got extremely angry if they didn't worship him.
The authors introduce another character to add some love and caring amongst the horror of God's wrath namely God's Son. (Jesus) This character seems more caring and shows more love to the people than God did in the rest of the book. Strangely God lets ordinary people kill his Son, and does nothing about it.
It's a big book with thousands of characters, some with the same name or very similar.
Which makes for difficult reading at times, especially as large tracts of the book are repeated ad-infinitum with gaping plot holes and terrible grammar at times.
(This may be down to the editor/proofreader a guy called King James, clearly he has been just an associate and not a professional editor/proofreader.)
There are some funny passages to keep you entertained, such as a bloke (Noah) building a huge wooden boat with the help of his sons. Onto this boat they put numerous animals of EVERY species then God once again shows his true colours and wipes out every other living thing on the planet by covering the planet in water. Quite clearly the authors had no idea about scale, as the boat they describe wouldn't have even been big enough to load on the foodstuffs to keep everything fed.
(This flood may explain why later in the book there are no more talking reptiles and multi headed animals.)
I was expecting some great ending to The Bible with it being such a long book and to be honest it just fizzled out. And they never explained why the rest of the Universe was there.
I hope for our sakes no one takes this book literally as all I could see it leading too is one hell of a lot of intolerance.
Oh! after you finish the book the pages make great skins for joints.
, ****ing brilliant!!
