Mmm... not good on the usual holiday books... we used to sell shedloads of detective novels, Dan Brown type books etc but I never read em. Can't be much help but.. A good mystery book which I loved is Snow Falling on Cedars. by David Guterson. But enlightening/escapism... maybe Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut... The Man in the High Castle by Philip Dick... Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury... Brave New World by Huxley. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk is quite good too. Terry Pratchett is a good and easy read. Fantasy with chunks of philosophical pondering. Historical novels... can't beat I, Claudius by Robert Graves (but not exactly easy reading). I would go for Kurt Vonnegut - very easy to read, rich meaning, interesting stories - but he is a marmite author because of his style. EDIT - just read your post above... if it's a more substantial book maybe Tropic of Cancer, Last Exit to Brooklyn, In Dubious Battle by Steinbeck... The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera is a stunning book.
Bollocks. I read Middlemarch for A Level English. It is about 4 inches thick and sod all happens in it.Basically young bird marries older vicar bloke and is unhappy
I beg to differ. The other novel we had for A level English was James Joyce - A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. Now that was a good book, although I believe his master novel Ulysses is hard work. Still can't beat Dickens, although my eldest daughter swears by Jane Austen, ironically we christened her Emma, to such an extent she has a quotation from one of her novels as a tattoo on her shoulder. To girly for me, maybe that is the problem I have with Elliot
Seriously, the girly thing is what I have a problem with re Austen, whereas I think Eliot's prose flows better and she express grander ideas re the society she was living in. It's early/mid 19th century, ffs - she's very progressive if you look at it in that context.
Talking of which, I had to chuckle at some of those adult Ladybird books I was leafing through in Tesco's at the weekend.
I did Brave New World (ok) and Passage To India (good) for A Level, as books; Hamlet and Lear for Shakespeare, which I ****ing hated at the time, but I love now having watched them and read them again without the pressure of studying them. In fact, I really loved all that Hollow Crown stuff (parts one and two) that the Beeb did, now that I can watch that stuff without any pressure. But even now I just can't get into the poetry of Gerrard Manley Hopkins. The one thing I enjoyed then (over 30 years ago) and enjoy even more nowadays though was the three plays by O'Casey. One day I WILL go to Dublin and watch them there - that and go to the Space Centre in Florida before it's too late. Then again, I always planned to learn to learn Russian when I retire and watch Checkov* in Moscow and St Petersburg. Think we might win the league first. * Not the recently outed fashionably gay character from Star Trek. Or is that Sulu? Or the dude that now plays Spock? Or all of the above?
We did Waiting For Godot for A Level as our modern piece, I thought it was ok, but a lot of the class hated it. When we actually performed it I think more of the class appreciated it.
A level we did Chaucer, Catcher in the Rye (meh), The Stranger/Outsider (good), usual Shakespeare and an Irish book called 'the Butcher Boy' by Patrick mcCabe - which is a cracker. Have just received the latest amazon order so starting Bukowski later with Post Office. Big fan of Tom Waits, who was majorly influenced by him. If it's good enough for Tom...
