I've been a bit distracted and lost all track of days this week. Still, if there's one theme I can jump at, it's 'Recommended books'.
I love lists. I constantly make them in my head. Top albums of all time, favorite bands, favorite drummers, favorite guitar solos (Soma by Smashing Pumpkins btw) and, of course, favorite books.
Usually I'd be scanning my shelves to remind myself of my favorite reads but I've helpfully boxed them all up, ready to move house so I'll have to go from memory.
Let's start highbrow and go for 'Literary'
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Time's Arrow - Martin AmisFight Club - Chuck Palahnuik
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Life of Pi - Yann Martell
Room - Emma Donahue
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
If we're going by less 'literary' efforts then my favorite fantasy series are:
Robert Jordan: The Wheel of Time
Robin Hobb: The Farseer Trilogy - The Liveship Traders - The Tawny Man Trilogy - The Rain Wild Chronicles
Katherine Kerr: The Deverry Cycle
George RR Martin: Game of... sorry (cough) A Song of Ice and Fire
David Gemmell - The Rigante Series and various Drenai novels
Brandon Sanderson - The Mistborn Trilogy
Straddling these two genres is His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. A work of sheer genius.
Finally one of my favorite books ever - The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.
This book is amazing. It reads like an action film yet muses on the nature of identity and ego, communication and language, construction of reality and shared experience. It incorporates so much thought I can't go into it here but it's a debut novel by a young British author and deserves to be huge. I've even found out that there is a 'negative' image of the book, consisting of 'unchapters' that have been hidden in various foreign editions and webpages. This knowledge has just kickstarted my obsession all over again.
I know the laziest thing you can do as a journalist is write that 'it's like (this) crossed with (this)' but due to my temporal disorientation this week, I'm going to resort to it. Here we go... (deep breath)
'The Raw Shark Texts is like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, crossed with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, crossed with The Matrix, crossed with Back to the Future, crossed with Who Framed Roger Rabbit, crossed with Jaws, crossed with the encyclopedia of the English Language and the Internet for Dummies. Oh! And crossed with a children's flick-book too.'
There you go. You honestly should read it. I did it in 2 days flat as I couldn't put it down. I consider it a modern classic and am damn well going to keep going on about it until everybody else does too.
As a small aside - I was recommended a book last night: 'Ass Goblins of Auschwitz' by Cameron Pierce. No blurb required, with a title like that I'm sold!
See you on the other side.