Incarnations of Immortality series. Book I: Riding A Pale Horse Book II: Bearing An Hourglass Book III: With Tangled Skein Book IV: Wielding A Red Sword After that I can't remember, but from Piers Anthony.
His Masters Voice. It's a Polish sci-fi novel translated (very well) into English. From the guy in my sig. I couldn't put it down. Incredibly deep, cutting and poetic.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (LeCarre) The Bourne Identity (Ludlum) From Russia with Love (Fleming)
Yup, and I'm slowly making my way through his other books. Some of it's heavy, but rewarding all the same.
The Trouble With Physics. Gogol's short stories, specifically "Diary of a Madman" and "The Overcoat". A Stillness At Appomattox and other books.
Caesar - Colleen McCullough No Country For Old Men - Cormac McCarthy Into The Wild - John Krakauer All excellent reads and well worth the time.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. The best fantasy I've ever read (and I read a lot). American Gods by Neil Gaiman Let me think some more and get back to you.
For a great bathroom book, pick up Forbidden Knowledge: 101 Things Not Everyone Should Know How To Do.
Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" series - Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars Any of Robert J, Parker's Spenser mysteries - all of them are quick, very entertaining reads. Stephen Baxter & Robert C. Clarke's The Light of Other Years. Fucking brilliant examination of society's response to the ability to view the past (but not travel!) thru time portals. David Weber's early Honor Harrington books, before he got bogged down in politics. Damn, there are a lot, but I'd have to be at home where I can scan my shelves for titles and authors.
To each their own? One and two were good, and I skipped three and peaked at four. I'm not exactly a fanboy, but I liked the premise of the first couple.
For easy reads, try Jon Scalzi's "Old Man's War" universe series: Old Man's War The Ghost Brigades The Last Colony Zoe's Tale all quite entertaining, and you can zip right through them yet still come away satisfied. For something a little more involved, you can't do better than Dan Simmons: Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion - best books I've ever read...literally! Multiple award winners! Endymion and Rise of Endymion - followups to Hyperion series. Just a notch below their predecessors, but still excellent! Ilium and Olympos - also very good If you're into Swords & Sorcery stuff; try Terry Goodkind: Wizard's First Rule Stone of Tears Blood of the Fold Temple of the Winds (plus several more I haven't gotten to yet)
Michael Flynn: Firestar [*]Lodestar [*]Rogue Star [*]Falling Stars A brilliant near-future sci fi chronicle of a space program entirely funded as a private venture by a wealthy woman with a single-minded obsession. I wish she were real, 'cause she gets us up there with no fucking around.
J. Gregory Keyes' Age of Unreason series: Newton's Cannon A Calculus of Angels Empire of Unreason The Shadows of God Young Ben Franklin as an adventurer in an alternate reality where alchemy works just fine, thanks.
James Alan Gardner's Festina Ramos adventures: Expendable Hunted Ascending Trapped Radiant Festina is an Explorer, which is the military's lowest form of expendable crewperson. Professional redshirt. So whenever something new and dangerous pops up on a Strange new world, they send her in first to see if she gets killed or not. The books are a ton of fun.
And if ya like military sci fi, anything by John Ringo or David Drake. I'd say David Weber, but he annoys me lately. Hard sci fi: anything by Greg Bear, Stephen Baxter, Larry Niven, Frederick Pohl, Poul Anderson... Try Anderson's The Boat of a Million Years for an interesting take on immortality.
Ghost Rider, Traveling Music, and Roadshow: Landscape With Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle by Neil Peart of Rush are all good reads, IMHO.
The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough, one of the most captivating history books you'll ever read. Period. Paragraph. Its an incredible account of one of the worst natural disasters to ever hit the US, and one that is sadly forgotten. I've read that book more than 20 times now, and I cannot simply pick it up "to pull a few facts out of it" without reading it all over again. Just incredible what McCullough is able to do with words. If the man were to decide to write fiction, he'd put every other writer out of business. The Odyssey by Homer. The only book that I've read more than The Johnstown Flood is Robert Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey. It is to Greek mythology what TWoK is to Trekkies. While there have been a number of attempts at adapting this to film (and it would make an epic film, if it were given to the right director), the only film which comes close to matching the book is O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which is a damn good film. (And I say this as somone who generally hates the Coen brothers with a passion.) Were I to find myself in a situation where I could only read two books for the rest of my life, it would be those two, hands down, no questions asked, no thoughts required. Mark Twain once said that he periodically reread a book on the French Revolution because every time he reread it, he came away a different person than who he was when he started. The same is true of those two books. You will not be the same after you read them, and if you reread them, you will change again.
Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley. THAT is the only book I've ever come close to tears over; it's the Arthurian legend from the perspective of the women.
The Discworld series... Good Omens... Dragon Riders Of Pern series... My brother says the Sisters Of The Moon series by Yasmine Galenorn is good... The Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathan Stroud... Monument by Ian Graham... Orcs by Stan Nicholls... The Lives of Alvin Maker by Orson Scott Card... Great site : http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/
Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. All of them. Of course, all the books are building on the ones before into something really bad going to happen.
