Until I got a Kindle, when I finished a book, I’d have a browse in a bookshop and come out with whatever took my fancy. Much as I like the convenience of Kindle, you can’t browse in the same way. You have to start the ball rolling with a search.
So, recommend me a great book. I’ll read anything. Cheers.
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bobness says
“H is for Hawk” is the best thing I’ve read for a long time.
Kaisfatdad says
DuCool and myself (and the other three in our book circle) have just finished The Good Son by Paul McVeigh. The summer of an 11 year old boy in Belfast during the early 80s and The Troubles.
An interesting and very enjoyable read.
Gary says
Or forget the reading malarky and just dig the choon:
Geoffbs7 says
All The Light You Cannot See
A Man Called Ove
mikethep says
All the Light You Cannot See – seconded.
Kid Dynamite says
I’ve been looking out for this one in the library to no avail. I’ll probably end up buying it.
PaulVincent says
“Black Swan Green” by David Mitchell. Just finished reading it myself, as I’m having a David Mitchell binge, having just discovered what a dazzling, amazing writer he is. (I usually shy away from Booker nominees/winners, being wary of Literature with a capital “L”). Of all his books I’ve read so far, I really fell in love with this one. 13 months in the life of a 13-year-old lad living in Worcestershire in 1982. Funny, wise, and really capturing what schoolkids are like as they blunder into their early teens. Great stuff.
duco01 says
Yes, I really liked “Black Swan Green” as well. And you could hardly get a book that was less like “Cloud Atlas” in its themes and structure. Mitchell is such a versatile writer.
slotbadger says
AA Gill’s self-coruscating autobiography ‘Pour Me’ is (thus far) extraordinary. Some beautifully wrought prose.
Beezer says
The Balkan Trilogy, by Olivia Manning.
Harriet and Guy Prungle are newlyweds just moved to Bucharest as the Second World War kicks off. Guy Pringle is a wide eyed naive socialist English Lecturer and an immense pain in the crevice at times. Harriet keeps them together as the Nazi advance confuses, confounds and over runs Eastern Europe. They’re pushed into flight to Athens
A tome, but you won’t notice it.
Beezer says
Prungle? Fucking Prungle?
Pringle. You fat fingered get.
timtunes says
The Circle by Dave Eggers.
Finger on the zeitgeist pulse satire/warning/ thriller about a Facebook/Google type company and its hungry expansion.
ganglesprocket says
Ditto The Circle, it’s excellent and I don’t like Eggars usually.
Currently reading Joseph Knight by James Robertson, a novel about Scots and the Slave trade which is brilliant and harrowing as hell…
duco01 says
Cheers for the tip, gangle.
I loved Robertson’s “And the Land Lay Still”.
Brucefield says
Two topical ones on the Middle East:
Robert Fisk: “Pity The Nation”: the Lebanese Civil war from 1975-1990 or thereabouts. There are no good guys, apart from the little people who are under the cosh all the time.
Peter Hopkirk: “The Great Game”: the 19th century history of Afghanistan, or how history keeps repeating itself.
Both these might sound dull and/or worthy, but they are as readable as anything you’ll ever pick up.
Diddley Farquar says
Clothes, clothes,clothes, music, music, music, boys, boys, boys by Viv Albertine. What a life, what a gripping tale. One of the best music memoirs I’ve read.
duco01 says
Yes, I just finished the Viv Albertine book. I loved it – and I wasn’t even a fan of the Slits.
What a survivor she is, and how wonderfully she deglamourises the picture of London during the punk years.
A great book, and it’s gratifying that it’s sold so well. Its content – particularly the IVF, cancer and divorce travails of her later years – must strike a chord with so many people.
Blue Boy says
Read a number of good novels this year but the one I’d pick out is Wolf Border by Sarah Hall, about a Cumbrian aristocrat’s attemp to reintroduce wolves into the British countryside. Great narrative drive, brilliant central character in Rachel Caine, the woman charged with leading the project, and it deals with everything from our natural environment, to family ties and loyalties, to Scottish Independence, and a load more. Brilliant.
Dodger Lane says
I love Sarah Hall’s books, and really enjoyed The Wolf Border but too long. What on earth was the point of those last 50 pages or so ? The novel lost its flow and momentum. Forgive her though given her writing has given me so much pleasure.
Getthenet says
Thanks all. Ive read H for Hawk, but struggled with it a bit. Loved the Viv Albertine book. She certainly has had some bad luck and met some creepy blokes. Fantastic read.
pencilsqueezer says
Two from me that I’ve found particularly engaging. A Winter In The Hills by John Wain. This is a novel I first read some time ago and recently rediscovered. A minor English academic spends a few winter months in Nth. Wales where he finds a new purpose for his life via his engagement with the inhabitants of a thinly veiled Caernarfon in the 1960s.
Secondly A Month In The Country by JL Carr. A brief but wonderful eighty four pages recounting a bucolic passage in the life of an art restorer spent in Yorkshire between the wars.
Both wonderful works of fiction.
bungliemutt says
A Month In The Country is a fabulous novel. Decent film treatment too.
Gary says
Agreed. On both counts.
Kid Dynamite says
I say this every time there’s a book recommendation thread, but Robertson Davies is wonderful. A quick check on Amazon suggests that his books aren’t on Kindle though. As good as a starting place as any would be What’s Bred In The Bone, which, although the middle volume of The Cornish Trilogy, works splendidly as a stand alone novel. It’s the biography of the (fictional) painter Francis Cornish, as narrated by the recording angels who watched over his life, and it is marvellously readable. Davies was a genius, and a life with his books in is a life enriched.
pencilsqueezer says
Absolutely couldn’t agree more Kid. When Donna and I moved home earlier this year we have our rather battered copies of Robertson Davies to charity.
I have now replaced them with pristine new editions.
They are the only books from the hundreds we donated that I have felt compelled to replace.
Kid Dynamite says
I knew you were a man of excellent taste
duco01 says
Pencil, Kid,
After your Robertson Davies recommendations in the past, I took the plunge and bought the Deptford Trilogy.
Have read “Fifth Business” and am now half-way through “The Manticore”
Loving it. What a prose style! The guy could really write.
pencilsqueezer says
Obviously that should be ‘gave’ not ‘have’.
Bloody phone.
bricameron says
I thought nobody read books anymore? Anyway I haven’t read it yet but I heard an interview with the author of ‘The magic strings of Frankie presto’ which sounded intriguing.
seanioio says
If books about music are your thang then carry on reading….
I have just started ‘Detroit 67’ by Stuart Cosgrove which is about, you may be ahead of me here, Detroit in 1967! Set within Motown & the breakup of the Supremes! I have only just started it but really enjoying it so far.
It is only £3.79 on the kindle too but £18-25 for a physical copy!
Morrison says
Just finished “The Loney” by Andrew Michael Hurley – and very good it is too. Pitched as a “gothic horror” – not my usual read – I was drawn to it by some decent reviews and because it takes place in a strange part of the Lancashire coastline – somewhere between Knott End On Sea and Glasson Dock…not many novels set in that neck of the woods which was close-ish to where I was brought up.
There’s a flavour of “Orange is not the only fruit” – odd characters with fervent religious beliefs – who gather at a remote retreat close to a disused shrine out on the marshes in an attempt to “cure” a mute teenager amongst the party. Usual ploys – strange unfriendly locals, odd goings on and things that go bump in the night – but it’s really well written and at times very spooky. I imagine someone has already picked up the option to turn it into a film or TV serial – it has the feel of one of those BBC Ghost Stories – uneasy, unsettling and nicely crafted.
pencilsqueezer says
Hi @morrison. I’ve just started on The Loney. For many years it’s been a small tradition of mine to read MR James at this time of the year. This year I’ve decided to put that to one side and The Loney has been selected to fill the gap.
Delighted to find it recommended. It puts my mind at rest that I may, unusually for me, have made a wise choice.
Dodger Lane says
T
Dodger Lane says
An elephant is better at typing than I am, and that’s not the title of the book.
Two brilliant novels I’ve read this year.
A whole life by Robert Seethaler
Scorper by Rob Magnuson Smith.
A whole life is one of the best novels I have read in a long time, not a word out of place and very touching. Scorper is creepy but great fun.
Oh, and forgot The Shore by Sara Taylor. Don’t miss out on this, a novel of interlinked family stories down the years and into the future. Her first novel apparently and it’s amazingly assured.
Jack Kelsey says
Here’s 3 books I’ve read this past month & can recommend
“The Poet” by Michael Connelly
Crime Journo trying to sort out his brother’s supposed suicide – great crime read with “strange” plot & intriguing ending.
“Time And Time Again” by Ben Elton
A time traveller (spy) going back to rearrange history of 1914 etc – to prevent deaths & disasters before they happen to prevent the “Great War” breaking out.
“The Shadow Of The Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A top read -brilliantly written descriptively about a boy in Barcelona – living in/above a bookshop trying locate the author of a book he has chosen & now cherishes – it has gothic/historical/murder/mystery themes throughout – well recommended.
Feedback_File says
I know there has been a lot of belated praise for ‘Stoner’ by John Williams. A forgotten American classic is the often used quote. Well it really is that good, as is ‘Butchers Crossing’ which may well have influenced Cormac McCarthy. Both books are superb character studies and I would recommend above anything else I’ve read in the last year.
Thanks to those above who have recommended ‘The Loney’ – sounds intriguing so Im putting that on my list
Dogbyte says
At the risk of being all self-promotional and horribly un-British about this you might try one of mine:
Fallen Star is only £1.99 at the moment – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fallen-Star-Ian-Barker-ebook/dp/B004S3CQUM/
One Hot Summer is £2.63 – http://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Hot-Summer-Ian-Barker-ebook/dp/B00AROMZ9I/
moseleymoles says
I am currently zipping through The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Absolutely gripping dystopian tale of a future USA in which radiation fallout from some war has rendered many women and men unable to reproduce, and reproduction is rigidly controlled by the government. For me this is her best work, much more powerful than her environmental apocalypse novels which can feel a bit didactic. This is anything but, and the central character is brilliantly drawn.
Or I reviewed Underworld by Don Delillo recently, an absolute masterpiece but are you up for 700 pages? At least it won’t weigh anything on the Kindle.