Thread: A few books which everyone should have read..

I believe that everyone who tries to complain about their current government should read this book and be damned grateful for what they've got and not what they could have.

I was right with you up to here, I would see it as a reason to keep kicking, not a cause for complacency.

The Magic Pudding ~ Norman Lindsay

These lists are subjective.

Many of the posts are no more than grandstanding. I have little time for that.

Good point Ox, early reading is really important, I know some people read adult books young, but I would include E.Nesbit's "Phoenix and the carpet" and Kipling's "Puck of Pook's hill". I would not include AA Milne or Ms Rowling in any list of essential authors. "Ivor the Engine" might make it in, "In the top left hand corner of Wales there was a railway, it wasn't a very big railway or a very important railway, but it was all there was ...", also "Ace dragon limited", "Limited means I can do some things but I can't do everything ...". I loved having kids, it was a great excuse.

Originally Posted by Waste.

I have Emma and Wuthering Heights waiting for me.

Have you read Emma yet? Sometimes I feel like throwing the book across the room and giving Emma a good smack in the face. She can be so obnoxious.

1984, as everyone said, should be essential reading. The same goes with Animal Farm.

Apart from this I thinik Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, A Farewall to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea and of course his short story The Snows of Kiliminjaro. That short story is the best I've ever read. Actually, all of his short stories are great.

Joyce's Dubliners, A Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man and Ulyssess should also be mandatory.

Also essential, I tihnk, is every single short story or flash fiction Kafka wrote and The Trial.

Why hasn't anyone mentioned F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby? One of the best novels ever written.

Also Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund and my favourite: The Glass Bead Game. All by Hesse.

Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, Slaugherhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions and Bluebeard.

At least some poems by e.e cummings. Start with "Buffalo Bill's"

Faust by Goethe.

Poems by Odysseus Elytis.

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Moon is Down, Cannery Road, The Pearl and East of Eden (AMAZING!)

Shakespeare is also a must!

So yeah there's a few...

My own reading list will bog me down for years yet. I'm looking forward to Thomas Mann, William Falkner, Dante's Inferno, Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio, Italo Calvino, more Orhan Pamuk, Coetzee, Lessing, and on and on...

The concepts of "Essential reading" and "Books one should read" require some qualification, essential to what? Why should one read them? 1984 and Animal Farm might be seen as essential reading for citizens, for writers seeking style and an erudite literary ability the novels of Margery Allingham might be more appropriate. If your interest in in convoluted plots read Dickens. Without such qualification I am afraid that I must agree with the Ox, that the lists people give are little more than grandstanding and subjective.

Originally Posted by Olly Buckle

I am afraid that I must agree with the Ox

Let’s knock this tired old “I am afraid I must agree” cliché on the head, once and for all.

Repeat after me: “I am very pleased to say I agree with Ox, I am very pleased to say I agree with Ox, I am very pleased to say I agree with Ox..."

I don't see Faulkner anywhere on that list. All of Faulkner should be on any list of essential English language books. Also, 1984 and Animal Farm only paint a partial picture. To complete the portrait of the basic driving forces of post World War I 20th Century you need Man's Fate, Darkness at Noon, and Brave New World.

Oh, and yes, if it's necessary, I do agree with Ox.

Ah, what was the question?

The agreeing with you is fine, it is what we are agreeing about that I dislike.

For those that are looking to write contemporary fiction in the genre of "fantasy" (since this seems to be exclusively about heavier literary tastes which is just fine) I would suggest that the obvious greats be read: Tolkien, Anne McCaffrey, Neil Gaiman, and Raymond E. Feist (I think it may be Fiest, but I am half awake at the keyboard so forgive my error if I made one).

I do not include Robert Jordan or Terry Goodkind in this because while Robert Jordan's writings started out as fantastic work it quickly grew, for me, impossible for me to like the characters he was writing about and Goodkind's writing swiftly became formulaic (main characters get separated, main characters will be seperated forever(!), main characters battle unbelievable odds not to be separated...). The first few books of Goodkind's series were nothing short of masterful but the continued employment of the same formula for every book following that that I encountered (I stopped reading at "Pillars of Creation") became rather drab.

In terms of creating a world, I believe the Feist rivals Tolkein in the depth, breadth, and brilliance of his creating the world his characters inhabit and I truly feel that his writing style was (dare I say it) better. Tolkein was, to me, excessively dry and spent most of the time telling the reader facts about the world rather than focusing on the adventures (at least in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, "The Hobbit" is a different story altogether) and so I felt that the deep, vibrant world he created almost got in the way of his storyrtelling. Feist, however, takes an intense, deeply layered, well rounded world and not only populates it with believable characters and VERY interesting parallels to our own history (the world he is writing in is not quite "Medieval Fantasy" but more "Renaissance Fantasy" which is almost unheard of and makes the historian in me quiver). The characters are deep and compelling and the rich fabric of the world that Feist creates is alluded to throughout his stories rather than waved in the reader's face. I felt that often, Tolkein would "info-dump" and that detracts from plot, whereas Feist gives you little teasers of history but keeps the plot galloping along. The only time that I believe that that exciting plot was dampened was his novel "Rise of a Merchant Prince", which was a little drab but I believe it was necessary in the totality of the series in which it was placed.

Anne McCaffrey... I am not certain what I can say about that woman that has not already been said. I was fed her works along with my breastmilk as a child and have been reading them all my life. I have never been able to get enough of her writing, her worldcrafting, and her compelling, human stories in the midst of alien worlds. While I did enjoy her other series, I felt that the Pern writings were unequivocally her finest selection of works. Her ability to begin the series as a strict fantasy setting and end it in science-fiction was nothing short of spectacular and her characters are intensely memorable and compelling and have been fixtures in my life as long as I have memory.

Gaiman's writing falls up there with the other greats, though he has just broken onto the scene of literature. His style is delicious and his subject matter is rivoting. "American Gods" is, in my opinion, a "must read" for everyone in this world and its depth and the world in which it was created were nothing short of breathtaking. His writing is absolutely riveting and his attention to detail and lore when creating any of his works is brilliantly executed.

1984, as everyone said, should be essential reading. The same goes with Animal Farm.

I've read both. They are pretty good. It should be a must read, because half the peope when I'm talking, don't know what I'm talking about. I'm always in my book world.

One of my favorites now, is Woods Runner by Gary Paulsen. Tragic, but gets better. It's I'd say a historic fiction, but I think it's really pretty good. Sad, in a way, but good. I finished it last night.

Now I'm reading The Rifle, also by Gary Paulsen. I really like his works, I've decided.

I would say Infinite Jest and Don Quixote are two of the most rewarding books that I have ever read. Infinite Jest requires a bit of work, but the payoff is incredible.

I havn't read any but you should have mentioned The Lord of The Rings, it is just an epic story and has to be read. I have been meannig to read Dorian Grey after seeing the film.

I would raise Atlas Shrugged as a possibility for such a list. It's scope and influence are immense..

In the vein of 1984/brave new world, the dystopian novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is quite a masterpiece in its own right.

If we're talking dystopian novels here Fahrenheit 451 has to be included. It is about burning books after all... We was a good book, 1984 and Brave New World were both based on it. And plus it was by a Russian author... if any nationality knows about failed utopian orders well...

Another good book is Demons by Dostoevsky. The character Shigagalov (I think I spelled it right) pretty much describes his system for the new socialist order as subjugating 90 percent of the population so the other ten percent of able society can be truly free... sound eerily familiar? And written before the socialist revolution even took place. Genius.