Who're yer favorite across all space and time?
Mine:
1. William S. - I've only read a few and a few more from Cliffsnotes, but this top spot is an easy call. Maybe only Newton has a more valid claim on Most Important Person in the History of the World.
2. Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn is Immense!
3. Len Deighton - Wrote James Bonds antithesis in his spy novels. Violent Ward is amongst my very favorites.
4. Ben Brown - some pretenious arsehole starts reading poetry whilst I'm trying to get zonked at a college beer joint. Guess what? It was really fucking good.
5. J. D. Salinger - Cos a person can't read Catcher In The Rye and ever tire of its brilliance.
Re: Rank the Writers!
His portrayal of the brutality of poverty and his portrayals of alienation are fucking awesome.
Hubert Selby Jr
Last Exit To Brooklyn is monumental. As is Requiem For A Dream. The film's powerful, but the book's even more so.
George Orwell
One hell of an imagination. Whatever he's writing about, it's always utterly readable.
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May I also add Alexander Trocchi - his use of the similie and metaphor is astounding.
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It sounds like you're trying to out-ponce each other!
I can see you all sitting around a table in a darkened library, all in smoking jackets or tweed (or tweed smoking jackets), smoking giant cigars whilst scratching your chin and nodding trying to look deep in thought, all whilst discussing how War and Peace is oh the more relevant in today's troubled climate.
Seems strange that nobody ever just admits to reading Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Dan Brown, Tom Clancy etc.
Come on! Someone admit that they've enjoyed a Jilly Cooper or a Barbara Taylor Bradford!
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Books that you can actually enjoy, by me.
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So maybe it's dark and chin-stroking, but that's just the kind of art I like... music, books, visual art: For me, most of the time I like it dark and I like to be intellectually challenged.
But notice I say MOST of the time because I also love lighthearted stuff just like everyone else - like Hitchhiker's Guide - these books are hilarious and the writing is genius, but my predominant tastes are, as you say 'poncey'!!!
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I like pretentious stuff really.
And podge King's short stories are very readable, and i can also remember reading a Koontz story when i was 15/16 some guy can see evil toad creatues who are evil and rule society?
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In the latter half of the 1980's Kennan went to Beirut University to take up a position as a lecturer at the University. Whilst there he was kidnapped by Shi'ite militiamen, and taken hostage for four and a half years, and this book desctibes his experiences there.
Seriously, go out and buy this book - it's fucking magnetic. The way he describes the claustrophobia of his situation and the utter helplessness of his time there is seriously gripping. I fell asleep at work yesterday because the night before I went to bed at 6 in the morning because I'd been reading straight for seven and a half hours and couldn't put the book down.
The friendship he forms with another prisoner there - John McCarthy, and the way that the two come to know each other and then absolutely depend on each other is some of the most heart-warming and yet so sad writing you'll ever read.
What made this book so compelling was also the fact that whilst reading it Ken Bigley was taken hostage. This book put a seriously human face on all the tabloid fodder being thrown at us at present, in Bigley's unfortunate circumstances.
Go out and buy it immediately.
Bob xx
Other than that - I think Iain Banks is a great author - Anyone read "Dead Air"?. And also, for all you Morrissey/Smiths obsessives and anyone else who felt like an outsider - Willy Russel's "The Wrong Boy"
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The author who I've enjoyed most consistently recently would be David Mitchell. He wrote Ghostwritten and number9dream, and I'm half way through his recent century-spanning opus 'Cloud Atlas' now. I'd recommend checking him out.
I always like Matthew Collings' trashy art diaries as well.
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Novels/Novelists:
The Bronte Sisters(all three of them)
The Castle of Otranto by Horce Walpole
Franz Kafka
Jaroslav Hasek
Bram Stoker
Oscar Wilde
Evelyn Waugh
A load of random other Victorian and early 20th century authors.
Poetry:
Blake
Dylan Thomas
Gerald Manley Hopkins
Seamus Heaney
Tennyson
Byron/Shelley/Keats/Coleridge
Browning
Emily Bronte
Other random poncey stuff!
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Iain Banks, Chuck Puhlhoweverit'sspelt, David Mitchell, in no particular order. There are others, but I'm going to miss my train at this rate...
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Terry Pratchett - great fantasy novels, very strong characters. Steals bits from other people and makes them into his own story(I think it's called research).
Laurell K Hamilton - descriptive fantasy, haven't read many but one of the few female writers I really like.
Piers Anthony - Wonderful series called Incarnations of Immortality, shows a series of events from the perspectives of the 7 Incarnations (Death, War, Nature, Time, Fate, Evil and Good).
Gerald Durrell - a nice travel/animals type writer, his books are usually pretty funny and he did a lot of work to keep rare species alive.
James Herriot - great books about a country vet in the 30's. Especially funny if you have experience of real animals, or five bar gates.
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B. S. Johnson
David Nobbs
Joseph Heller
It's all about being funny *and* poignant *and* true.
N.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
James Joyce
John Dos Passos
John Steinbeck
Joseph Heller
Martin Amis
VS Naipaul
Dostoyevsky and all that jazz
Monica Ali
Dave Eggers
Robert Rankin (and I must confess a weakness for Douglas Adams)
Don DeLillo
Salman Rushdie
and more...