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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: World Book Day
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
In honour of World Book Day, you’re invited to name one (1) book you’d recommend to others as a really good read.
Just one (1) please. Yes, it’s hard to choose just one (1). But fiction or non-fiction, that's fine: something you particularly enjoyed for whatever reason. The only criterion is it has to be a book and it should have impressed you. Tell us a little about why you think it’s great.
I’ll kick off with "Kim" by Rudyard Kipling. It’s the story of a young orphaned Irish lad growing up in India in the days of the British Empire, who has all sorts of adventures and gets recruited by military intelligence while accompanying a Tibetan lama who is on the search for a holy river. The book is classed as children’s fiction but works on more levels than one, and is still good on an adult level: you can see Kim’s development from streetwise cynic to a more mature young man who begins to genuinely care about his companion, and the lama, who appears unworldly to naïve in the beginning, is revealed as less so than he appears. And the book is full of wonderful little glimpses into life in India. This is one of my lifelong favourites.
Posts: 25445 | Registered: May 2001
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starbelly
but you can call me Neil
# 25
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Posted
The Goldfinch by Donna Taart
An obvious choice maybe, but while reading it it quickly became my life, every spare moment I wanted to pick it up, and when I had finished I was evangelistic in telling everyone they should read it!
Neil
Posts: 6009 | From: High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. | Registered: May 2001
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Sarasa
Shipmate
# 12271
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Posted
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell. This book is full of wonderful characters (nice and nasty) and has one of the most moving death scenes I know.
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'I guess things didn't go so well tonight, but I'm trying. Lord, I'm trying.' Charlie (Harvey Keitel) in Mean Streets.
Posts: 2035 | From: London | Registered: Jan 2007
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Sipech
Shipmate
# 16870
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Posted
The Outsider by Albert Camus
A very short read, it's a great study in what it feels like to be 'different'. If you don't react to certain events in the way society expects you, it is easy for you to quickly become an outcast.
Plus, it's an exploration in how the writer manipulates the reader into variously siding with one side and another.
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I try to be self-deprecating; I'm just not very good at it.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheAlethiophile
Posts: 3791 | From: On the corporate ladder | Registered: Jan 2012
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Adeodatus
Shipmate
# 4992
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Posted
T.H.White's The Once and Future King, four short novels under a single cover. It's the story of King Arthur, and is set in the late Middle Ages, where it's the Normans and Plantagenets who are fictional, and Arthur's England is real.
There are two great things about this book. The first is the quality of White's prose - it's so visual you can almost feel the warm sunlight on you, smell the forests.
The second great thing is White's passion for an England he thinks vanishing around him, and which he projects onto this medieval ideal. It's romantic, whimsical, wnd so beautiful you come away thinking it should have existed.
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"What is broken, repair with gold."
Posts: 9779 | From: Manchester | Registered: Sep 2003
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Doone
Shipmate
# 18470
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Posted
By Grand Central Station, I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart.
I read it years ago when I was passionately in love and the depiction of the sheer insanity of 'love' resonated hugely.
Posts: 2208 | From: UK | Registered: Sep 2015
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starbelly
but you can call me Neil
# 25
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Sipech:
The Outsider by Albert Camus
A very short read, it's a great study in what it feels like to be 'different'. If you don't react to certain events in the way society expects you, it is easy for you to quickly become an outcast.
Plus, it's an exploration in how the writer manipulates the reader into variously siding with one side and another.
Couldn't agree more, a book I like to read every few years!
Neil
Posts: 6009 | From: High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. | Registered: May 2001
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor, is my usual for threads like this.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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LeRoc
Famous Dutch pirate
# 3216
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Posted
quote:
Sipech: The Outsider by Albert Camus
The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud is a brilliant Algerian reaction to that book.
Let that be my recommendation then.
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I know why God made the rhinoceros, it's because He couldn't see the rhinoceros, so He made the rhinoceros to be able to see it. (Clarice Lispector)
Posts: 9474 | From: Brazil / Africa | Registered: Aug 2002
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Ariel
Shipmate
# 58
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor, is my usual for threads like this.
Care to elaborate a little?
Posts: 25445 | Registered: May 2001
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Jack the Lass
Ship's airhead
# 3415
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Posted
Just to be different, and inject some non-fiction into the mix, I'm going to nominate "Journey to the Edge of the World" by Billy Connolly. It's a TV series tie-in book, and details his journey along the Northwest Passage for a TV series in 2009. It's full of beautiful photos on every page (I like ebooks, but this is one where you definitely need paper, and this one has shiny paper so even better) of places I'm never likely to see in person, and his thoughts on the places and people he meets are both funny and profound. It's a beautiful book, I absolutely loved it.
Dafyd, can I second Ariel's request for an explanation of why you love "If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things"? I have to admit, when I read it I found it quite ordinary (although as I am the only person I know who's read it and not utterly raved about it I'm prepared to give it another go sometime, as it might just have been me rather than the book!).
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"My body is a temple - it's big and doesn't move." (Jo Brand)
wiblog blipfoto blog
Posts: 5767 | From: the land of the deep-fried Mars Bar | Registered: Oct 2002
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Eigon
Shipmate
# 4917
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Posted
Some good choices here - I remember getting my ex-husband to read Kim. He was a bit dubious to start with, and then got very enthusiastic. "It's like a fantasy novel, only real!" he said.
I've actually just been filmed for a local blog - A Book A Day In Hay - recommending a favourite book, which I re-read so it was fresh in my mind.
It's Intervention by Julian May, which I love because the main character is a second hand book dealer, and because of the use of the theology of Teilhard de Chardin as the human race comes to the point where the watching aliens think we are ready for First Contact, as psychic powers become more common. Rogi, the book dealer, is part of the psychically powerful family which becomes the most important family on Earth.
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Laugh hard. Run fast. Be kind.
Posts: 3710 | From: Hay-on-Wye, town of books | Registered: Aug 2003
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Brenda Clough
Shipmate
# 18061
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Posted
I need to read Wives and Daughters. Alas, I need to read so much. I will throw in another nonfiction book: The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Stephen Pinker. His thesis is that, despite everything you might see in today's newspaper, the human race is actually getting less violent and more decent over the long haul. He backs this up with more data than you would believe possible. One of those books that you close and immediately send up a fervent prayer, "Oh Jesus, let Stephen Pinker be right!"
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Science fiction and fantasy writer with a Patreon page
Posts: 6378 | From: Washington DC | Registered: Mar 2014
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georgiaboy
Shipmate
# 11294
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Posted
'The Edwardians' by Vita Sackville-West.
A well-written look at the Edwardian era, as seen through the eyes of a young duke of nearly-unimaginable wealth and position. The book manages a rather complete look at the hierarchies and relationships in and around the ducal estate. Includes the duke's presence at and reactions to the coronation of King George V & Queen Mary.
Written in 1930.
(I kept trying to read it as a roman à clef , but without success.
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You can't retire from a calling.
Posts: 1675 | From: saint meinrad, IN | Registered: Apr 2006
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venbede
Shipmate
# 16669
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Posted
Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym.
In the early 1950s, a highly respectable and (contemporary standards) repressed lady finds gays totally problematical years before the Wolfenden Report.
It hits the nail on the head of London Anglo Catholicism as well.
Barbara Pym is a marmite author - you love her or loathe her. I'll always be moved by this book wonderful.
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Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.
Posts: 3201 | From: An historic market town nestling in the folds of Surrey's rolling North Downs, | Registered: Sep 2011
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor, is my usual for threads like this.
Care to elaborate a little?
The language is part of it. A lot of care has gone into it. It's asking us to believe in the beauty of everyday events, and it uses a language that works at showing us.
The other thing is I think that it wants us to believe that the people in the book are important. Not in a sentimental way - the language is too careful for that - but without cynicism.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
I find it really difficult to pick just one, but I would suggest "The God of Small Things". Not unlike "If nobody speaks..." (which I agree is fantastic), it deals with the importance of the little, and the reality that the little is far more significant for most people that the large.
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take out this broken heart and renew my mind.
Posts: 18859 | From: At the bottom of a deep dark well. | Registered: May 2001
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Aravis
Shipmate
# 13824
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Posted
I've been trying to do this but I can't do just one... I keep thinking of better ones... ![[Waterworks]](graemlins/bawling.gif)
Posts: 689 | From: S Wales | Registered: Jun 2008
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mark_in_manchester
not waving, but...
# 15978
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Posted
I like 'Gilead' by Marilynne Robinson. A tale about an elderly preacher with a younger wife, and son, set in 1950s mid-west America. The book made me love the protagonist, in a way - a good man, entirely believable to me, who keeps punching me the reader in the gut with more and more real-feeling lumps of goodness, but somehow without being sentimental. Well, I guess you'd have to read it.
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"We are punished by our sins, not for them" - Elbert Hubbard
(so good, I wanted to see it after my posts and not only after those of shipmate JBohn from whom I stole it)
Posts: 1596 | Registered: Oct 2010
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Beenster
Shipmate
# 242
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Posted
Winter in Madrid by Sansom - I think that's his name. Oh it twists and turns and I was utterly gripped. Very traumatic, to add flavour.
Posts: 1885 | Registered: May 2001
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Twilight
Puddleglum's sister
# 2832
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by starbelly:
The Goldfinch by Donna Taart
An obvious choice maybe, but while reading it it quickly became my life, every spare moment I wanted to pick it up, and when I had finished I was evangelistic in telling everyone they should read it!
Neil
Ditto. Every word Neil said. I love a book that completely absorbs me in the way Goldfinch did. Perfect for winter reading.
I'll pick Carthage, by Joyce Carol Oates, just because it's her and easily available at your local library.
We have all read newspaper accounts of missing teens and thought with sympathy of their family, without really much idea of how it actually plays out for them. Oates takes us through this with view points from the mother, father and sister, but, most interesting to me, we experience it through the young man "last seen with," the missing girl.
I love JCO and I think what makes her special is that she seems to write without personal bias of any kind. It makes for such clean, honest characters. She is sympathetic and non-judgmental of her characters while, at the same time, keeping a distance that unflinchingly reveals flaws.
It was good.
But not as good as The Goldfinch!
Posts: 6817 | Registered: May 2002
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Welease Woderwick
Sister Incubus Nightmare
# 10424
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Posted
Resurrecting this but overnight it occurred to me to mention Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner published 41 years ago so a tad dated but an excellent read and a book that was a bit of a watershed for the gay publishing industry.
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