Ship of Fools: World Book Day

Thread: World Book Day Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

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.

Posted by starbelly (# 25) on :

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

Posted by Sarasa (# 12271) on :

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.

Posted by Sipech (# 16870) on :

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.

Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on :

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.

Posted by Doone (# 18470) on :

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.

Posted by starbelly (# 25) on :

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

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor, is my usual for threads like this.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

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.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

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?

Posted by Jack the Lass (# 3415) on :

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!).

Posted by Eigon (# 4917) on :

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.

Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :

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!"

Posted by georgiaboy (# 11294) on :

'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.

Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :

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.

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

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.

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

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.

Posted by Aravis (# 13824) on :

I've been trying to do this but I can't do just one... I keep thinking of better ones... [Waterworks]

Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on :

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.

Posted by Beenster (# 242) on :

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.

Posted by Twilight (# 2832) on :

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!

Posted by Welease Woderwick (# 10424) on :

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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