Good reads

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ash
  • Start date Start date
I've been digging through my pdf book collection and I'm in the process of uploading a few of the classics to the downloads section. Hope folks that maybe haven't read them before or want a paperless version(pdf's are much lighter to haul around the country) will enjoy them!
 
Vonnegut is maybe my favorite author, Slaughterhouse Five, Dead Eye Dick, and Cat's Cradle are all fantastic. Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk (who's name for the life of me I cannot pronounce) is very good also. Right now I am reading The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and it is amazing. It's about a dystopian society dictated by Christian extremists, told from a woman's viewpoint. I read The Tent by her, also, which is just a bunch of short stories, or themes, really. It was very good.

I'm going to make a list from this forum next time I go to the library. woo, books!
 
I'm currently reading:

STIFF: the curious lives of human cadavers.

and I must say.. damn good read. funny, creepy, informative, and all around intersting as hell. some of the best NF I've read in a long time.
 
just finished Steinbeck's East of Eden and Wayward Bus last week. Both very enjoyable.
finished Hemingway's Islands in the Stream today. Great read, but sad. and the whole time I kept thinking that I wanted to turn the book into a drinking game.
 
three books that changed everything for me:

nausea-john paul sartre
the conquest of bread-kropotkin
walden-thoreau

all of these books i've read multiple times and each time their meanings change for me. especially nausea, i remember reading that book when i was sixteen and lying awake in bed at night, i couldn't get it out of my brain..it's pretty cliche, but it really did change everything for me. even years later, i still think back often to that story.
 
yeah, I liked nausea too. Often overlooked is the fact that it`s part of a trilogy, so if you haven`t checked out the other two, you might want to, they are good.

¨Vagabonds¨ a collection of short stories by Maxim Gorky
just read it, really good.
 
The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
Illusions: adventure of a reluctant messiah by richard bach

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery

Revolution For The Hell of It Abbie Hoffman

short but really good reads.
 
Some thing you might like is jack london's sea wolf. traveling stories aboard ships but tells an amazing story. He covers the concept of lonliness really well like mice and men well. He transposed a lot of his personal travel experinece and observations from hobo life into his stories with out feeding us something tired. He traveled during early depressions bout thirty years before kerouac. He wrote The Road long before and was an actual pirate! awesome
 
Mouse said:
I'm currently reading:

STIFF: the curious lives of human cadavers.

and I must say.. damn good read. funny, creepy, informative, and all around intersting as hell. some of the best NF I've read in a long time.
Click to expand...

I read this awhile ago... years now probably... and I agree, AWESOME book!! very entertaining as well as informative. I had a hard time putting it down and I was sad when its over (although thats how I am with most books...)
 
For nonfiction, I would recommend all Chomsky and Zinn as high priority. If you haven't read the People's History of the United States before, you should definitely pick it up. All Chomsky is good, but can be quite boring and tedious. I must confess that I have never picked up one of his books and read it cover to cover in a short amount of time. I always read some, read another book, and then come back. His books cause an information overload, but it is all good information.

Both of those authors are anarchists, but their books are about a lot of different things.
If you want the basics of anarchism, you should read Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid. Also, Bakunin is good. I haven't read any of his books, but I have read his essays.

A personal favorite of mine is Shibboleth: My Revolting Life by Penny Rimbaud of Crass. It is basically the story of his life, but anarchy is an underlying concept in the book. To see how some anarchist thought actually played out within the punk community of the time, there is no better read.
 
sanFRANCIS said:
\

i love graphic novels, funny/weird pictures makes a story a bit more interesting to read.
Click to expand...

Graphic novel? SELL OUT! Its called a comic book.



I find the defenses of corporate bookstores bizarre. I'm going to assume someone refuted them, but I'm too lazy to read the 100-odd posts. Since when is B&N not the third on the "indie killing assholes" list, right after Walmart and Starbucks? I used to self-righteously shoplift B&N blind and go trade the loot with the independent book exchange a couple blocks over.


But to go back on topic, Distress and Diaspora, both by Greg Egan. Greg Egan is just plain the best hard science fiction writer. Plus, Diaspora has implicit anarchist points, while Distress has very explicit- the bases of the story is that some bio-engineers "steal" the copyrighted GMOs they designed and use them to build an artificial island called "Stateless".
 
well this is a long thread so apologies if any of these have been posted before

anything by john muir
anything by john steinbeck

travels with the flea-jim perrin
rachel carson-silent spring
it still moves-amanda petrusich
parallel lines-ian marchant
fire and steam,the story of british railways-christian wolmar
the ragged trousered philanthropists-robert tressel
saturday night,sunday morning-alan sillitoe
the loneliness of the long distance runner-alan sillitoe
a kestrel for a knave-barry hines
attention all shipping-charlie connelly
the green fool-paddy kavanagh

im sure ill think of more later
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top