2000AD Online "Recommend A Book Day"

[The Amstor Computer]

Picking up on King Trout's push to lighten the mood & get everyone participating, welcome to the inaugural 2000AD Online Messageboard "Recommend A Book Day"!

The idea is simple: Every Wednesday, boarders are groaning from the impact of the Thrill-power Tharg has unleashed, and we're looking for some tamer, terrestrial fare to keep our thrill-circuits ticking over until next week.

So, each Wednesday I want boarders to suggest a book that they think might interest other members. You can tell us why you enjoyed it if you want, or you can just give us the title & let us find out for ourselves. The suggestions can be for space opera, period mystery, autobiography, colouring book... anything you want, provided it's something that you've read & have enjoyed.

I'll start the thread moving with a double whammy. The first book is Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. I picked up a battered paperback copy of this in New Zealand for $5, and I read the whole thing while touring North Island in a motor-home. It's an incredibly densely-plotted tale about cryptography, sex and hidden treasure that had me eagerly reading through 900-odd pages and kept me sane when I came down with a chest infection two days before we were due to fly to London.

The second is a book that I stumbled across in the library, A Devil's Chaplain, by Richard Dawkins. I've read some of his work before, and this is a wonderful collection of essays, forewords and tributes, including a moving eulogy for Douglas Adams. He is, at times, ferocious in his condemnation of religion, creationists and peddlers of "alternative" therapies, never more so than when he's presenting his foreword to John Diamond's posthumous Snake Oil. But he also writes passionately about his love of science, and his childhood in Africa, and tenderly in eloquent tributes to dead colleagues and friends. It is at heart a collection about science, but written with a humanity that is sometimes missing from essays on the subject. A remarkable book.

There! I've started this rolling, and I look forward to suggestions from other boarders.

[Steamboy]

try a book called Grunts, by Mary Gentile(IIRC) about a fantasy world(orcs, elves etc)that sort of bleeds into ours(the Orcs end up with guns, missile launchers, Helecopter Gunships, magic dog tags)causing all sorts of havok on their world. Quite well written, funny and quite original.

CU Krestel

[Floyd-the-k]

John Diamond`s Snake Oil is a great read. I recommend Haruki Murakami`s Dance, Dance, Dance - a surreal, literate, pastiche of detective fiction in which the narrator gets a lot. It`s very readable and also interesting.

[The Enigmatic Dr X]

AM currently reading The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, on my wife's advice. I thought it would be feminist twaddle but it is rather good.

[Richmond Clements]

I've read Cryptonomicon, it's big, but it's well worth it!

You could read The Bridge by Iain Banks, which is brilliant.

At the moment, I have surrendered, and am reading Northern Lights by Phillip Pullman, and it is as good as they say.

[Woolly]

I advise reading the Earth's Children series by Jean M. Auel (Clan of the Cave Bear, and the sequels)

Also 'A Scanner Darkly' by Phillip K. Dick, which is absolutely superb!

[Mr C]

I am Legend by Richard Matheson. Best Vampire book I've ever read.
Anyone read anything by Poppy Brite? Just wondering if her stuffs any good or whether it's goth toss like Anee Rice.

[DavidXBrunt]

If no-one speaks of remarkable things by Jon McGregor.

It's the story of an incident that took place in a small street in a city in the north of England. Kids are playing, an old man is painting his windowsills, students are packing up to leave their digs. And then out of the blue something terrible happens that none of them will forget.

Told in two strands - one made up of minute observations about what all the people in the street are doing on the day in question, the other the remeniscenses of someone who was present and finds herself mulling over the incident years later - it's a poetic and moving story about all the ordinary miracles we sometimes take for granted and miss and all the things we probably should say but don't.

I usually hate this sort of comparison but if Dylan Thomas and Jim Cartwright had collaborated then they'd have written this novel. Beautiful stuff.

[Quirkafleeg]

Stephenson: Early books v.good but he can't do endings
Grunts: funny, try Ash it's vast but one of the best fantasy books I've read
Poppy Brite: Goth, Gore and Gay... I dint like it

Currently reading Easy Riders Raging Bulls about Hollywood in the 70s... great on the personalties of the people of the time - they were all mad men! how did anything decent get made! Real insights into movie making (such has how it changed very quickly as a very old 'old guard' of cameramen, lighting techs etc went and the union stranglehold vanished - which made a real differenct to what you seen on the screen. One of the best film books I've read

[hag]

I'd say Tehanu by Ursula Le'Guin

Currently reading nothing.... because i suck

[Wils]

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An excellent series that I'm still trying to complete. IIRC, there's another 6 books after these British released ones. The British books having vastly superior Bolland covers too.

[House of Usher]

Doris Lessing. Memoirs of a Survivor.

One whole summer I read a bunch of dystopia novels, and this one was pretty good. It was also made into a good film with Julie Christie in it. It's a story in which civilisation breaks down, and the streets are full of rubbish, rats and feral children. The narrator also seem to be able to revisit scenes from her childhood through the bedroom wall.

[GordonR]

>>Anyone read anything by Poppy Brite? Just wondering if her stuffs any good or whether it's goth toss like Anee Rice.

Not so much goth toss, as violent homoerotic porn toss.

[Tanky]

I just finished Chocolat by Joanne Harris. I borrowed it off a mate on her recommendation. It's not my usual sort of thing at all, a bit of a 'girls book' with no guns, giant robots, explosions etc. But it's a charming read, a real feel-good book. and it makes you feel all warm an fuzzy!

[Art]

Definitely one to avoid if you get queasy at occasional graphic descriptions of gore or , but I actually found them pretty enjoyable, in a pretentious gothy kind of way. Certainly more fun than Rice, who I found overwritten and just plain bad.

Brite is apparently all grown up now, and doesn't do stuff with vampires or serial killers in anymore, which can cause friction with fans.

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