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Good novel suggestions?

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It's not really a cookbook though ...but it is. Each recipe ties in with a story of her life.
 
Sim0n said:
I'd go for something even more accessible and say A Scanner Darkly. It's basically like the 60s California drug scene (lots of amphetamines and acid) projected into the future. So there are some sci-fi elements, but it's based firmly on reality. PKD doesn't go in for heavy dialogue, so it should be quite easy to read.

But really, if you want recommendations, it would help if you tell us a bit more about what you like :)

I mean, "something a Bluelighter would like"? There's an awful lot of us. Some with advanced English Lit degrees. At least two of us loved 'Infinite Jest' so much that we took our usernames from it (it's an 1100 page novel that doesn't actually have an ending, or make much sense). Our tastes vary so much, it would help to know more about what you like :)
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I'm really looking forward to the scanner darkly movie, but I didn't much care for the book. I don't know why. Too much character exposition at the begenning, maybe, which I find uncharacteristic for PKD.

"Something a Bluelighter would like" Hmm. Well, Lots of people say they've read War and Peace in the book thread ;).

Who is the other Bler who has an Infinite Jest nickname, Simon?

Btw, how dare you say the book doesn't have an ending. Its just not at the end of the book. :p =D
 
blahblahblahblah said:
Dont know what your into, this is a fun one though...

The Legend of Altazar: A Fragment of the True History of Planet Earth
By: Hermit of the Crystal Mountain [Solara]
amazon link

Kinda on the metaphysical side of things, very good read IMO.
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You reccomended that to me ages ago and I've never been able to find a first hand copy that will order to the UK.
 
atlas said:
Who is the other Bler who has an Infinite Jest nickname, Simon?

Btw, how dare you say the book doesn't have an ending. Its just not at the end of the book. :p =D
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My old sn was Infinite Jest, of course. There was a guy called Pemulis who posted quite a lot a few years ago. I checked with him, and he did take it from the book.

OK, so it has an ending (at the beginning) but it never explains how they get from the physical ending of the book (Gately hallucinating in hospital and Hal in withdrawal as the Canadians close in on ETA) to the narrative ending of the story (Hal applying for college, following the digging up of James Incandenza's head).
 
I think that's debatable. Obviously there's the suggestion that the Entertainment *was* in the grave, and that it drove Hal mad (though that doesn't explain how he survived). But there's the other theory that after he Abandoned All Hope, the withdrawal drove him mad. It's not really resolved.
 
Patrick Suskind's Perfume gets a third recommendation for me. it's bewitching.

Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight is beautifully crafted, emotionally powerful yet supremely funny. i've just finished it and i love it.

Stephen Fry's The Liar is a much more light-hearted glimpse at humanity's writhing underbelly.

Ben Okri's The Famished Road is purportedly wonderful and is next on my list.

I also thoroughly recommend Kipling's The Jungle Book. tis brilliant.

call me a heathen ignoramus but i found War and Peace unbearable. i'd much rather some Bulgakov or Mandelstam.
 
I would like to recommend: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.

A short synopsis from Publisher's Weekly:
Christopher Boone, the autistic 15-year-old narrator of this revelatory novel, relaxes by groaning and doing math problems in his head, eats red-but not yellow or brown-foods and screams when he is touched. Strange as he may seem, other people are far more of a conundrum to him, for he lacks the intuitive "theory of mind" by which most of us sense what's going on in other people's heads. When his neighbor's poodle is killed and Christopher is falsely accused of the crime, he decides that he will take a page from Sherlock Holmes (one of his favorite characters) and track down the killer. As the mystery leads him to the secrets of his parents' broken marriage and then into an odyssey to find his place in the world, he must fall back on deductive logic to navigate the emotional complexities of a social world that remains a closed book to him. In the hands of first-time novelist Haddon, Christopher is a fascinating case study and, above all, a sympathetic boy: not closed off, as the stereotype would have it, but too open-overwhelmed by sensations, bereft of the filters through which normal people screen their surroundings. Christopher can only make sense of the chaos of stimuli by imposing arbitrary patterns ("4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day when I don't speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don't eat my lunch and Take No Risks"). His literal-minded observations make for a kind of poetic sensibility and a poignant evocation of character. Though Christopher insists, "This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them," the novel brims with touching, ironic humor. The result is an eye-opening work in a unique and compelling literary voice.
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This sounds like a really strange book, which it is. But it's also very good, and I couldn't put it down after starting it.
 
Okri's The Famished Road is indeed a super book, imho.
As is Mark Haddon's Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime...

2 more come to mind...

Gene Brewer: K-Pax
Nick Hornby: About a Boy
 
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