Help me find a good book to read.... please

Sigh.... I am running out of stuff to read... stupid unemployment.

I like coming of age books, thrillers/mysteries and I really like authors with a good sense of humor - if you have read Carl Hiassen or my personal favorite author Joe Lansdale you will get my humor.

I am open to broadening my horizons...

Please help...my local library is missing me


:hi:

Are very good, if you like English detective novels, same for Peter Robinson. Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford mysteries.
I loved "A Prayer for Owen Meaney" by John Irving - long, but once you get into it, un-put-downable and very funny in parts.
Donald Westlake books are also very funny - a bunch of offbeat characters trying to pull off well-planned but ultimately unsuccessful capers, "The Hot Rock" is probably the best.

when I had to drive a lot... thanks for reminding me

in the crime/funny department.

I find Bret Easton Ellis to be relentlessly funny, but he is a much different type of book.

When the miniseries was on I picked up the John Adams biography. Might not be what you traditionally go for, but it is very interesting. Adams doesn't get as much credit as he deserves.

Jeffery Deaver shelf if you want good thrillers. These guys are the keep you up all night kind of guys
I presume you have already read Patricia Cornwell, but if not try those as well.

I recently read a whole detective series set in Japan in the 1600's author is Laura Joh Rowland. These books are great.

for humor:

Janet Evanovich, please read in order.
Carole Nelson Douglas "Midnight Louie Mysteries" start with 'Catnap' and proceed forward from there.
Patrick McManus's collections of short stories will put you in the floor..examples of his work:
"The Grasshopper Trap", "They Shoot Canoes, Don't They?"
T R Pearson's " A Short History of a Small Place" is a riot.
Shirley Jackson's " Life Among the Savages" and "Raising Demons"

and finally if you haven't read Patrick Dennis you need to:

"Auntie Mame" and a couple of sequels
"The Joyous Season" hysterical

Oh the original novel M*A*S*H*, and the first sequel M*A*S*H Goes to Maine are both great. And funny

For Opening Your Horizons, try some good fantasy. like George R R Martin, or Robin Hobb. Martin is in a class by himself. There is a whole group of DU folks over in the Scifi/fantasy group waiting for his fifth novel to come out...Start with A Game of Thrones Big Fat Epic type books.

Another good fantasy author is Guy Gavriel Kaye

edited to add: I am with you on the unemployment, sucks, doesn't it.
checkout the DU Fiction and Sci Fi Fantasy forums for book talk.

Actually that's the first part of a trilogy.

by Edith Wharton. I thought it was a very interesting read. It gave me a lot of insight into how the wealthy lived in the early 1900's, which helped my correlate to how I'm sure they live now. I'm now on to "Age of Innocence".

Hope you find a good one! :hi:

that also have a mystery element are the Southern Sisters mysteries by Anne George. Took me a while to get around to them (I was on more of a British-mystery kick at the time) but my local library-cast-off book store had the first one in the series and it was so worth my time. Murder on a Girls' Night Out is the first one - definitely worth a try.

I love, love LOVE Dorothy Sayers' novels, set in the interwar years in Britain. Her hero is Lord Peter Wimsey, and the best ones are when Harriet Vane is introduced - the books are Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon. Excellent writing, great and witty dialogue. Nothing like Agatha Christie at all. (Not that there's anything wrong with Agatha).

I also really liked the Colin Dexter Inspector Morse series (1980s-90s Oxford).

Margaret Maron has a good series about a female judge set in North Carolina (present day).

Kathy Reichs has a good series with character Temperance Brennan, set alternatively in present day Charlotte, NC and Montreal, Quebec.

Lyn Hamilton has good armchair-travel mysteries, they're called 'archaeological mysteries' about a Canadian antiques dealer who travels here, there, and yon for work and usually an accompanying murder mystery is thrown in. DO NOT read "The Chinese Alchemist" first, or even second, if you decide you like them - it was the author's 11th book, and last one, and you could just tell the author was ready to retire the character.

And if you like a little British court humor, try the Rumpole of the Bailey short stories (pulled together into three volumes) by John Mortimer. Some of the funniest writing and observations of human nature I've ever read... but then again, I read them while I was practicing law (and hating it) and the Rumpole character's observations of his absolutely pompous colleagues really hit home with me.

Happy reading! I love Hiassen, too - think he is just brilliantly warped - but I've enjoyed the ones above a lot.

was great and I'm just starting Kite Runner which is supposed to be wonderful. Also my friend just read Three Cups of Tea and loved it.

Japan's greatest living writer (and arguably the the best writer living today). Comparisons in style, content and subject to Thomas Pynchon. Writes mysteries novels and sweeping modern epics, ones in which the central mystery of the plot rarely has anything to do with the point of the novel. Always disturbing, provocative, and funny.

His greatest work, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is fundamentally a book about a missing cat...except that the novel has more to do with the disintegration of the protagonist's marriage, his search for personal meaning in a world which makes increasingly-less-sense to him, the nature of irrelevance, Japan's shameful (and universally-unspoken-of) internal-history of WW II and why evil exists.

Murakami is the foremost writer of a "Westernist" (meaning reflective of America and Europe as opposed to traditional Japanese culture and values) literary movement within Japan exploring themes of "What does it mean to be Japanese in a global (and increasingly local) culture dominated by non-Japanese?" and "Is purpose random or deliberate?".

Occasionally Murakami writes non-fiction as well...his compilation of interviews with survivors, perpetrators and government officials regarding the Sarin attacks in the Tokyo subway (Underground) is considered to be the foremost exploration in print of a single terrorist act from multiple perspectives.

Great coming-of-age book, IMO. Parts of it read like a novel. You won't be able to put it down.

I read mostly non-fiction, so I can't help much with the other categories.

Stiff, by Mary Roach.

It's about cadavers. Seriously. And believe it or not, it's quite funny. Roach has a weird sense of humor that lends itself well to her unusual choices of subject matter.

http://www.maryroach.net

I love threads like these too. I've dicovered so many great books this way.

Gil's All Fright Diner by A. Lee Martinez (a good laugh)
A Simple Plan by Scott Smith (suspense)
The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox (a good story)

Those are some of the best books I've read recently.

Here Be Dragons. Sam Vimes and Havelock Vetinari. Trolls, dwarves (one over 6 ft. tall), and Corporal Nobbs, who carries ID proving he actually is, despite all appearances to the contrary, a human. And of course, Errol.

The first in Terry Pratchett's City Watch subseries:

Men at Arms
Feet of Clay
Jingo
The Fifth Elephant
The Truth
Night Watch
Monstrous Regiment
Thud!

She's ah-maaaaaze-ing. Queer coming of age/punk lit. It's awesome and I can't put her stuff down.

Also, Chuck Palahniuk's books are good. "Lullaby" and "Survivor" are my favourites by him.

Saramago is a Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author. All the Names is an unforgettable book that takes you on a strange journey inside the mind of a very ordinary individual. It's a real page turner...

Quite a coming of age story, imo

From Publishers Weekly
In this risky but resoundingly successful novel, Kingsolver leaves the Southwest, the setting of most of her work (The Bean Trees; Animal Dreams) and follows an evangelical Baptist minister's family to the Congo in the late 1950s, entwining their fate with that of the country during three turbulent decades. Nathan Price's determination to convert the natives of the Congo to Christianity is, we gradually discover, both foolhardy and dangerous, unsanctioned by the church administration and doomed from the start by Nathan's self-righteousness. Fanatic and sanctimonious, Nathan is a domestic monster, too, a physically and emotionally abusive, misogynistic husband and father. He refuses to understand how his obsession with river baptism affronts the traditions of the villagers of Kalinga, and his stubborn concept of religious rectitude brings misery and destruction to all. Cleverly, Kingsolver never brings us inside Nathan's head but instead unfolds the tragic story of the Price family through the alternating points of view of Orleanna Price and her four daughters. Cast with her young children into primitive conditions but trained to be obedient to her husband, Orleanna is powerless to mitigate their situation. Meanwhile, each of the four Price daughters reveals herself through first-person narration, and their rich and clearly differentiated self-portraits are small triumphs. Rachel, the eldest, is a self-absorbed teenager who will never outgrow her selfish view of the world or her tendency to commit hilarious malapropisms. Twins Leah and Adah are gifted intellectually but are physically and emotionally separated by Adah's birth injury, which has rendered her hemiplagic. Leah adores her father; Adah, who does not speak, is a shrewd observer of his monumental ego. The musings of five- year-old Ruth May reflect a child's humorous misunderstanding of the exotic world to which she has been transported. By revealing the story through the female victims of Reverend Price's hubris, Kingsolver also charts their maturation as they confront or evade moral and existential issues and, at great cost, accrue wisdom in the crucible of an alien land. It is through their eyes that we come to experience the life of the villagers in an isolated community and the particular ways in which American and African cultures collide. As the girls become acquainted with the villagers, especially the young teacher Anatole, they begin to understand the political situation in the Congo: the brutality of Belgian rule, the nascent nationalism briefly fulfilled in the election of the short-lived Patrice Lumumba government, and the secret involvement of the Eisenhower administration in Lumumba's assassination and the installation of the villainous dictator Mobutu. In the end, Kingsolver delivers a compelling family saga, a sobering picture of the horrors of fanatic fundamentalism and an insightful view of an exploited country crushed by the heel of colonialism and then ruthlessly manipulated by a bastion of democracy. The book is also a marvelous mix of trenchant character portrayal, unflagging narrative thrust and authoritative background detail. The disastrous outcome of the forceful imposition of Christian theology on indigenous natural faith gives the novel its pervasive irony; but humor is pervasive, too, artfully integrated into the children's misapprehensions of their world; and suspense rises inexorably as the Price family's peril and that of the newly independent country of Zaire intersect. Kingsolver moves into new moral terrain in this powerful, convincing and emotionally resonant novel.

but especially Gallowglass and No Night is Too Long.

The Sabbathday River by Jean Hanff Korelitz is one I always recommend. It's about a Jewish woman living in New Hampshire who finds a dead baby in the river, and it's riveting.

The Golden Compass series, if you're interested in fantasy.

Boy's Life by Robert McCammon.

Any of Shirley Jackson's books.

I'm going to copy what primate1 did in rev_acts thread asking for a book rec.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=105&topic_id=7939490&mesg_id=7939490

See my post there about Lavinia. I'll also add, my reason for thinking this would be a good book to recommend to you, is your statement that you like coming of age stories and willing to broaden your horizons a bit.

So this can provide both I think. Lavinia is a young woman just starting puberty as the story begins and if you don't read mythology or ancient classics like the Aeneid much this will be a little bit of broadening for you.

It's a thriller/mystery-ish book and a fun, easy read (personally I think it would make a good movie)
http://www.amazon.com/Riptide-Douglas-Preston/dp/0446607177/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216586263&sr=1-1


:hi:

Riptide was awesome!

It was awesome! I lurve Hatch. :D