My answers:
Changed my life: Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
Book everyone should read: more tricky - so many good ones, so many for particular reasons. The Communist Manifesto? The Wind in the Willows? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
Don't touch with a bargepole: The Lord of the Rings. Atlas Shrugged. The Book of Mormon. Left Behind. Any of Dickens' 'funny' novels. The Narnia novels. Loads more…
10 comments:
Changed my life: Lance Armstrong's first autobiography "It's not about the bike".
Book everyone should read: "Friday Night Lights" by Buzz Bissinger.
I really need to start reading non-sports books.
Changed my life: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger
Books everyone should read: On the Road by Jack Kerouac, To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee
Yes, The Catcher In The Rye and On The Road. But to be different...
Changed my life: House Of The Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Everyone should read: Out Of The Blue by Simon Armitage, is poetry allowed?
Avoid: Turn Of The Screw by Henry James.
Changed my life: 1984 by J. Orwell, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by K.Kesey
Book everyone should read: Master and Margerita by Bulgakov, Faust by Goethe
Don't touch with a bargepole: P.Coelho books...
Sorry, I'm a bit late here.
Book that changed my life: well apart from all of them? (time being linear and all - sorry quick science joke there) Most changed my life? probably the collected fiction of Jorge Luis Borges.
Everyone should read: Shakespeare (obviously), Borges, Bulgakov, John Barth - The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, Albert Cohen - Belle de Seigneur, J.H. Carr - A Month in the Country, Gaiman's Sandman comics, Alice through the looking glass, Max Frisch, Muriel Spark, Ali Smith, Christopher Reid, any instructions for anything that has an electrical source or moving parts.
Avoid: Any book that features the words 'self' and 'help' next to each other, anything written by anyone who has presented top gear (off-the-cuff inaccurate and sweeping statements lose their charm when written down). I noticed this week that Jools Holland has written a book: I imagine that would be shit.
Top quality advice from you all - especially from Cynical Ben. Clarkson = death of brain cells
Book that changed my life: I'd also go with Kerouac, On the road and Visions of Cody. I Read them whilst travelling across the US, though I doubt if I'd re-read them now. Non-fiction: The third revolution by Paul Harrison.
Recommend: I remember thinking Midnight's Children was the best book I'd ever read when I read it some years ago, and have never had that feeling since. Also anything by Milan Kundera. Non-fiction: Jared Diamond, particularly Guns Germs and Steel, and Collapse.
I'd usually dump any book I thought was shit before finishing it, wouldn't wipe my arse on Clarkson, though I did once read a Coelho when I had to kill a couple of hours with nothing else to read and I can confirm that it was utter bollocks.
There's only one book I couldn't finish because it made me too depressed and filled with self-loathing, Note's from underground by Dostoevsky, the man was a genius.
I should probably give Notes from underground another go, but after reading James Lovelock's latest book last week I need something a little more uplifting.
Haha I was going to ask your opinion on this topic.
I think this is amazing - Shanteram.
Read it before they make a film out of it if you haven't already. When you do blog about it please i'd like to know your opinion :)
I'll look it up, anonymous - first recommendation of something of which I haven't heard.
Post a Comment