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ORIGINAL: Leepus

I'll also throw out Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein, which just came out in paperback. Worth it for the ostrich sex alone
(you will, btw, either hate me forever, or love me, for recommending this book)

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ORIGINAL: slvemike4u

Why is it that I am not surprised by the lineup of posters on this thread....and yes Aynne The Irish did save Civilization

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ORIGINAL: Aynne

The Road was the best book i have read in years, and i prefer books to people generally! it was breathtaking. Also worth a look Edward Rutherford's 'Sarum' a novel of England, and 'How the Irish saved civilization.'  p.s. we did you know.

Review and sysnopsis:

In “The Road” a boy and his father lurch across the cold, wretched, wet, corpse-strewn, ashen landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. The imagery is brutal even by Cormac McCarthy’s high standards for despair. This parable is also trenchant and terrifying, written with stripped-down urgency and fueled by the force of a universal nightmare. “The Road” would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty.




THE ROAD
By Cormac McCarthy.

This is an exquisitely bleak incantation — pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes. Mr. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was never meant to see.

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ORIGINAL: softness

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ORIGINAL: Viridana

It's never to late to lose yourself in the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett.

grins .. already lost ... and can't start re-reading them until the New Year when me and my brother are going to race to get through them in order .. loser buys lunch

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ORIGINAL: kiwisub12
"Swan Song" by Robert McCammon

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ORIGINAL: bipolarber

Well, if you like Pratchett, then I'd suggest either the "Myth" series by Robert Lynn Asprin, (the first book is "Myth-Conceptions") and the "Xanth" series by Peirs Anthony. (A Spell for Chameleon being it's first.)

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ORIGINAL: Sundowner

For your list, if you want books that really will stay with you for life, try Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold - it will make you cry - and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon will make you think.

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ORIGINAL: subtee

 
Me Talk Pretty One Day
 by David Sedaris, Terry Adams (Editor)
 
Synopsis
ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY contains far more than just the funniest collection of autobiographical essays - it quite well registers as a manifesto about language itself. Wherever there's a straight line, you can be sure that Sedaris lurks beneath the text, making it jagged with laughter; and just where the fault lines fall, he sits mischievously perched at the epicenter of it all.
 
No medium available to mankind is spared his cultural vision; no family member (even the dynasties of family pets) is forgotten in these pages of sardonic memories of Sedaris's numerous incarnations in North Carolina, Chicago, New York, and France.
 
The New Yorker
This fourth collection of short pieces offers pleasures normally to be found only in the best novels and the rare standup act that is actually funny.
 
Reading this on a train through Dallas had me squirting tears out of my eyes from laughing so hard. Mighta cracked a rib. 
 

quote:



Galchen’s narrator, a fussy 51-year-old psychiatrist named Leo Liebenstein, believes that his beautiful, much-younger Argentine wife, Rema, has been replaced by a “doppelgänger,” a “simulacrum,” an “impostress,” an “ersatz” spouse. “Last December,” Leo explains, “a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” Like his wife, the newcomer has the same “wrinkly boots,” the same Argentine accent with “the halos around the vowels,” the “same baby blue coat with jumbo charcoal buttons, same tucking behind ears of dyed corn silk blond hair. Same bangs cut straight across like on those dolls done up in native costumes that live their whole lives in plastic cases held up by a metal wire around the waist.” The idea that this cockatiel of a woman could not be the Rema in question is absurd, but the evidence of Leo’s eyes and ears doesn’t persuade him. “Same everything, but it wasn’t Rema,” he maintains. “It was just a feeling, that’s how I knew.”