E.H. Munro

Both, and add A Man in Full to that Wolfe list.

__________________
If everyone loves you you're doing it wrong.

"Opium is the religion of the masses." Fred Reed

The Power of 99 Press

"He thinks it's going to be fun being governor. It's only fun being governor of New York if you have money to spend, and I spent it all." Nelson Rockefeller on his successor, Hugh Carey.

The Truth

OK, here we go...

I'm going to stick to American authors because that is what LegoHat asked for, and I would be up all night if I didn't.

I'll try to list them by time frame...I'll stay away from periods and theory so I don't confuse anyone. I will list all of an authors works under the time period in which their first book listed was published (i.e. Saul Bellow published novels from the 50's to the 90's, but I will list all of his works in the 50s-60s). These are important 20th century American novels (and some collections of short stories) that I have read and would recommend:

1900s-1940s

F. Scott Fitgerald
The Great Gatsby
This Side of Paradise
John Dos Passos
USA Trilogy
William Faulkner
Go Down Moses
The Sound and the Fury
As I Lay Dying
Richard Wright
Native Son
Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man
JD Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
John Steinbeck
Grapes of Wrath
Of Mice and Men
East of Eden
Nelson Algren
The Man With the Golden Arm


1950s-1960s

Saul Bellow (oh I'm a fan)
Dangling Man
The Victim
The Adventures of Augie March
Seize the Day
Henderson the Rain King
Herzog
Mr. Sammler's Planet
Humboldt's Gift
Ravelstein
Joseph Heller
Catch-22
Walker Percy
The Moviegoer
Richard Bradford
Red Sky at Morning
Philip Roth
Portnoy's Complaint
American Pastoral
The Ghost Writer (fictional account of Roth's relationship with Bellow)
Zuckerman Unbound
The Anatomy Lesson
The Counterlife
The Plot Against America
Bernard Malamud
The Natural
Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse Five
Breakfast of Champions
Thomas Pynchon
Gravity's Rainbow
William Gaddis
The Recognitions
Jack Kerouac
On the Road

1970s-1980s

Don DeLillo
White Noise
Great Jones Street
End Zone
Americana
Mao II
Libra
Underworld
Donald Barthelme
The Dead Father
Snow White
60 Stories
40 Stories
Charles Portis
The Dog of the South
Norwood
True Grit
William T. Vollmann
You Bright and Risen Angels
The Royal Family
Europe Central
Jay Mcinerny
Bright Lights, Big City
Bret Easton Ellis
American Psycho


1990s-2000s

David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest
The Broom of the System
The Girl With Curious Hair
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
Oblivion
Richard Powers
The Gold Bug Variations
Jonathan Franzen
Strong Motion
The 27th City
The Corrections
Jonathan Lethem
Motherless Brooklyn
The Fortress of Solitude
Jonathan Safran Foer
Everything is Illuminated
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Michael Chabon
Wonder Boys
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Rick Moody
The Ice Storm
Dave Eggers
You Shall Know Our Velocity

I'm sure I've left some great books off of my list. And please keep in mind, this is limited to books I have read.

If you have questions about any of these books, please don't hesitate to reply or pm me.

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"Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else."

tb3214

Very good job! Thank you for this Truth.

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The statement below is true.
The statement above is false.

Magyarn

Random collection of books that sprang to mind
Mann: "Felix Krull, Confidence Man"
Waugh: Scoop, Black Mischief, The Loved One
M. Amis: Time's Arrow
K. Amis: Lucky Jim
Naipaul: A House for Mr. Biswas
Theroux: The Mosquito Coast, My Other Life
Burgess: Enderby trilogy, A Clockwork Orange
Dahl: Boy
Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Saramago: Blindness
Card: Ender's Game
Graves: "I, Claudius"
Coetzee: Disgrace
Tobias Wolff: This Boy's Life
Heller: Catch-22
Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Kafka: Amerika and short stories
Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London, 1984
Pohl: The Space Merchants
Roth: Portnoy's Complaint, The Human Stain
Zelazny: Lord of Light
Brunner: Stand on Zanzibar
Clark: Rendezvous with Rama
Camus: L'etranger
Houellebecq: The Elementary Particles, Platform

Authors:
Dickens, Twain, Wodehouse, Dave Barry, Verne

LegoHat

Thanks TomB, Magyarn and The Truth! :biggrin:

This was exactly what I was looking for.

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"True gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it – or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character."

- Hunter S. Thompson

LegoHat

I'll have to pick that one up, because I loved the two books I've already listed.

__________________
"True gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it – or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character."

- Hunter S. Thompson

Ghiman

Any sport related book recommendations?

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Lynx

Even if you aren't a Baseball fan, you should check it out.

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SeaNet

I enjoyed the book Phil Jackson wrote about the Bulls. I believe he wrote it during the year off between the Bulls and Lakers. Esp. good is the part about coaching in the Puerto Rican leagues. Crazy ****.

__________________

Sign and Trade for Vince? Any takers... anyone at all...?

Aurelino

Some books I like:

By Hermann Hesse
The glass bead game, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Peter Camenzind, Narciss and Goldmund, Journey to the East, Beenath the Wheel to name a few.

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Love in the time of cholera, One hundred years of solitude, Autumn of the patriarch.

By Gunter Grass
The Tin Drum, Dog Years.

Salman Rushdie
Midnight's Children, Haroun and the sea of stories, The Satanic Verses, East West

James Joyce
A Portrait of the artist as a young man. I want to read Ulysses.

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451.

William Faulkner- As I lay dying, The Sound and the Fury

Mikhael Sholokhov- And Quiet flows the Don.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot.

F. Scott Fizgerald: The Great Gatsby

W. Somerset Maugham: Of Human Bondage

Camilo Jose Cela: San Camilo, 1936. The Hive.

Nadine Gordimer: The Lying Days

Thoman Mann: Buddenbrooks

J M Coetzee
Waiting for the barbarians, Disgrace.

Jack Kerouac: On the Road.

__________________
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

lukewarmplay

has anyone else read The Corrections? i finished it a couple of weeks ago and yes it's glib and somewhat contrived, but i really really liked it and found some of the descriptions so imaginative and engaging. and really good characters.

for the record, i did not like infinite jest. i thought the end was really disappointing, although individual scenes have certainly stayed with me in the 8 or so years since i read it. the wind-up bird chronicles is similar in that way, great all the way through and then (imo) crappy ending. most of murakami's books are like that, the only exception was the one where the main character is chasing a sheep, but i can't remember it's name.

i think i'm going for a book by richard feynman next.

Krstic All-Star

For Dan Brown's books, I'd recommend in order, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, Digital Fortress and then The Da Vinci Code.

James Rollins is good for a formulaic but fast-paced and fun read, kind of like Clive Cussler.

I highly recommend Dan Silva's books, both series. Stephen Hartov has a good trilogy as well.

Fred Saberhagen's Dracula series is good too, beginning with The Dracula Tapes.

Steven Brust's The Phoenix Guards/Viscount of Adrilankha series is a nice homage to Dumas, and is good with his Vlad Taltos series.

H.P. Lovecraft is good, though only short stories are around.

Read anything you can get by Robert Bloch, and see that Psycho was not even his best psychological horror work.

Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe series is great historical fiction, on par with the Master and Commander series.

For more historical fiction check out H. N. Turtletaub's series. (Pseudonym of SF alternate-history master Harry Turledove.)

Edgar Rice Burroughs has a nice historical fiction work called I Am Barbarian.

Howard Fast wrote My Glorious Brothers, set in the Hasmonean period.

I could go on, but it'd be a lot better to list specific genres, and then books in those genres. (I read a lot)

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Odomiles

"The Sun Also Rises" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway

Hakeem

Going by the few that you mentioned in your original post, you might like these American novels:

Something Happened by Joseph Heller
Humboldt's Gift and Henderson The Rain King by Saul Bellow
The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux
A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row and The Pearl by John Steinbeck (actually, you'll probably enjoy all of Steinbeck's stuff)
The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon
Deliverance by James Dickey
Life Of Pi by Yann Martel (I think this guy is Canadian, though)
The Winds Of War and War And Remembrance by Herman Wouk

The Truth

I loved The Corrections, though I agree with your assessment for the most part. It seems to me that Franzen is always swinging for the fences in his novels, especially with his characters, and I admire the hell out of him for it...Sometimes he misses (as in Denise's relationship with an older man when she was in high school in The Corrections), but Franzen also hits a lot of 500 foot homeruns.

Have you read his other books? I thought Strong Motion was solid, but I didn't care much for The 27th City (plot was terribly contrived). His collection of essays "How to be Alone" is fantastic.

What didn't you like about the ending of "Infinite Jest?"--I thought it was incredible; I love that we aren't exactly sure about what happened, but there are plenty of clues in the text to formulate a theory (and there are some interesting theories out there).

__________________
"Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else."