The Book Thread Book • Page 14

I'm sure I will enjoy at least one of them haha I'm not crazy about Bukowski but there are plenty of other options in there!

 

I enjoy the Book Thief more now when I think back on it than I did when I actually read. What are your other favorite plays?

 

I would add:

George Orwell - 1984
Stephen King - The Long Walk
Lev Grossman - The Magician's Land
Brandon Sanderson - Words of Radiance
Donald Miller - A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

All of them would probably make my top 10. Surprisingly, this may be the one list I've not made.

 

Only using one per author... not really in order

1. It - Stephen King
2. The Ruins - Scott Smith
3. The Terror - Dan Simmons
4. House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
5. Last Days - Adam Nevill
6. Girl Next Door - Jack Ketchum
7. Storm of Swords - George R R Martin
8. Words of Radiance - Brandon Sanderson
9. Atonement - Ian McEwan
10. N0S4A2 - Joe Hill
11. Fires of Heaven (Wheel of Time) - Robert Jordan
12. Scarlet Gospels - Clive Barker
13. The Five - Robert McCammon
14. Ghost Story - Peter Straub
15. Metro 2033 - Dmitry Glukhovsky

 

Freedom was good but I pretty much despised the characters for most of it, although they were ultimately sympathetic. Does The Corrections live up to the hype?

 

Interesting choice from this series. It's in my top 5 for the series, though, so I definitely get the love.

 

How is Peter Straub? Haven't read any of his stuff but have a couple of books he co-wrote with King.

 

Well I'm sure when I'm done my favorite will change, I tend to love endings (Dark Tower 7 is my favorite for example). It's not like a super obvious favorite, I think what really puts it over the edge is Lanfear V Morraine. But you've also got the stuff the balefire and Rahvin too which is mind blowing. If I remember correctly this is when Jordan starts leaning really hard into the Forsaken too and giving them their own POV, which I adore. Also, by this time I'm so fucking into the world it's crazy, haha. Which one is your favorite...was it Shadow Rising?

 

He's not for everyone. You can get a real glimpse of what his writing is like in the books with king that he co-writes (which are all great). Whenever the scenes feel like they're going on just a bit too long and describing seemingly unimportant things, it's because of Straub. He's really dry, but not in a bad way, just sort of an acquired taste. He does not hold his reader's hands and just dumps you right in and expects you to get it. Ghost Story is his masterpiece, his "It" in very many ways. He also has a very dark mystery/horror kind of interconnecting Vietnam related material that's really good.

All of his books with King are great. Black House is one of my favorite King books, which is a sequel to that Talisman which is really good in its own right

 

I feel like my top one is a weird choice but my top 5:

1)The Westing Game
2)To Kill A Mockingbird
3)And Then There Were None
4)Harry Potter And The Goblet of Fire
5)The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles

 

Totally didn't know Black House was a sequel, so that's good to know since I recently bought it haha. I'll hopefully get around to those soon, but I say that about a lot of books haha.

 

Shadow Rising for all the Aiel history sequences in Rhoidian (spelling off and from memory). But yeah, I loved when the Forsaken became integral.

 

I thought so, but I may be biased since The Corrections is one of my top 5 favorite books "of all time". However, with that said, the characters in The Corrections are generally terrible people who some find it hard to feel sympathy for and those are the type of characters I like best. They don't do anything outright horrible like a villain, but they are not easy to root for.

 

The book thief
One flew over the cuckoo's nest
One hundred years of solitude
The outsiders
In the garden of the North American martyr
Watchmen
A storm of swords
Jurassic park

 

Anyone find themselves loving a book and hating a book by the same author?

I love One Hundred Years of Solitude but absolutely hate Love in the Time of Cholera.

 

I haven't read LITTOC yet but I don't think that's an unpopular opinion, hahaha

 

Even if I really dislike, or downright hate something usually it still has a few things that made it worthwhile or at least memorable. Even if just a scene or a character or a few pages. And while LITTOC had some of those it's probably the closest I came to ever having nothing positive to say about a book. Aside from the writing itself because Marquez is real good at that.

 

This is how I am with both Neil Gaiman and John Green--some of my favorite books are by each of them and some of my most hated books are by each of them, it's weird

 

there are a few Vonnegut books I didn't really like

 

which ones?

 

breakfast of champions and cat's cradle were both pretty boring imo

 

sometimes it's hard for me to remember what happens in which particular Vonnegut book because they all feel kind of the same in terms of weirdness / atmosphere / universe - kind of like Murakami - but i don't think i've disliked any of Vonnegut's work. although at the same time because of the sameness to them i find it hard to pick out "favorites" (aside from Slaughterhouse Five, likely because that was the first one i read by him and most of the time the first book i read by an author sticks with me the most).

 

I think Galapagos is great and one of his most underrated books

 

another question for everybody:

if you really like a particular author, do you read their books in a row / in a short time span, or do you spread them out?

i'm a huge Murakami, Vonnegut, Steinbeck, Hemingway, King, Pynchon, DeLillo fan (among many others) but could never go from reading East of Eden to Cannery Row to The Grapes of Wrath to Of Mice and Men to others because i'd feel like they would blur together too much and i wouldn't be able to separate them when looking back at them.

also, i like to 'torture' myself at times so if i read a great book i'll deliberately wait awhile before reading another one by said author because i anticipate the next one being just as great and don't want to squeeze them together too quickly. like to have one settle and really sink in.

 

I do the same thing when I really love a book. I own multiple books by authors I loved but have yet to read them. My reasoning is more that I am afraid that I read the "one good one" by the author and the others won't live up. When I do read something else it normally is as good or at least almost as good.

I've started to split up my reading of a book with my reading of a comic book/graphic novel because I definitely have blended many books together in the past. Back in high school I would read like 3-4 books from the library a week and cannot remember all the books or a lot of what happened in all of them.