Brain hungry...feed me book!

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Please recommend me a book. Or nine.

I'm on a reading kick lately, and I'm sick of my favorite author, Chuck Paluhnialphabet (author of Fight Club and Choke whose name I can never spell and have given up trying to pronounce). I've been cranking through the Elmore Leonards, but I'm kind of sick of crime novels right now. I'm also not in the mood for fantasy.

Something sardonic, and funny (but not a comedy book) and semi-topical would be good. Books about the Nazis always interest me for some strange reason, fiction or otherwise. Don't ask me why - I blame Wolfenstein 3d and Benknobs & Broomsticks for my latent Nazi fetish, but that's another topic.

Thanks a pantload.

 

Not much comedy in these:

For Whom the Bell Tolls -- Ernest Hemmingway. Perhaps the best book I've ever read.

The Old Man and the Sea -- Ernest Hemmingway. Pulitzer Prize winning novella.

The Caine Mutiny -- Herman Wouk. Another Pulitzer Prize winning novel (the movie is great, the book is better).

The Eagle Has Landed -- Jack Higgins. This one has German soldiers who are definately not Nazis.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold -- John le Carre. The best spy novel ever.

Eye of the Needle -- Ken Follett. Another novel with Nazis.

The Evil that Men Do -- R. Lance Hill. Good luck finding this book. A hit man is hired to punish a Nazi trained torturer.

 

Totally agreed. I have 3 copies of this book, strangely. One I bought for myself, and two gifted from my brother and aunt when I mentioned I was reading Hemingway. Yeah, that Christmas sucked.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was already on my "to buy" list, so thanks for confirming.

 

Chasing a Mirage by Tarek Fatah. It's non-fiction, and it is an erudite Muslim author arguing that he and his peers need to do more to roll back radical Islam and stop the ridiculous belief that countries should be ruled by sharia law. It's well written, extremely enlightening, and gives a person hope, as it demonstrates that not all Muslims are whackjobs lusting to blow us up.

On a lighter note, you could read Why You're going to Hell for leaving the Mormon Church by Elder Imagun Whippah Yo'Ass, the eminent and fiery African convert to the faith.

I'm sorry, I'm in a weird mood today.

 

How about Catch-22? Linky Linky

 

You know something? I've never read either Catch 22, Ferenheit 451 or Slaughterhouse 5. Mayhaps the month of May will be numbers month. (Or Freshman Lit reading catch-up month. )

 

I read some Dickens (Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities) when I was 14 or so and didn't mind them at all. I should note that this is with an annoyance to the aforementioned lengthy prose. I will agree with the Russians though, Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago was a great effort to finish, and even though I loved the book, Dostoeyevsky's The Brother's Karamazov, I could never sit down and read it for any significant length of time.

OK, enough of that and time for a serious recommendation, Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night. It's not like most of his books where he has a bunch of SciFi elements that I never like, in fact it has none at all (IIRC). What it does have is a clever plot, good humor, nice satirical writing, and also Nazi's. It is definately worth a read, one of my favorite little books.

So, go read it.

-edit- Haha, new replies while I was posting. You mentioned Slaughterhouse 5 and to that I say you should definitely read Mother Night before it. If you like Vonnegut's writing in the latter, than you can read Slaughterhouse 5, but otherwise don't start with it. Not a favorite of mine.

Fahrenheit 451 was a pretty good book and I enjoyed it, thought it wasn't anything immensely special for me. I can't comment on Catch 22 because I have neglected reading it, despite considering it every time I get near my family's tiny bookshelf at home.

 

So, mods, I want to point DR to some comics that're legally available free online. Only there's, like, profanity and/or nudity and/or gore in the comics. Okay to link directly, or should I just point him to the companies' homepages and let him take it from there?

 

Try some of Stephen Fry's books. They're very well written can be light-hearted without taking away from the seriousness of what he's talking about

 

The earlier books in the Kay Scarpetta series were quite good by Patricia Cornwell.

I would also recommend early Tom Clancy -- The Hunt of Red October and Red Storm Rising are amazing.

 

He already did. And there was boobies.

 

Yeah, a few minutes after I posted I remembered that there were these mysterious things called 'PMs' and decided to investigate further. I'm clever like that.

 

I have never read Slaughterhouse 5 either, but of the other two, I would definitely recommend Catch 22 over Farhenheit 451.