I'm into sci-fi more than anything and recommend most Philip K Dick books, especially The Man In The High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldridge and Ubik, although I'm not too keen on anything he wrote after the semi-autobiographical Valis.
John Wyndham is great too. Check out Day Of The Triffids and The Midwitch Cuckoos.
Neuromancer by William Gibson. The Matrix stole a lot of ideas from this book, and fell short.
Dune by Frank Herbert is an amazing book, and Dune Messiah is quite good too but I haven't read any of the others yet.
I also like Iain M Banks, especially Excession and Against A Dark Background. My only real gripe is that some of his books are a bit too utopian, but his wit and imagination make up for this.
hecter wrote:I thought I'd leave a suggestion of my own after reading all this. Lewis Carols books and poems are good for a light read. He wrote Alice in Wonderland. It's actually really good, so don't dismiss it because it's been Disneyfied.
One of my favourite authors at the moment is
Jeff Noon. Everything of his that I've read is of the utmost quality. He has a book called Automated Alice which is a kind of 22nd century remix of Alice In Wonderland. Vurt and
Needle In The Groove are his best books. He's also got a collection of short stories, Pixel Juice, with a truly outstanding passage called Metaphorazine (read it out loud).
Non sci-fi, check out Iain Banks' (without the 'M') The Wasp Factory. I also like The Diceman by Luke Reinhart, if you haven't bought some dice by halfway through this book then you're an unimaginative coward
. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is just brilliant. Fans of the TV series Monkey should check out Journey To The West by Wu Cheng-En.
Terry Pratchett is entertaining easy-reading. Most of his books can be ploughed through in a single day. Mort and Small Gods are my favourites. The same is true of Douglas Adams.
For those of you who like military/history books I can't speak highly enough of the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraizer. Set in victorian times, Harry Flashman is a coward, bully, womaniser and all-round bastard. After being expelled from school, his father buys him a commission in the army and off he goes to the first Afghan war and undeservedly becomes a national hero. These books are historically accurate as regards people and events, with Flashman himself taking the place of various unknown soldiers and filling in some grey areas. Education has never been so funny. The only book in the series that I didn't like much was the second one, Royal Flash, but the rest are great.
Another is the Golden Compass trilogy by Philip Pullman. Just great relationships between the characters.
