Best novel you've read?

[eek]

american psycho (as good as when I first bought it in 1991)

Casino Royale won't take long to read and all Ian Fleming is a lot shorter than you would expect.

[d000hg]

Hmm,

I enjoyed a "complete Sherlock Holmes" collection for about 50p, and have read a couple of Dickens from a similar nearly free collection as well as Pride & Prejudice and so on - check out the Kindle bestsellers and free bestsellers lists on Amazon for lots of older things like that (Jules Verne is another one).

Pi is good, and I would equally recommend "Curious incident of the dog in the night-time" and "A spot of bother" by Mark Haddon - good respectable fiction

"The Power of One" is wonderful though I don't recall if it's on Kindle, check it out though.

Alistair Reynolds' Revelation Space books are very good in the Iain M Banks vein of SF if you like that - and Iain M Banks if you don'r know his stuff already and like SF (also writing non-SF without the 'M' - stuff like Wasp Factory is a modern classic, and his books are generally based in Scotland.

Will add more as they occur to me.

[KentPhilip]

Does Playboy count as a book?

Yes, but only if you don't look at the pictures..

[stek]

Best novel you've read?

Odin Dyen' Ivana Denisovicha, love owt by Solzhenityn...

[Gibbon]

The Aeneid

Particularly Book II which I've just finished translating into English.

The vivid description of the suffering and violence in a sacked city in antiquity is awful and sobering.

[rd409]

Life of Pi is the best book I've read in a long time.

WNATS. +1 for Life of Pi.

[quackhandle]

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell.

qh

[stek]

Best novel you've read?

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell.

qh

Based on Zemyatin's 'We'!

[quackhandle]

Based on Zemyatin's 'We'!

I did not know that, thank you, I'll have to get a copy.

FYI:

George Orwell averred that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) must be partly derived from We.[17] However, in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World as a reaction to H.G. Wells's utopias long before he had heard of We.[18] According to We translator Natasha Randall, Orwell believed that Huxley was lying.[19] Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing Player Piano (1952), he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We."[20] Ayn Rand's Anthem (1938) has many significant similarities to We (detailed here), although it is stylistically and thematically different.[21]

Orwell began Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) some eight months after he read We in a French translation and wrote a review of it.[22] Orwell is reported as "saying that he was taking it as the model for his next novel."[23] Brown writes that for Orwell and certain others, We "appears to have been the crucial literary experience."[24] Shane states that "Zamyatin's influence on Orwell is beyond dispute."[25] Russell, in an overview of the criticism of We, concludes that "1984 shares so many features with We that there can be no doubt about its general debt to it," however there is a minority of critics who view the similarities between We and 1984 as "entirely superficial". Further, Russell finds "that Orwell's novel is both bleaker and more topical than Zamyatin's, lacking entirely that ironic humour that pervades the Russian work."[18]

qh

[Scrag Meister]

Roots - Alex Haley
Crystal Singer - Anne McCaffrey
Dragon Tattoo trilogy - Stieg Larsson
A Song of Ice and Fire aka Game of Thrones - George R R Martin
To kill a mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov