ddavidv wrote:
"Grapes of Wrath" by Steinbeck. Amazing.
"White Fang" by Jack London.
Both are fantastic books. I reread 'Grapes' a while back, it still has the same power.
I read 'Ghost Soldiers' a while back, the true story of survivors of the Bataan Death March and their rescue ahead of the Allied invasion of the Phillipines. It has many pictures of the characters taken in the camp and during/after the rescue, a fantastic book.
I'm going to have to get 'Truck'.
I've read just about everything Stephen King ever wrote. The 'Dark Tower' series started out great then went to pieces with Blaine the Train. Was King experimenting with psychedelics, or did he just have to write something to get his publisher off his back? I still think he hit his peak with 'The Stand'.
My kid has both of the 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' books, those are great! There's a third one coming out, can't wait.
If you've never read it, 'Alive' is a straight from the shoulder honest book.
James Dickey's 'Alnilam' holds first place on my 'crappy book' list. I got to chapter 3, put it down and have never been able to pick it up again. He devotes most of the first chapter to describing his protagonist's bowel movement outside in very cold weather. Hard to believe this came from the same guy who wrote 'Deliverance'. All joking about Ned Beatty and banjos aside, that's a great book.
'Slaves in the Family' by Edward Ball is not particularly well written, but the subject material is gripping. Ball's family goes back to the 1600's in the Charleston area. He decided to do some geneaology research and discovered his forebears were some of the largest slave owners of Colonial times. In the book, he visits some of the old plantations which belonged to his family and their peers, but most interesting of all he visits the descendants of his family's slaves and recounts the conversations. A deep look into the truth of race relations in the South today.
'To Kill A Mockingbird' is a fantastic book and the movie with Gregory Peck is well worth watching, if only to see Robert Duvall in his first starring role.
My favorite escapist sc fi books were 'The Stainless Steel Rat' books written by Harry Harrison. Imagine 007 with 30th century technology.
Hard sci fi, Arthur C Clarke. 'Rendezvous with Rama' is particularly good. Asimov's 'Foundation' books fall in this category as well. I will probably be excommunicated for this, but Frank Herbert's 'Dune' is the second worst piece of crap I have ever tried to read. The movie was painful to try to watch.
I used to read all the time, I have tons of paperbacks. Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler occupy a lot of my paperback shelf along with Robert Ludlum.