Filth : Irvine Welsh
Diaspora : Greg Egan
Hannibal : Thomas Harris
Consider Phlebas : Iain Banks
American Pastoral : Philip Roth
The Six Books Of Blood : Clive Barker
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo : Stieg Larsson

Thanks for tips.
Greg Egan I like - might have read Diaspora
Don't know Welsh
Read Hannibal a long while back and enjoyed ..think there is a companion to it
Iain Banks is hilarious ...perhaps acquired taste
destest Philip Roth
Clive Barker ...also aquired taste
Steig Larson ...brilliant...never wanted the series to end.

Irvine Welsh wrote Trainspotting, among others. His books are ermm...unpleasant.

Robert Harris wrote The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal Rising.

I would describe him as graphic rather than unpleasant. But it adds to the realism of the plot without it being unnecessarily gratuitous. You cannot really have beautiful prose when dealing with dark subject matter. It would not gel. Trainspotting is
a hard read but that is because it is mainly written in Glaswegian dialect. When I read The Filth it was easier to understand

Fallible wrote:Irvine Welsh wrote Trainspotting, among others. His books are ermm...unpleasant.

Robert Harris wrote The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal Rising.

Thomas Harris wrote those books.

FFS, I'm always doing that.

Robert Harris wrote The Fatherland which is the book of his I would
most like to read. And it has sold a million which is a lot for a novel

The_Metatron wrote:The Healer, by Antti Tuomainen. I'm halfway through it, and it's pretty goddamned grim.

I read that just recently - you may have seen it on one of my lists - and thought it was excellent. But yes, it is grim. His Dark As My Heart is good too.

Some others :

Saturday : Ian McEwan
Strangers : Dean Koontz
Ghost Story : Peter Straub

Legion Of The Damned : Sven Hassel
Something Happened : Joseph Heller
The City And The City : China Mieville

The City and the City is brilliant.

Strange book - not one of his best...I still don't think he has surpassed Peridido Station

Looking forward to



Never knew it existed.
NYT review here
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/books ... novel.html

Just finished...Lonely Vigil about the coast watchers in the Solomon Islands during WWII and Incredible Victory ...the Battle for Midway ...both by Walter Lord and meticulously researched...both read very well.

Midway in particular could have seen a very different outcome to the war. The coast watchers were the ones that picked up John Kennedy after the PT109 was cut into by a Jap destroyer.
Fascinating read, well crafted.

BTW ... https://www.bookbub.com/home?mid=1-12072-12888539 provides daily deals ...it almost always has one book I'm interested in an at $1.99 - can't resist......they are one day deals only.

Just getting into The Man from St. Petersburg by Ken Follett. He's a good story teller ....akin to Mitchner in bringing an era to life.

I'm currently reading The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. The first chapter is about Georges Cuvier who, in 1796, correctly identified the mastodon as an extinct species (and not something still roaming the undiscovered wilds of America), went on to discover many more, and was the first to conceive of extinct worlds before our own, which he believed were wiped out by major catastrophes which he attributed to Noah-like deluges. Before this people, like Thomas Jefferson, didn't really believe that mother nature would create creatures which would be so weak as to disappear from the planet.

On the one hand it's written in a really engaging way which makes the whole era of discovery in his time exciting, on the other hand, it's quite sad that this era of discovery will likely be off-set by one of dystopia because I think I know where this book is headed.

The very last line of the first chapter mentions that the disappearance of megafauna close to our own level of strata in Europe and America coincides with the spread of humans into those regions.Yeah, it's not looking too good already in this fairly predictable novel.

Picked it up on BookBub for $1.99 and pleasantly surprised ....fast paced cyberpunk .....very edgy. Got me hooked.
They have my number ...scifi and historical stuff - fiction and non-fiction....rarely a day goes by I don't grab one.

https://www.bookbub.com/home/

One day deals only

My next is 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. Apparently he is the best science fiction writer on the planet though this
was not why I bought it. It was because the plot sounds space opera ish and space opera is my favourite sub genre

He is very good. The Mars series is brilliant once you get into it. Aurora perhaps a bit more accessible.

Not sure I'd call him space opera genre .....lots of hard SF tho some imaginative reaches as well.

ack ...I've gone and dun it now ...



I consider him the finest most evocative writer in the English language but need a dictionary regularly.

This



was an impulse buy .....came on on BookBub for $1.99 and was pitched in the same vein as Jarad Diamond and it's usually $15.99 on Kindle !!!
I would not pay $15.99 for it before I got into it....
NOW...it's worth every penny of that. Truly insightful well written science.

Part way in and he really can make deep time for primates/humans come alive as if you are walking in a well stock museum with a knowledgible guide pointing out the details you might miss.
While not quite as exuberant as Song of the Dodo or Guns Germs and Steel....he nevertheless spins a very well constructed narritive of our evolution both physically and culturally ( tool use, shelter, fire etc ) .
He also shows how our near relatives have cultures as well.....then our big brains pull us away.

What happens when the big silcon brains pull away a ...

edgy or what...




Geez - deeper I get the weirder the imagination very reminds me of Snow Crash - original thought for sure.

My god, he's a miserable git. But in a good way.