I agree! bring on Oprah! 'Back Roads' by Tawni O'dell is wonderful!

Also, 'I know this much is true ' (not an oprah pick but by wally lamb , who also wrote 'she's come undone')

one another note... I've always had a love/hate thing going on with Stephen King but *recently* ---- 'DUMA KEY' was masterful! Also 'Lisey's Story'...

"A Dry White Season" by Andre Brink.

I hate these threads b/c they remind me of how much I've not read, and how little I have.

Amazon is really pretty good for this shit, seriously. Go on there, find all of the books you've read and liked and click on the little things that say "I own this" and then have a skim through the recommendations they give you.

I'm off to amazon now to buy some more books that I won't get round to reading for two years

I'm not posting my favourites b/c I don't read enough to have proper favourites. But, I mean, I have favourites though. And they've already been mentioned in the thread.

- Almost everything Faulkner & Hemingway
- If you're into short-ish but allegedly classic Lit, then Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie"
- I've a lot of Anthony Trollope as well but evidently that's not everybody's taste at ALL
-- Also Evelyn Waugh.

Much more recent stuff I've got & re-read or reading :
- "American Gods" - Neil Gaiman
- I did think "Back Roads" (can't recall author atm" was decent as said above
- If you H8 Pat Conroy, beware, but this is the only one of his which I not only read but actually bought & re-read a LOT: "Beach Music". Long but a non-difficult/well-paced read, & a bit, well "deep" but not in the sense of some of his other themes
- The very best of Anne Rivers Siddons' books, which btw I used think were total beach-reader froth, is: "Peachtree Road". O M G Z. Incredible imo; and written very well from the POV of a MAN. Hard to pull off and she does it astonishingly well. VERY long & very worth the effort.
- William Gibson: "Neuromancer" (the origin btw of the term "cyberpunk")
&likewise
- William Gibson: 'spook country' :am currently reading, and the plot is fucking complicated. Includes, yep: additional 'cyberpunk'. heh
- I quite liked "Odd Thomas", by Dean Koontz , somewhat strangely-- got it to read on a long journey to-n-fro; & followed by nearly a wk or 8 ? days of horrible hotel stay & many astoundingly boring waiting sessions @ U of Chicago's Cancer Treatment Center, & was surprised bc most of his things I've found not so interesting. Or just flat out predictable.

- btw:Also, quite agree w/whoever said above that Stephen King's "Lisey's Story" was, if not terribly i challenging or w/e, better (?) than a great deal of SK's more recent output (imo o'course}. I did not do well w/ "Duma Key" tho, unfortunately.

- Re. SK: I did rly really like "Bag of Bones" tho. Unexpected themes & sub-plots, sorta. Warning: If you hate longish books w/a good many sub-plots of the mostly unlikely variety, you ought prob give this a miss.

K, obv I'm an omnivorous reader, so I shall spare you what else is on my library shelves atm.
Some of it is 18th & 19th century stuff w/a vengeance

Chyia, unapologetic bibliophile

I haven't read the whole of the thread so I'm not too sure if any of these have been listed:

Don DeLillo - Underworld
Charles Bukowski - Ham on Rye
Sherman Alexie - The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven
Paul Auster - Moon Palace
Albert Camus - The Outsider
Bret Easton Ellis - Less than Zero
Haruki Murakami - The Wind-up Bird Chronicles OR Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Jack Kerouac - On the Road
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
Douglas Coupland - Generation X OR All Families are Psychotic
Katherine Dunn - Geek Love
Jim Dodge - Stone Junction


I won't go on any further as I could be here all day....