Old Books And Book Collections

[wily]

i like to read.

i read the earth is enough off of a similar thread and liked it...so i just went to amazon and bought gene hill and corey ford based off trout fanatics response.

my favorites americans are steinbeck and upton sinclair...my favorite twain story is the private history of a campaign that failed. I also like camus.

for sci fi...i lean more towards aldous huxley

[eric1978]

for sci fi...i lean more towards aldous huxley

Brave New World was a great book. Too bad his vision of the future turned out to be so accurate...

Factoid: Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" is where Jim Morrison got the name for the Doors.

[Al Agnew]

I never was one for reading a lot of literary classics. I've read Hemingway and Steinbeck, hated Dickens, and think that Mark Twain is the greatest American writer ever. The first non-children's book I ever read was Tom Sawyer. Read Huckleberry Finn soon afterward, didn't like it. Read it again for high school literature class, liked it but didn't believe Twain was really putting in all the stuff the teacher was telling us. Read it the third time in college and finally understood everything he was saying in it. Still not my favorite book of his, but certainly his most "important" book. I love "Life on the Mississippi" the most.

But I'm pretty much either escapist type fiction, or non-fiction, in my reading tastes.

Another great fantasy writer with a lot of loosely related books (same "world", different time periods and characters) is David Gemmell. He died a couple years ago, and so we won't be seeing anything new, but I've just about collected all his available novels.

W.E.B Griffin's "Presidential Agent" series is about the only stuff of his that I read. Tried a couple others, but couldn't get too interested.

Tom Clancy, of course, is the classic writer of his genre. I've got all of his, including his newest, which is a little better than the last one he wrote a number of years ago. Didn't expect to ever see another Clancy novel, figured he had retired with his fortune.

It seems that vampires are all the rage now, but Fred Saberhagen's series of Count Dracula books did the vampire stuff as good as anything today. And one of my most favorite current authors is Jim Butcher. His series about Harry Dresden, a wizard and private detective in Chicago who battles all kinds of magical beings including three kinds of vampires, is great reading, and his Codex Alera series, just completed (I read the final book a month or so ago) is excellent fantasy writing.

[rps]

If you like Gemmel, try Raymond Feist, start with Talon of the Silver Hawk.

[yakfisher]

[Another series that I really like is Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp books. Rapp is the present day version of Matt Helm.

Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp books are a favorite of mine, too. Going back a few years, John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series is good. Lee Child's Jack Reacher series, John Sandford's "Prey" series with Lucas Davenport, and anything by Nelson DeMille always is a good read.

[rps]

[Another series that I really like is Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp books. Rapp is the present day version of Matt Helm.

Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp books are a favorite of mine, too. Going back a few years, John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series is good. Lee Child's Jack Reacher series, John Sandford's "Prey" series with Lucas Davenport, and anything by Nelson DeMille always is a good read.

While I don't know Flynn, the rest of the authors/series you mention are good reads - though DeMille sometimes seems a bit "made for television"

[Al Agnew]

I agree on Lee Child...can't wait for the next Reacher novel to come out.

Jack Du Brul's Mercer series was good. Mercer was a geologist but an expert with guns and hand to hand combat. Kind of a hybrid of science, Indiana Jones type adventure, and secret agent stuff. Du Brul wrote five or six in the series, but haven't seen a book by him in a long time. Wonder what happened to him?

[ness]

In the 'spy' genre, I read a lot of Robert Ludlum's stuff. Ken Follett too. Just reread Eye of the Needle by him. Really enjoyed Pillars of the Earth (though, not spy stuff). I've got Key to Rebecca in the queue.

Read most all the early Clancy/Jack Ryan stuff. Good, but I moved on.

Started into the Sacketts and got maybe halfway. The plots just seemed too contrived and some of them leaned so heavily on an unbelievable set of circumstances that I was having trouble 'believing'. I've read some of his other stuff and like it pretty well -- like his short stories series. I've got an interesting letter from L'Amour to my dad, who had written him asking about the source of a character who shares our last name.

Read a couple oldies but goodies in 2010: Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Travers (of Trout Magic, etc.), To Kill a Mockingbird and In Cold Blood.

Picked up An Irish Country Doctor on a whim, and really enjoyed it. Reading another in that series right now.

[Trout Commander]

I've got an interesting letter from L'Amour to my dad, who had written him asking about the source of a character who shares our last name.

That would be an awesome piece to pass down the family line!

[ness]

That would be an awesome piece to pass down the family line!

Yeah, it's written on his stationary with his name at the top, signature at the bottom. He wrote a mini-history lesson on the family who shared our last name.