Favorite books?

Question

I am trying to find some great books to read. Do not like romance novels. Just the good stuff.

Thanks in advance! There are some books here that sound great.

Answer 1

The Vivero letter by Desmond Bagley.Jeremy Wheale's well-ordered life is torn apart when his brother is murdered by a mob hit man, whose bait was a family heirloom - a sixteenth-century gold tray. The trail takes Wheale from Devon to Mexico and the wild tropical rain forests of Yucatan. In dense jungle, he helps two archaeologists locate the rest of a fabled hoard of gold - treasure from Uaxuanoc, the centuries-old lost city of the Mayas. But his brother's enemies are on Wheale's trail, and with them are the Chicleros, a vicious band of convict mercenaries.

Landslide by Desmond Bagley.Bob Boyd wakes up in a hospital with no memory,the only surviver of an accident.He was burned badly all over and needed extensive plastic surgery which was payed by a mysterious sponser.He is told that he's a geology student with a bad history.However Bob recovers and gets on with his life.Hired by the powerful Matterson Corporation to survey land before they build a great new dam, he begins to uncover the shaky foundations of the Matterson family and becomes a fly in their ointment.His accident and the Matterson family have more in common than he thought.

The door to december by Dean Koontz.A psychiatrist's daughter was kidnapped by her ex-husband years ago. When the daughter is finally found, the real fight begins. One by one the people who held her captive become mysteriously tortured and killed. Everyone is afraid the young girl will be next.

The mystery unravels as to what happened to the young girl while she was kidnapped. The young girl, Melanie, is unable to speak, but her mother soon learns that the young girl went through extreme torture as her father used her for a rat in his experiments.

Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini.When his best friend, a young clergyman, is killed in a mockery of a duel by an arrogant noble, just to quiet his eloquent expressions of democratic ideals, Andre-Louis Moreau vows revenge. From that point, through meteoric careers as a consummate actor and scenario writer, then as a fencing master, and finally a politician, the brilliant Moreau keeps thwarting the aims of the aristocratic Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr. However, the nobleman causes pain to Moreau as well, and the time must come when the two will meet to settle their enmity once and for all. You are not likely to guess how their confrontation finally turns out. Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, this swashbuckling novel is exciting throughout, and it presents one of the most dashing heroes in fiction, a man who can fight equally well with his mind, his mouth, his pen, and his sword, a man who stirs up events wherever he goes.

Dragonjousters series(joust,alta,sanctuary) by Mercedes Lackey.The setting is ancient Egypt.Hunger, anger, and hatred are constants for young Vetch, rendered a brutally mistreated and overworked serf by the Tian conquest of his homeland. But everything improves when a Tian jouster requisitions Vetch to become the first serf ever to be a dragon boy. His training is intense, and his duty clear-cut: to tend his jouster, Ari, and his dragon, Kashet. He discovers that, because Ari himself had hatched Kashet, the dragon is different from others that have been captured live in the wild and must be drugged to be made tractable. Vetch finds he really likes and understands dragons, and soon he becomes the best dragon boy of all. He still harbors anger, however, toward the Tian invasion. Could he, perhaps, hatch a dragon, and then escape to help his people?

Dresden file book series by Jim Butcher.There are 8 books in the series beginning with stormfront.It narrates the story of Harry Dresden,chicago's only professional wizard who works as a detective.He stands between the general population who is ignorant about the supernatural world and the monsters - vampires,werewolves,fallen angels,fey.He is aided by Bob,a talking skull.Karrin Murphy-a police officer and Thomas-a white court vampire.

Another supernatural detective series is Nightside book series by Simon R.Green.John Taylor, the main character, is a private eye specializing in finding things. He literally has a private eye, one he can open and find anything. This power only works in the nightside, but anytime he opens it, his enemies (and he does not know who they are, but they have been hunting him since he was young) pick up on his presence like his gift is a homing devise. He as quite a reputation, some of which is true, some not and it gets him into trouble, or sometimes out of it, but it is the fact that some of it has nothing to do with him so much as that he is his mother's son. A mother he never knew and no one will tell him about. One big case is covered in each book, but underlying tensions build up higher and higher running through out the series.

Answer 2

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels
Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Answer 3

Jane Austen is my all time favorite - try Emma or Pride and Prejudice. I also really enjoy Ted Dekker. He has an amazing trilogy called Black, Red, and White. Or you can try Three for something less involved. It is being made into a movie. State of Fear by Michael Crichton is a great action book. If you want something really different you can try The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov. It is a very interesting sci-fi read.

Answer 4

Books I've read recently and enjoyed immensely:

The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion - very close to home for me, as my precious precious father died in much the same way as Didion's husband and she records her feelings/experiences for the first year.

The Red Tent - Oh My God. Fabulous tale bringing to life the reality of nomadic life in "Old Testament Days." The main conflict is the story in Genesis 34. Read that and get blown away. Read The Red Tent and learn why polygamy made sense, how people's lives really were, and how much more diverse the world was then than we imagine.

Drowing Ruth - Awesome story, well-written, explores how secrets hurt our lives.

I know This Much Is True - amazing book about a man and his schizophrenic twin.

Gone With The Wind - read it 18 times. What can I say?

Misquoting Jesus - fascinating, non-fiction about how the Bible was actually constructed. Learned, for example, that the "Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Stone" story never appeared in any christian texts until 400 a.d. It's made up by some monk!

The Little Prince - awesome awesome, heartbreaking tale of human foibles

The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan, demolished superstitions

The Odyssey by Homer Robert Fagles' translation is kick-a**. I loved this ancient epic. Heartbreaking, exciting, inspiring - great story denigrating war and celebrating hearth and home. Apparently, an allegory on hospitality.

Grimm's Fairy Tales - get the grownup annotated version and be amazed. The Robber Bridegroom, The Jew in the Brambles (if you're curious how Hitler was able to exploit the worst in Germans, see that story!), The Twelve Brothers - what those tales bring alive about life in europe is fabuluos.

The Brother's Karamazov - by Dosteyevksky - awesome, philosophical, funny - the grand inquisitor is a chapter often excerpted - powerful story about how the spanish inquisition condemns christ to death - knowingly.

Dead Souls, by Gogol - historical and hysterical

Black Edelweiss - heartbreaking autobiography of a member of the Waffen SS. I kid you not.

The Vinland Saga - the Vikings know how to tell tales. Check out all their sagas.

The Wizard of Oz - not what you think!

Tao Te Ching - mindblowing

The Rule of Four - fun, DaVinci code without the 'heresy.'

Answer 5

Some of my favorite authors are:
Nelson DeMille
Robert Ludlum
Frederick Forsythe
Ken Follett
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Leon Uris
Len Deighton
Bill Granger

Answer 6

Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven.

My dad passed away recently and a co-worker gave me a copy.

A phenomenal read. I went through a box of tissues while reading it but found it to be very comforting - some beautiful answers to some very hard questions.

Answer 7

If you like classics and you've got some time, these are worth the read...
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

These are some of my favorites. You've probably heard of all of them before, but if you've never bothered to pick them up I think you might be surprised at how easy it is to get lost in them!

If these really aren't your style, maybe try...
Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson
Forever by Pete Hamill

All really well-written and beautiful in their own ways. Hope this helps.

Answer 8

The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman. It's a great adventure story with a young girl as the highly capable heroine.

Answer 9

I loved 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson & I also love William Faulkner. 'The Portrait of a Lady' by Henry James impressed me. Its about a 19th century woman in a bad marriage. 'Middlemarch' by George Eliot is considered by some to be the best English novel of the 19th century.

Answer 10

Romance for the romance-novel-hater

Anyone But You by Jennifer Crusie
After her divorce, as part of her new life, Nina makes a trip to the pound to find a small, cute, perky canine companion...but that's not what she comes home with. To make matters more complicated, she finds herself attracted to the young man living downstairs who she meets when her new dog climbs in his window... very funny and entertaining.
http://verywellsaid.com/titles/a/anyone-but-you-0373771460.php

Faking It by Jennifer Crusie
http://www.mostlyfiction.com/humor/crusie.htm