The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.

Great, dark book.

Viggo Mortenson is going to be in the movie version.

 

Masterlist of Fiction in the English Language.

Hey People,

I think it'd be a great idea to create a list of the 'fundamentals' of the English Language. Books that are 'must reads' in the domain of Fiction. So, please pipe up with your suggestions and I'll add them to the list.

 

Robert Heinlein
Larry Niven
Agatha Christie
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
JRRTolken
Andre Norton

 

Ayn Rand. Primarily Atlas Shrugged.

Oops. Just realized that this one is more in the philosophical sense. But still a great read.

 

George Orwell
Steven King
Tom Clancy

 

I'm looking as well for those 'must read' books, particularly of the English language.

Here are a few I've read recently...

* Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange).
* Aldous Huxley (Brave New World).
* George Orwell (1984).

Any recommendations beside those? I'm not looking for fantasy or science-fiction.

 

Not to be critical, but similar FaceBook-ish ideas have been done in other threads. A few cases in point:

best book you've read
science fiction recommendations
spy/military novel recommendations
fantasy recommendations
another fantasy recommendations
political book recommendations
books in general (thread number twenty three on the site).

Edit: Ayn Rand, Wetnurse? Surely you troll...

 

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

 

Boring. D:

 

Theres this series about wizards and stuff going to boarding school written by some woman, can't for the life of me remember the name. Something about pottery...

Its good though.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics

 

The Road is an incredibly awesome post-apocalyptic book. It's about a man and his boy traveling through the wasted countryside just trying to survive. There was some sort of unspecified (nuclear?) disaster that killed almost everyone and threw the survivors back into a primitive lifestyle. There are bands of roving marauders, encounters with various freaks, and all sorts of brutality. It's a dark, dark novel.

I'd also recommend McCarthy's Blood Meridian. It's a sort of postmodern Western, taking place in the midst of scalp-hunting wars in the 1840s. It takes place along the Mexico/US border in a desert wasteland. There's all sorts of philosophizing about the nature of violence and God, which is McCarthy's specialty, and it's probably my favorite book. Incidentally, it's also one of the most violent books ever written, and not for the faint of heart.

 

If you're looking for a 'master list,' just glance at the syllabi for the literature courses at any university.

Here's some of my favorite recent literary fiction. I think most of the DLP crowd would like it:

(1) Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian. Apocalyptic western set in the midst of a scalp-hunting war; one of the most violent (and philosophical) novels ever written.

(2) Don DeLillo - White Noise. College novel. Funny look at the chaos and impersonality of modern life.

(3) Donna Tartt - The Secret History. Another college novel. A group of 'classics' students recreate Dionysian revels and end up murdering one of their classmates. Good fun. Oh, and twincest.

(4) Denis Johnson - Jesus' Son. The main character's name is "Fuckhead." 'Nuff said.

I'd be interested to see what other recent 'literary' stuff people are reading.

 

I'll second "The Road", a very dark and sad story but also a very good story about good people just trying to survive and the lengths they will go to survive.

 

Recommend some short stories?

Ok, so we're supposed to adapt a short story to a 20 minutes film as a collage final year project and since I mostly prefer novels I need some help. The story must be:
- A self-contained story.
- Mostly plot/character driven (I don't mean some sappy-emo-boring shit, but I do need some plot to work with).
- Something that is not TOO effects/props heavy (we do have some really good SFX guys but don't go overboard).
- Preferably, something that wasn't adapted before.

Can anyone recommend anything? Everything from Stephen King's stuff to Jbern will work if it's good enough.

 

Have you read Ender`s Game? It`s not short, but it could be done in 20-30 minutes if you leave out some parts.

 

I think that that would require omitting pretty much the entire book.

I'm not sure how effective any of these would be for your purpose, but since I'm assuming that you're just looking for ideas that you could potentially consider I'm going to offer them anyways.

The first is "Mr. Jones" from Truman Capote's collection Music for Chameleons. I can't find a copy online since I don't think that the copyright has expired yet (doubt it actually), so you might have to find a hard copy of the book, but it's short, it's distinct, and its fairly poignant. Most of it is thought process though, so it might be a bit tricky to execute or just boring in practice, but the thought behind the visuals might be sufficient to engage, especially if you do something especially avant-garde with the representations. The plot and character development aspect may suffer, but it seems justifiable.

The second is "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathanial Hawthorne. It seems like that would be the exact opposite, with a few minutes of confusion and chaos and general excitement followed by an analysis of the outcome. Seems to clearly fit your purposes, but might be a bit archaic.

The third, if you want to try to go for extra pretension points, would be an attempt to wrestle a script from the first chapter of Mohiro Kitoh's Hallucinations from the Womb. The work is essentially a collection of shorts connected by a main character, and follows his development as he experiences the horrors and wonders of his dystopian city, so it should fit perfectly for the character development aspect of the project, especially if you were to slow the pace slightly. It is manga, so it would be interesting to see the transfer of media, and it's obscure enough, especially compared to the other two, to be interesting. There's also the points for thinking outside of the box and finding a work beyond the mainstream. It's short, it's fast, and it makes almost no sense, and it challenges, confuses, and entertains the reader, so it would be a pretty exciting interpretation as well. I'm probably a bit biased here since I love the author's work, as might be apparent, but I do think that it deserves some serious consideration. I recommend the first one because I remember that this one is just disturbing and not explicit like a few others in the work, but I can't remember at the moment exactly which are which.