I have run out of books - suggest some?

[CherryChoc]

I always used to be reading, but I slowed down a lot since college and then I went off fiction about a year or 2 ago and have been reading nothing but parenting books since. However I recently read Two Caravans and enjoyed it, and have discovered I have a bit of time in the evenings to read while putting DS to bed, so I am looking for more books. Can anybody suggest anything?

It's probably easier to list what I don't like:
Depressing fashionable child abuse novels
Chick lit and/or anything utterly predictable
Fantasy
Horror/Thrillers etc
Crime
Romance (unless not utterly predictable and/or boring.)

I like things which are in the realms of believeable - ie set in the real world. Don't mind happy or sad, but I do like funny. Don't mind time period set, either.

Also - where do you start when choosing books to read, in a library or bookshop? Do you start with the bestsellers? Look for favourite authors? Pick a random shelf? I must have stopped reading when I had read all the books in the teenage section at the library and the adult section was full of boring books or trash.

The Road Home by Rose Tremain (about Polish guy working in UK).

Choosing - in a library a combination of looking for authors I know, and picking up titles/covers just because they draw me in.

I am suspicious of best sellers because so many seem to owe their status to clever marketing rather than any real merit. I tend to pick things on the basis of recommendations from my dh or friends, or classics I feel I should have read years ago.

Your tastes sound quite similar to mine, so here a few things I've enjoyed in the last year or so.

The Great Gatsby (but see the other thread about this)
Madame Bovary
Vile Bodies
Unless (Carol Shields)
The Lovely Bones
The Laments
Half of a Yellow Sun
The Grapes of Wrath
Vanity Fair

I have heard that Rose Tremain's The Road Home covers the same ground as Two Caravans, but in a more literary way.

A Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, a fictionalised account of the plague hitting a village in Derbyshire. Written by a journalist, I seem to remember. Great read.

Ooops. X-post with totalchaos about The Road Home.

I have just read The Birthday Present by Barbara Vine and really enjoyed it.

Also really like Kate Atkinson.

The Kite runner!

Just finished and really enjoyed Life Mask by Emma Donoghue.

Try The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. I loved this.

Or Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

try this literature map
you type in a favourite author and loads come up ..the ones closest to the centre are most similar

A thousand splendid suns.

The book thief.

I'm currently reading The Road Home by Rose Tremain and I can't put it down. Would highly recommend it.

Recently read Consequences by Penelope Lively which I'd also recommend

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively is another good 'un.

I often listen to radio four...women's hour, the stories that are dramatised, the stories read aloud, also book club and other programmes. From the radio 4 website i get the book lists and choose a couple, then collect the aithor names. I find this opens my mind to new authors and fiction.

Tim Winton Cloudstreet

You could try some classics if you've not read them already:

If I could only choose five they would be:

• Pride And Prejudice
• Jane Eyre (but skip the boring first section! Janeite runs away before being flamed for this!)
• Vanity Fair
• Of Mice And Men (a different kind of classic)
• 1984

Then I'd recommend:

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Kite Runner
Isabel Allnde's "Paula" for non-fiction
The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
A Town Called Alice - Neville Shute
"Brideshead Revisited"

Lots more but they are some of my favourites!

ggirl great website!

just read 13th tale by diane setterfield...really gripping tale about a woman called to do a biography of a writer whose past is a mystery

Bananapaddlepop - they are my 2 favourite books of the past 10 years or so. Do you have any others you'd recommend as we're obviously on the same wavelength.

Have you read "The Virgin Suicides"? I liked it much more than "Middlesex".

2 of the best books I read last year were
The Savage garden by mark Mills
and Notes from an Exhibition by patrick gale

Oh good ChocolateDot at last someone on my wavelength...

Have you read Prayer for Owen Meany? Outstanding.
What about Cloud Atlas - I know it gets a regular slating on here but I thought it was fantastic. My next book is Cavalier and Klay...it's been on my shelf for eternity calling out to me.

"Notes From An Exhibition" = good.

Anything by Dorothy Dunnet, start with the game of kings.

My favourite two books of all time are:

This Book Will Save Your Life by A M Holmes
and
How to Talk to a Widower (cant remember author sorry)

The Book Thief
The Lovely Bones
Case Histories / One Good Turn