After going on holiday and reading a tremendous book.... I have decided to become more cultured and delve into the world of literacy (and drink less).. anyway the book i read was

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Buklgakov



I thought it was a truly amazing piece of creative writing....

In the past i have only really been bothered with factual writing... sports biographies and crime/war books etc.... but now I am branching out to embrace the world of fiction.... I am currently reading 1984 by George Orwell.

Anyone else know of any brilliant fiction work?

Anything by James Herbert- a master of his art.

If you enjoy 1984, try "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. More recently & completely different either of Mark Haddon's books "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" or "A Spot of Bother".

Dean Koontz: Odd Thomas trilogy

Odd Thomas

Forever Odd

Brother Odd

Odd Hours

In Odd We Trust

In that order, spot on

anything with pictures in for me, Daily star, Sport, Nuts or Loaded

Can I offer the following?

Milan Kundera: The Joke, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (don't be put off by the title), Laughable Loves.

Any of the Ross O'Carroll-Kelly books by Paul Howard

Roddy Doyle: The Commitments

Gunter Grass: The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years (Cat and Mouse is the best, and shortest, but they all fit together and can be read in any order)

Heinrich Boll- The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

Amelie Nothomb- Fear and Trembling

Antal Szerb- Journey by Moonlight

Tom Wolfe- The Bonfire of the Vanities

The world is your oyster. Urmston Wire's collection has some gems (the Gunter Grass is hard, but worthwhile).

Try some other Roddy Doyle too.

Tell me about it, I sat a three-hour exam on his work at my university finals!

Crime and punishment- Fyodor Dostoevsky
To kill a mockingbird- Harper Lee
Catch 22- Joseph Heller
The Throwback- Tom Sharpe



Avoid at all costs The catcher in the rye, just a load of self-indulgent drivel. A massive let-down.

I have catch 22 at someone's recommendation... im going to read that after 1984

East of Eden- John Steinbeck....In fact, anything by Steinbeck

oooh yeah red pony.

that's short but great.

You read them in German then?

Any of the gubbins on the pie board about them being the greatest team in the universe ever and how there going to dominate RL for the next millenia. Best fiction i have ever read.

Yeah i can never get into the comedy lit though.

I certainly did. I have also read them in English though, back when my German wasn't up to reading the originals. The translations are pretty accurate.

Agree on Catcher in the Rye. Another one that disappointed me was Anna Karenina.

Mario Vargas Llosa has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His novel The Feast of the Goat is very good- all about evading the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.

I've ordered Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on Amazon. Have I made a dud purchase?

Have you read his novel "Mice and men"?

The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Any James Patterson, esp the Alex Cross series

Just finished reading the trilogy, all three are brilliant.

The first two are really good, I thought the last one was a little ropey. Rumour has it that there is a fourth in his girlfriend's possession.

Do you rate the film of The Tim Drum?

I've read a fair bit of Boll - not for twenty years or so though. Thinking about it, it's probably dated now given Germany's re-unification.

Quite a lot of "heavy" reading on here.

If you want an entertaining read try anything by Mike Gayle, Matt Dunn, Tony Parsons or David Nicholls. Most men will be able to relate to the characters and storylines created by any of these authors.