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.

Less heavy - Ian Rankin "Rebus" books...

It won't take you long to read but "The Widnes Vikings Super League glory years" should be a bit of a laugh, i'm not sure what section it will be under in WH Smith's, try comedy.

www.whatshouldireadnext.com/ quite usefull

www.whatshouldireadnext.com/ quite usefull

Read all of his books. Even been to jis house in Salinas..

I think it's a good film, but haven't seen it for years. The same director also made a film of Katharine Blum which is very good. Maybe we need an 'O/T-European Cinema'- but would there be any interest?!

I think you might be right about Boll, he was very much of his era. Billiard um halb zehn (Billiards at Half Nine- you might already know that Germans use 'half to' rather than 'half past',hence the strange number) is REALLY dated. But I think Katharina Blum still holds up. There's also some good short stories, in a collection called 'Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa..."- I forget what its English title is, but it's something like "A Wanderer came to Spa..."

If you like German literature, some good stuff in recent years includes Ingo Schulze's 'Simple Stories' and apparently Thomas Brussig's stuff is quite good, but I haven't read any.

Avoid Christa Wolf and Elfriede Jelinek unless you like Stalinist Feminism- I'm still scarred by that!

Smith's in Sale have a "Tragic Stories" section, maybe it could go there!

If not the bargain bucket

If you're interested in fiction which is a good read but you can read into it if you so wish, try the novels of Michel Houellebecq.

'Whatever', 'Atomised' and 'Platform' are the best, and very widely available. They're very funny, and the writer is a nutter.

try "All quiet on the Western Front" by Eric Remarqu, also for light relef the Sharpe novels by Cornwell. but the best bet is just to go into Roccos in Longford St and pick whatever you fancy 2 for £1