Recommend a book

Cervantes' Don Quijote.

In this novel K, a primary school teacher is in love with his friend Sumire. Quirky Sumire regularly calls K at 3 in the morning to discuss life and receive advice from K but she has no sexual feelings for K. K has an affair with the mother of one of his pupils to placate his lust for Sumire. Sumire is an aspiring writer who lives on a small stipend from her parents until one day she meets Miu a woman 17 years her senior who runs a business importing wine from Europe. Sumire goes to work as Miu's personal assistant and together they travel to Europe. Sumire is madly in love and lust with Miu and one day throwing caution to the wind she makes her move on Miu. However the feelings are not reciprocal and it cannot be. Afterwards Sumire disappears like smoke and K travels to Greece to help find her. Murakami returns to his surreal roots with Miu explaining how her hair went white overnight after seeing herself from the top of a ferris wheel making love in her flat to a man she was trying to avoid and with K encountering a mysterious band playing late at night on a hilltop. In this novel the characters all live in their own world and each is lost in this space like the satellite of the title. The novel explores love, sexuality and the fragility of friendships and acquaintances and we are left brooding on our own friendships that have lapsed. This wonderful simply written book is another masterpiece by Murakami.

I highly recommend Salman Rushdie's Fury. If you haven't read his work because of The Satanic Verses hype (or any other reason I guess) then this is a great book with which to meet a genius.

Richard Matheson's I Am Legend
or
Mark E. Rogers' The Dead

hmmm ....

Hairstyles of the Damed by Joe Meno

The Rules of Attraction by Brett Easton Ellis

Magical Thinking by Augusten Boroughs

And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave

London Fields by Martin Amis

Our Band Could be your Life by Michael Azerrad

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

A Confederacy of Dunces

Too beautiful for you by Rod Liddle

Poems by Christina Rossetti

Black Coffee Blues by Henry Rollins

The Art of Love by Ovid

Imajica/Clive Barker

I am not convinced that a better book has been written than Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov"

That being said, the best book no one has ever heard of is "The Last Samurai" by Helen DeWitt. Nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie, it is about a child prodigy looking for his father.

"Sibylla, a single mother from a long line of frustrated talents, has unusual ideas about child-rearing. Yo Yo Ma started piano at the age of two; her son starts at three. J.S. Mill learned Greek at three; Ludo starts at four, reading Homer as they travel round and round the Circle Line. A fatherless boy needs male role models; so she plays the film Seven Samurai as a running backdrop to his childhood. While Sibylla types out back copies of Carpworld to pay the rent, Ludo, aged five, moves on to hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese, aerodynamics, and edible insects of the world -- they might come in handy, if he can just persuade his mother he's mature enough to know his father's name..."



[Edited on Nov 05, 2005 by punkadixon]

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

Life Expectancy - Dean Koontz