I prefer Five on Kirrin Island.
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I’ve read lots of Keith A Pearson.
The 86 Fix got me hooked, I prefer audiobooks myself, can listen whilst out walking.
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No fan of True Crime but the recommendation up the thread for Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is a very good one. Incredible book.
A bit of J G Ballard always gets my vote. Start with High Rise - it’s not too long and if you don’t like it, you can give the rest of his work a miss.
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I hesitate to recommend it because it is bleak but I really liked Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton which I read this year. Some thematic similarities to The Beach.
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The KLF is excellent as is In Cold Blood.
Continuing the history of the Troubles theme, Say Nothing by Patrick Keefe.
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Say Nothing is outstanding, as is basically everything Patrick Radden Keefe does - an easy toe dipper for his work is Rogues, a collection of his newspaper / magazine writing on various rather rum characters.
High Rise was my introduction to Ballard and I was hooked. I often found myself re-reading paragraphs just because I found his prose so perfect.
I failed to offer any fiction earlier, but basically anything by Kurt Vonnegut, especially Slaughterhouse Five.
And if you like some noir-pulp-fiction with a hard boiled anti-hero, the Parker novels are my one true fiction love. The first in the series was the basis of the Lee Marvin movie Point Blank which, despite many tries from Hollywood, remains the only Parker movie worth watching. Richard Stark was a pseudonym of Donald E Westlake who also wrote under his real name, and confusingly many of the characters from the Parker novels also appear in those books too.
The Parker books were all out of print when I first discovered them so it took me several years to collect the full set. Well worth it though.
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Crash is a favourite of mine. The movie was excellent as well but this BBC short stars the man himself.
I’d highly recommend Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth. Never thought a book about the building of a Cathedral could be so good. It is a behemoth of a book though .
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I believe I once played a computer game based on this book
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Some others on here have mentioned a couple of boks by Iain Banks, I prefer the books he’s written under his alternate name Iain M. Banks which are the Culture Novels. If you want to get lost in a full on space opera series then these are for you:
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Consider Phlebas (1987)
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The Player of Games (1988)
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Use of Weapons (1990)
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The State of the Art (1991)
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Excession (1996)
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Inversions (1998)
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Look to Windward (2000)
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Matter (2008)
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Surface Detail (2010)
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The Hydrogen Sonata (2012)
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That is scary.
'Kier Rodney Starmer ,My Part in his Downfall ’ by Andrew Burnham .
Or, ‘I Toppled a Prime Minister’
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Dug into memories of my mid century reading. John Updike and Saul Bellow were both prominent and popular novelists at the time but, for brevity’s sake, I will make just two recommendations - both by Saul Bellow. The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog. Remember thoroughly enjoying them at the time but, sadly, the world has moved on, especially this century. Not all for ill of course.
Why scary?
@Bigred87 I too am riddled with ADHD. I find it near impossible to finish a book no matter how good because I will read a page and have to re read it at least once because nothing went in… even with books that I’m really enjoying!
I find audio books read to me better… but the narrator has to have an appealing voice!!
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The sheer horror of trying to catch up (if so inclined) with so much reading. From the viewpoint of someone (me) who struggles to get beyond a couple of dozen pages of most of the books dotted around our home.
But (and, if you’ll pardon the expression, it’s a big but) I have started reading Shuggie Bain (The 2020 Booker Prizewinner) by Douglas Stuart, a novel of rare and lasting beauty according to the Observer and universally acclaimed.
Wish me luck.
That’s a tremendous book, @micra . Try to stick with it. It’s just has really interesting perspective on life.
On that theme, I really loved Alan Hollinghurst’s ‘Our Evenings’, with its all too believable account of gay and ethnic minority life through from the '60s to the 2010s.
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OK makes sense. I thought maybe you had confused the Iain Banks novels like the Wasp Factory with the Iain M Banks (same bloke) Culture novels. The Culture novels are not scary whereas the Iain Banks novels always have a weird twist particularly the Wasp Factory that some could describe as scary.
