I'm sure many of you have already read them, but I'd like to recommend the works of James Herriot. In the US the books were published in omnibus editions as:

All Creatures Great and Small , All Things Bright and Beautiful , All Things Wise and Wonderful , The Lord God Made Them All

Ilearned more about compassion and human relations the I ever learned in church.

My stepdaughter's reading them now, and she says "Leung Ken, everybody's too good, it's just hard to believe". I hope her view of what's possible is enhanced by her reading.

"A thread to offer your recommendations"

I read Shogun about ten years ago, and am now reading Tai Pan.

Quite enjoying it.

Also, Michener's Hawaii is a must read. Fabulous tale with bits of true history.

I have just re-read "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" and enjoyed it even more second time around. Mark Haddon is the author.

It's written from the perspective of a boy with asbergers (sp?) who finds his neighbour's dog dead on the lawn and decides to investigate the 'murder'. Tragic and funny and sad all at once.

Maybe it's not you Chownah, maybe it's just not a very good book.

It would be pretty hard to dispute that The Idiot is a 'good book".

It is a revered classic, so a lot of people think so, however, it might be a good book that chownah does not enjoy for some reason - maybe he does not like the writing style.

I hated A Tale of Two Cities, but I would never say that it is "not good". I would say that I did not enjoy it personally.

I hated A Tale of Two Cities,

My most valued book, Sydney Carton a true working class hero, a drink sodden misfit, unrequited love tearing him apart and the courage of a Lion, and an under used intellect, How's that for a new type of Four Horsemen.

My review would be:

A great opening sentence, a great last sentence and nothing in between (Actually, I enjoyed the last 25% of the book, but it wasn't worth it getting there).

Maybe it's not you Chownah, maybe it's just not a very good book.

It would be pretty hard to dispute that The Idiot is a 'good book".

It is a revered classic, so a lot of people think so, however, it might be a good book that chownah does not enjoy for some reason - maybe he does not like the writing style.

I hated A Tale of Two Cities, but I would never say that it is "not good". I would say that I did not enjoy it personally.

Good Books aren't always enjoyable reads and vice versa. One of my all time favorites that's a winner in both categories is "Lonesome Dove". Unfortunately it doomed me to think the sequel (StreetsOf Laredo) could not measure up (which it didn't) from the first page. Probably would have been a more than accepatable read, stand alone.

How could it have been as good without "Gus" as a character? I did think that it was still darn good if you did not compare it with Lonesome Dove.

What you probably would enjoy is Comanche Moon which is the prequel to Lonesome Dove and has all the same characters at almost the same age.

The prequel to that is Dead Man's Walk in which Gus and Woodrow Call are young Bucks that have not really developed the personalities that make them such intersesting characters when they are older. It is not terrible, but certainly is the dud of the bunch!

I just finished reading Mr Happy, I didn't enjoy it as much as Mr Uppity...

Hmm whats this book got to do with Thailand.

Hmm whats this book got to do with Thailand.

Hi Bizz,

You do know where you are don't you? And welcome to the newest sub-forum on TV

Moss

I just finished reading Mr Happy, I didn't enjoy it as much as Mr Uppity...

You must be looking forward to working your way up to Dick, Jane and Spot!

My apologies for the length of this post - UG can probably vouch for my avidity for the printed word. I would like simply to list some favourite authors and works, without reviewing them. If you are interested, just google them or look on Amazon:

Orson Scott Card - Enders Game, indeed the entire Ender series and the Tales of Alvin Maker.

Edward Rutherford - Almost any of his books - Sarum, Dublin etc.

S. P. Somtow. - A most interesting Thai author writing in English. Jasmine Nights - and others

John Steinbeck - a true classic writer - Of Mice and Men to start - and others.

Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion - Letter To A Christian Nation - The Selfish Gene and others.

Trevanian - Shibumi - The Summer of Katya and others.

Chavoret Jaruboon - The Last Executioner (Memoirs of Thailand's last prison executioner.)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Summer of Cholera - One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The recently departed Alexander Solzhenitsyn RIP - The Gulag Archipelago - A Day In The Life and others

Harold Stevens - Who Needs A Road and almost all of his other great Travel books.

Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns - The Kite Runner

Yann Martel - Life of Pi and others

Daniel Mason - The Piano Tuner

Amitav Ghosh - The Glass Palace - The Hungry Tide

Jean M. Auel - The Earth's Children series.

Bryce Courtenay - The Power Of One and any of his other books.

Lenny McLean - The Guv'nor

All the above are highly recommended.

pip is indeed a real reader and his list is great. Some of my favorites are on his list too:

Orson Scott Card - Enders Game, indeed the entire Ender series John Steinbeck - a true classic writer - Of Mice and Men to start - and others.

Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion - Letter To A Christian Nation - The Selfish Gene and others.

Trevanian - Shibumi - The Summer of Katya and others.

Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns - The Kite Runner

Yann Martel - Life of Pi and others

Daniel Mason - The Piano Tuner

Bryce Courtenay - The Power Of One and any of his other books.

Also:

Sidhartha by Hermann Hesse

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

The Stranger/Outsider by Camus

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Papillion by Henri Chariere

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

1984 by George Orwell

and so on.

Also:

Sidhartha by Hermann Hesse

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

The Stranger/Outsider by Camus

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Papillion by Henri Chariere

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

1984 by George Orwell

and so on.

Yes, I would have included them if I had but continued. How could I not list Sidhartha, Quiet American, On the Road etc.

A few others I should have included:

Sterling Seagrave - Lords of the Rim, a must read for anybody living in S/E Asia.

Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel and others.

Clifford Stoll - The Cuckoo's Egg - A brilliant first person account of a hunt for an internet spy. It should be read if only for his recipe for the best chocolate chip cookies on the planet!

Mervyn Peake - Gormennghast

The Rev Charles Lutwidge Dodgson aka Lewis Caroll - Alice

I could write all night.

I just finished reading Mr Happy, I didn't enjoy it as much as Mr Uppity...

You must be looking forward to working your way up to Dick, Jane and Spot!

To be honest, I enjoy the Mr Men books more than he does - he just wants to crunch up the pages!

Yes Sidhartha by Hermann Hesse is a fantastic book in the way the author animates the feelings of innocence lost,

a period we have all passed through but would perhaps be unable to encapsulate in such proximate detail.

I haven't read it in such a long time, I think that's one I shall buy soon.

John Steinbeck - The Grapes Of Wrath, an absolute masterpiece which must be the saddest work of fiction I've ever read,

I don't think I could bring myself to read it again, but still I would reccomend it to anyone that hasn't read it.

Two books by Jeff Noon, Vurt and Pollen.

Vurt (1993)

Vurt tells the story of Scribble and his "gang" the Stash Riders as they search for his missing sister Desdemona. Vurt refers to a drug/shared alternate reality that is accessed by sucking on color-coded feathers. Through some (never explained) mechanism, the dreams, mythology, and imaginings of humanity achieved objective reality in the Vurt and became "real". The book won the 1994 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Evidently there is a Vurt film in the works, but as of the date of this writing, Jeff Noon has stated on his public website that "Of the Vurt film, all has gone silent at the moment. Don’t hold your breath."

Pollen (1995)

Pollen;

Pollen is the sequel to Vurt and concerns the ongoing struggle between the real world and the vurtual world. When concerning the vurtual world, some references to Greek mythology are noticeable, including Persephone and Demeter, the river Styx and Charon, and Hades (portrayed by the character John Barleycorn).

Wikipedia.

redrus

Ah yes, I'm going to look out for these too. I'm glad I bumped this thread now, I'm a little bewildered by the Sci-Fi section and the myriad of unpronouncable fantasy worlds, but these look quite accessable. I've just read Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (1972) and it was brilliant.

It's set in our solar system so at least I could remember the name of the planets! The book has an excellent and rather subtle twist at the end, a quick read but very enjoyable.

John Steinbeck - The Grapes Of Wrath, an absolute masterpiece which must be the saddest work of fiction I've ever read,

I don't think I could bring myself to read it again, but still I would reccomend it to anyone that hasn't read it.

It has been too many years for me to comment, however try Thomas Hardy, now that man can depress, Jude, Tess, Far from.............not for the faint hearted.

Here's one more, I had to go and dig this post out of the South East Asia forum.

Vietnam: The Definitive Oral History, Told from All Sides, by Christian G Appy

I'd like to recommend this book to the guys on this forum that were involved in the conflict in Vietnam

and also to all of you that are interested not only in the conflict, but in the history and culture of Vietnam.

It's an oral history and comprises insightful introductions with short recollections of people involved in all aspects of the conflict on both sides,

covering the military and political aspects of the war, but also it's social, cultural and psychological effects.

It's a well reserched and presented book that is fascinating, revealing and moving.

ISBN: 978 0 09 101012 9

£14.99 paperback.

Reviews:

Vietnam: The Definitive Oral History, Told from All Sides, by Christian G Appy (Ebury, £14.99)

Appy means that subtitle about "told from all sides". His North and South Vietnamese contributions I expected, though the enduring duration of their fight and captivity always awes (a commando said goodbye to his 10-year-old son before a sortie that ended in imprisonment: when he next saw him, his son had an 11-year-old son of his own). More surprising are the Pentagon brass who started out gung-ho and stayed that way - nothing neo about his conservatism; and the US army nurse who told her son during the first Gulf war that if there was a draft he would be a conscientious objector since "if anybody's going it'll be your old mom". This covers the whole catastrophe, from the US's creep into the mission circa 1962 to "Taps" played on a tape recorder by such geezers as remember too much - and the Saigon manufacture of fake Zippo lighters, engraved with slogans and handcraftily vintaged, to sell to tourists. Overall, notwithstanding Oliver North's recollections of the sound and fury of defending Firebase Burt, I was left feeling distant and calm, possibly the only response to such waste, absurdity and political-military-industrial lies. Vera Rule http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2257063,00.html

VIETNAM: The Definitive Oral History Told from All Sides

by Christian G Appy

Ebury £19.99 pp574

Vietnam is a long time ago, and most young people today know the war — one of the great traumas of American history — only through Hollywood or as thousands of names on the black granite wall of the Vietnam war memorial in Washington. But for those who served and suffered, Americans and Vietnamese alike, communist and non-communist, it will always be a defining moment of their lives.

Christian Appy, an American history professor, has written an oral history of the conflict. It is an extraordinarily compelling and powerful book, disorientating to read when American and British forces are embroiled in another bloody and troubled conflict in a faraway land. I read it just a few days after President Bush admitted the possibility of an Iraq comparison with Vietnam, and it gave me distinct moments of déjà-vu.

Frank Maguire, for example, was an American army major who liked Vietnam, served three tours there and believed in the cause. He recalls how, when he first went home, he made speeches telling people that Americans were not just killing people but building and trying to improve their lives. In the end, though, the Americans failed miserably to understand the Vietnamese.

“I think it’s a national trait that we always feel we know what’s better for everybody,” says Maguire. “It was an attitude of misguided benevolence — that we know what’s good for them and they don’t really understand what’s happening. We really wanted to win their hearts and minds, except we could never find one or the other.”

Such benevolence, 32 years on, is one of America’s problems in Iraq. A senior state-department official controversially and publicly confirmed as much last weekend. There are obvious differences; no insurgent force in Iraq can be compared to the Vietcong; Saddam Hussein is not Ho Chi Minh; nobody can confuse Baghdad with Saigon. The current cost in lives is far lower than Vietnam, too. Although this October has been one of the bloodiest months since the 2003 invasion, with the deaths of at least 87 American servicemen and hundreds of Iraqis, these rising casualties are less than one day’s combat at the height of the Vietnam war. Then, 400 Americans were dying each week.

Yet just as the Vietnam era of the 1960s started with huge American self-confidence that it could put the world right by intervening against communism, the Bush presidency began, too, with grandiose, naive ideas of saving the Middle East through Saddam’s overthrow. Bush and the neocons saw the invasion as the critical fulcrum for creating democracy in a region of oppressive, corrupt regimes that is of vital importance to America. Three years on, America is preoccupied with many issues familiar to those who lived through Vietnam: an unwinnable war started on false pretences and with little knowledge of the history of the country it was invading, mounting casualties and atrocities, no clear exit strategy, all leading to disillusionment with the White House leadership.

Senator Edward Kennedy has called Iraq Bush’s Vietnam, and fewer and fewer Americans are disagreeing.

But Appy’s book is not a history of the Vietnam war or the policies that led to it, though there is a bit of that. It is a riveting portrait of what happened to some 135 Americans and Vietnamese, northerners and southerners, communists and non-communists. Their voices provide vivid, illuminating and often harrowing insights from a host of different angles.

The breadth of Appy’s interviews is the strength of this book. He talks to some of the key military players, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese military genius, and General William Westmoreland, the US commander, among them. The CIA operative Frank Snepp tells how he is so wrapped up trying to save his Vietnamese agents as Saigon falls that he neglects to evacuate a former girlfriend despite her threat to commit suicide. Later, he learns to his shame that she killed herself and their child rather than fall into the hands of the communists.

There are interviews with Senator John McCain, America’s most famous prisoner of war, and the survivors of My Lai, and the brave American helicopter pilots who intervened to try to stop the massacre. There is Mrs Thieu describing how, trapped beneath a pile of bodies, she was drowning in their blood. There is Larry Colburn, an American helicopter pilot who talks of his crew wading waist deep through the dead to rescue one child who was moving. The two are reunited many years later.

These stories really bite. Some are amusing. Bobbie Keith, the weather girl for Armed Forces Television in Saigon and the GIs’ pin-up, sometimes makes up the weather data just as American troops made up body-counts to convince their generals that they were winning the war. The rock star James Brown insisted on sporting a .45 and a US army uniform when he gave a show, to look like a GI. He said even the Vietcong had a ceasefire during his shows. They liked the funk, he tells Appy. “Then they went back and reloaded, boy. They were very smart.”

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...ticle612173.ece

Gary Sheffield ............. Forgotten Victory.

Most interesting book that expels the myths presented by historians such as AJP Taylor.

I have just read 'Freakonmics' by Stephen D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner. I'm not into economics and all that byt this book is fab. Full of interesting little chapters with titles like:

What do Schoolteachers Sumo Wrestlers have in Common?

One of my favourites was:

How is the KU Klux Klan like a group of estate agents?

A very interesting read.

I've just been to the bookshop and picked up; Vurt by Jeff Noon, recommended by Redrus, Freakonomics by Stephen D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, recommended by Suegha and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, recommended by U G.

Cheers guys, now then.. decisions, decisions.

If you enjoy Sidhartha, may I recomment Narcissus and Goldman which is by the same author, but a very different story.

Sod it, I'm a peasant when it comes to reading, George McDonald Fraser, Stephen King, Wilbur Smith, Micheal Connelly, Larry McMurtry, Leslie Thomas, Bernard Cornwell, WEB Griffin, John Grisham.... I did read a book/s by a woman once and enjoyed it/them... Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy.

I like pretty much all of those.

I read for enjoyment, not snobbery.

I've just been to the bookshop and picked up; Vurt by Jeff Noon, recommended by Redrus, Freakonomics by Stephen D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, recommended by Suegha and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, recommended by U G.

Cheers guys, now then.. decisions, decisions.

Freakonomics is probably the easiest read of the three. I read it in a day.

I like pretty much all of those.

I read for enjoyment, not snobbery.

Well said UG. Read mostly for fun, sometimes for 'education' and never cos it's the thing to do! I have had so many books passed to me by friends over the years with a 'must read' label. Have to say 80% bored me witless!

I have had so many books passed to me by friends over the years with a 'must read' label. Have to say 80% bored me witless!

Would "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Marquez be one? It felt like it took 100 years to finish it!

I have had so many books passed to me by friends over the years with a 'must read' label. Have to say 80% bored me witless!

Would "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Marquez be one? It felt like it took 100 years to finish it!

Don't recall that one UG, in fact, can't recall any of them! My mind just shuts them out. Unlike you though, if I'm not into it at around the 100 page mark it doesn't get finished.

Does anybody know an "online" bookstore, that carries all the English language books, in Thailand where you can pay at the bank (ie direct bank transfer) rather than credit card?

Before anybody starts asking "why no credit card?" - haven't had one in over 15 years - too easy to max out!

Cheers guys.