Must haves/reads:

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. It seems everyone who knows anything about him has a massive crush on Feynman, and this is the book to find out why. He skips lightly between stories about how his dad taught him what's important in life (knowing ABOUT things, not what things are called), stories about failing and succeeding at pulling chicks in bars, stories about taking the piss out of his colleagues at the office, and stories about how he annoyed his bosses at said office, and you need to pinch yourself and remind yourself that what he's talking about is his time as an UNDERGRADUATE (i.e. he hadn't even finished his degree yet) spent at Los Alamos designing the fucking atomic bomb, giving the equivalent of powerpoint presentations to and getting in technical arguments with Albert. Fucking. Einstein. And painting strippers. He didn't actually write the book as such - it's a transcript of a conversation with him, and you can tell.

Larry Niven: science fiction without a net in Known Space, although the Ringworld stuff I could take or leave. And the Magic Goes Away is fantasy written as hard sf. It's great.

To avoid: I was told as a primary school nerd and serial library consumer that I should read one of the best books ever written - John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress. Incorrect. It is one of the most deliberately, obtusely boring and tedious books ever written. It made me actually angry for the time I'd wasted reading it - and I was about ten. Engendering that amount of cynicism in a ten year old take a really, really bad book.

Far From The Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy. Now, don't get me wrong, I've no particular animus towards classics. I quite liked Romeo and Juliet, which we also had to study that year, although the plot is weak as it relies almost entirely on coincidence after coincidence rather than the characters' failings. But FFTMC, which we had to read for O level, was cak. And it was made worse by our English teacher bigging it up, telling us how funny the comedy scenes with the rustics were. Er... no, Mrs. Webster, "The Young Ones" is funny. "Not the Nine O Clock News" is funny. This is a bunch of people who say "oo arr" in every sentence misunderstanding simple concepts and falling over. It's not funny. It's slow, too. There is an entire chapter, pages long, in which the only thing that happens is that it rains and some flowers get washed away. No actual living humans feature in the chapter at all. It's a five page description of the behaviour of inanimate objects and fucking weather. The sole redeeming feature of this chapter is that it contains the single funniest line in the book - the chapter title, which is "The Gurgoyle: Its Doings". Me and my best mate thought that was fucking hilarious.

And worst of all was the plot. Oh god, it burns, make it stop. The entire book is about this irritating slapper who comes to town and every man falls under her spell. Specifically three guys are desperate to bang her - a good-hearted bloke, an old, boring geezer, and a bounder-and-a-cad-to-boot soldier. And over four hundred pages the hero moons over her while she coquettes around town, puts out for the bounder, breaks the heart of the older guy, and in turn gets her heart broken by the bounder, and eventually finds the love she always needed with our hero the good bloke. And that's supposed to be the happy ending. NO! The happy ending would have been
(a) good bloke hooked up with some wench who hadn't abused him for 400 pages and knows when she's onto a good thing
(b) bounder dead of syphilis, which he has time to first pass on to the "heroine"
(c) heroine forced to marry boring old geezer and discovers on the wedding night that he's into violently sadistic sex to which she is forced to submit every night until she, too, dies of syphilis.

As it was, I didn't even want the happy ending, because the good bloke didn't deserve it, the mooning bellend. I hated the book and every single character in it with the exception of the gurgoyle.

And... breath.
(SonofRojBlake, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 16:23, 5 replies)

I couldn't read Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman?
Because, brilliant though he quite clearly is, he comes over as so damn SMUG about it.
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 16:35, closed)

True. Should shop his head onto Croissant Dude.

His other stuff is all somewhat less so, though, so maybe it's down to Joking being ghost-written.
( Squilliam but . . . . *I'm* the one with all the talent!, Sat 7 Jan 2012, 2:51, closed)

I fucking love Feynman.
If I were a necrogay I would totally bum him right up.
( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 16:39, closed)

If you think Madding Crowd is bad
You should try 'Jude the Obscure'. I tried to read it- (I'd just read Tess and liked some of the description in it... more fool me.) -and it's interminable.

(Also, *breathe )
(Sivvus trolley collision in the fruit aisle led to a jam, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 23:09, closed)

I still re-read Tess every few years just because it's interminable and I like the descriptions.
( Squilliam but . . . . *I'm* the one with all the talent!, Sun 8 Jan 2012, 12:21, closed)