Recommend a book.

[Dareos]

Finished a Scott Lynch book today = The Lies Of Locke Lamora - Excellent debut novel, cracking tale, well realised world (think Venice with glass towers dotted among the canals), enjoyable writing style

4.5/5 for me, looking forward to the rest of the series

[Turkle]

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. Amazing technothriller (I guess?) kinda like a mix of Bourne and Matrix.

[Nightwolf13]

I don't know Was it recommended earlier.. But my the best book is: "Hard to Be a God" - by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky..

[0Neji]

just started reading the first Ender's game book... those damn buggers!

Great book!

I've recently picked up The Shining and am just over half-way through. I haven't seen the film so I'm going in *fairly* freshly. Really enjoying it so far!

Probably a little too popular to be recommended in this thread but read Dune if you haven't already.

[Knoxville]

I just finished Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, sometimes classics can make for difficult reading, especially if they've been through one translation too many but I really enjoyed it. Once you get around the fact that most of the characters are referred to by two or three names each it's a real page turner and definitely deserves it's status in the world of literature!

[mangekyoumusa]

I would recommend Alex rider as I am reading right now

It's a series and I'm on the 7th book,
It's about a spy who gets used by the mi6

[Frankenfurter]

I can +1 for the Alex Rider books and Ender's Game (especially the later), though it's been a fair few years since I read them. Artemis Fowl and Pendragon are two series I remember being really into as well.

Anyway, I was going to just say Dirk Gently - is a really fun one, especially check it out if you liked Hitchhiker's Guide etc.

[Kovoet]

Try Raymond E Feist or David Gemmel

[Vanguard1138]

Got to recommend the Hitchhikers Guide series.

[Brian224]

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

The perfect antidote to the conspiracy theories that seem to propagate spontaneously (or is it all a bigger conspiracy) on the web.

[markbravo2014]

Just one book. Fiction, non-fiction, whatever. Just one book, you think everyone should read and why, what's your "if you never read anything else, read this"?

"The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver. That book makes you think!!

[heinsmit]

Enjoying Flash Boys by Michael Lewis. Sounds a bit niche but very well explained for people not in Finance.

[Smudger]

Just finished 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup. Quite a harrowing (true) tale and now available as a film by Steve McQueen. Haven't seen that yet though.

[RobbieRoy]

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R Covey - basically a good manual for life.

[SeriousSam]

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Edges out Snow Crash as my favourite of his books, despite the latter having some of the coolest ideas / characters in the cyberpunk genre. Explaining the plot is difficult in that it has multiple threads set both in the past and the present. So I'll just paraphrase some of the descriptions from literary critiques - "The Ultimate Geek Novel"

I'll also second Turkle's choice of Altered Carbon - though a more apt description would be that it is the angry love-child of Mickey Spillane and William Gibson

[Smudger]

I'm only part way through American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and I'm enjoying it enough to give a mid-book recommendation...

I also read another Neil Gaiman novel recently, The Ocean at the End of the Lane - highly enjoyable.