Book Recommendations

[FoghornBellows]

According to his facebook account, my friend's favorite books are Alice In Wonderland, Cat's Cradle, Catch-22, The Catcher In The Rye, A Clockwork Orange, Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, Hamlet, Invitation To A Beheading, The Little Prince, Lolita, 1984, Pale Fire, The Stranger, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Ulysses.

Taking his taste into account, would any of you suggest about five books, by authors other than those who wrote the aforementioned books, that I could purchase for him for his birthday? Thank you in advance.

[The Comedian]

Your friend seems to like philosophical science fiction stuff --

Here's a few titles the come to mind. . . .

Watchmen -- Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons
Stranger in a Strange Land -- (can't remember the author's name at the moment)
War of the Worlds -- H.G.Wells

[mal4mac]

Your friend seems to like philosophical science fiction stuff --

Here's a few titles the come to mind. . . .

Watchmen -- Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons
Stranger in a Strange Land -- (can't remember the author's name at the moment)
War of the Worlds -- H.G.Wells

Heinlein wrote "Stranger". But I wouldn't recommend this for your friend. All the books that Foghorn lists are acknowledged classics, and Heinlein's books are not. I enjoyed reading Heinlein when I was 12, but I'm not sure I would now. It would be safer to stick to acknowledged classics.

A safe bet would be the RSC Complete Shakespeare ( a beautiful new hardback - just buy him/her this instead of "five books"

[LitNetIsGreat]

How about:

Guy de Maupassant Bel Ami
Checkov plays or short stories
Daphene Du Maurier Rebecca
George Orwell Down and Out in Paris and London
Baudelaire Flowers of Evil

Of course the problem is that he could have read some of what you buy him, but if not those books would fit for the ones you mentioned for me.

[Barbarous]

definitely get him some Samuel Beckett, any Borges, Joycehead, Pale Fire-loving reader would love his Trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable.

Besides that check out Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

[sixsmith]

Herzog - Saul Bellow
Hunger - Knut Hamsum
Omensetter's luck - William Gass
The Sailor who fell from grace with the sea - Yukio Mishima
Sabbath's Theatre - Philip Roth

[Etienne]

Rulfo - Pedro Paramo
Bely - Petersburg
Celine - Travel to the End of the Night
Döblin - Berlin Alexanderplatz
Villiers-de-l'Isle-Adam - Sardonic Tales
Gombrowicz - Bakakaï
Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Goytisolo - Count Julian
Bulgakov - Master and Margarita
Gadda (couldn't find any english translation on amazon)
Voltaire - Candide
Diderot - Jacques and his Master
Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
Aquin - Next Episode

I like Barbarous' suggestions too. Baudelaire's Flower of Evil was a good suggestion too.

[Dinkleberry2010]

Grimm's Fairy Tales
Lord Arthur Saville's Crime and other tales - Oscar Wilde
Can Such Things Be? - Ambrose Bierce
The Willows and other stories - Algernon Blackwood
The Great God Pan and other tales - Arthur Machen

[Mariamosis]

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
The Wall - Jean Paul Sartre (short stories)
The Sirens of Titan -Kurt Vonnegut (by an author you listed, but a VERY good book)
The Box Man - Kobo Abe
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
The Iron Heel - Jack London
The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells
The Call of Cthulhu - H.P. Lovecraft (short stories)
....and I second Voltaire's Candide

[stlukesguild]

Your friend's taste seems to run along the lines of Surrealism, Magic Realism and those literary isms that revel in artifice, play with words and literary forms and elements. Similar writers would include Julio Cortazar (Blow Up and other Stories, Hopscotch), Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities, Cosmi-comics, The Baron in the Trees), Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Marguerita), Donald Barthleme (40 Stories, 60 Stories), definitely Lawrence Sterne's Tristam Shandy and Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal... translation Richard Howard or the anthology published by New Directions). I'd also suggest the Arabian Nights. You might look here for many related works of literature:

http://www.themodernword.com/authors.html

[Adagio]

definitely get him some Samuel Beckett, any Borges, Joycehead, Pale Fire-loving reader would love his Trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable.

I'll second this. Definitely Beckett.