I'll read anything except romance!
Really liked To Kill A Mockingbird though...

ooooh! I completely forgot to mention this great writer: MATTHEW REILLY! I'm not usually into 'army/navy/action thriller' type stuff but i am now! I've read 'Icestation', Area 7, Scarecrow, Temple, and i got Hover car racer out of the library yesterday which i'm about to read! Has anyone read Contest though?

nope!! has anyone got any good holiday books to recommend? nothing scary though... or fantasy-ish

The Copeland book i put in HBP thread is good...no fantasy though...um...you tried Montmorency books?

No, what are they about? Is the Copeland book about the ghost girl who gets pregnant?

I read almost anything.

Favourite authors include Dorothy L Sayers, A S Byatt (sometimes heavy-going, but I loved Possession), Colin Dexter, J K Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Susan Howatch (snap, Andy!), Elizabeth Pewsey, Kate Atkinson, JRR Tolkein, C S Lewis, He-who-must-not-be-named Francis (especially Whip Hand, Bolt, Break-in and Straight) and I really liked An Equal Music too, but it's so sad.

Yes!

Has anyone else read 'Past Mortem' by Ben Elton, read it all in one day yesterday, NOT the thing you should read just before bed...scared the ......out of me!Had really bad nightmare about being chased round a mansion by a man dressed as a rabbit and holding a gun...

Humm,

Difficult I have read so many good books in my time ...... (yes I know thats a lot of time).

Purfume by Susking (A brilliant story about a man that produces purfume. He found away to make himself vitually invisable by using smell)

LOTR of course.

Thomas Covenant Trilogy by ......... forgot his name now!

Childhoods End by Issac Asimov

Hundreds of other but for so many different reasons...

Is Isaac Asimov the Robot guy? Did he write anything else? What is Childhoods end about?

He wrote just a few other books .... Sorry SciFi was and still is dominate by his books......

Childhoods end is about the earth being visited by aliens who have the form of devils. These visitors are however not evil and only bring about the good in society. However I can recommend any of the hundreds of books he as written. Be carefull though because he actual wrote alot of non-fiction books and scientific journals...

He was apparently one of the driving forces (if not the inventor) of the modern day communications satelite.

You learn something everyday! The only thing i've read is I Robot, which is really good, apparently he was the first guy to ever use the word 'robotics' or something...

harry potter books rule!!! i LOVE the noughts and crosses series! checkmate was brilliant, but i still think i prefer n & c. i didn't think knife edge was as good, what does everyone else think? the georgia nicholson books are fantastic, very random!... i like nick horbys about a boy, and tony parsons books are great too!

I've just bought Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything"...I'm at page one hundred and something......It's fantastic!

Anyone else read/is reading it?

Wow!!! I love those books too!!! Can you tell me what happens in the Checkmate please? I don't mind spoilers at all!!!

Has anyone else read 'Black Ice' by Matt Dickinson....its SO freaky...tthe thing that caught my eye was that the blurb was almost the same as Icestation by Mattew Reilly, and i LOVE that book... (Hovercar Racer rocks by the way!)

Harry Potter (ongoing thing really, Im always in the reading one), I started reading Far from the madding crowd while I was on holiday but sort of got side tracked and didn't get past the second chapter...

Right now I'm reading "How to pass the PIRT".

I am now reading "Dune" by Frank Herbert. It's so hard to get into and there's about a million characters in the first chapter... but it's meant to be really good. Anyone heard of these?



Oh, I loved that book! Some of the stuff just went over my head but it was really good.



What happens in Checkmate... well,

[spoilers]




Callie Rose is now grown up and is 16, and Sephy is thirty-something. The story is mainly told in the form of flashbacks, though there are references to the present now and then. Jude is now the general of the Liberation Miltia and he has a plan... a plan that will involve Sephy and Callie Rose. Jude poises as the 'good uncle' to Callie and approaches her when she is little, and when Callie is 16, she joins the LM. Callie grows up to hate her mother, because Sephy didn't tell her about Callum and Callie trusts Jude completely. The drama also involves Meggie and Jasmine too. Plus there's some more about Sephy's love life.

I read it quite a while ago so I can't remember the details, but it was good! Still preferred Noughts & Crosses though.

yeah, AND you get to find out about the letter (the one callum wrote before he died, remember?) and it turns out that Callum did love Sephy after all! the letter is really sweet, and it was the real letter, Callum only wrote the other one so that Sephy wouldn't worry about him! and then Jasmine (Sephy's mum) kills Jude!!!!!!! and meggie (Jude's mum) knew all about it but didn't try to stop her! she just left Jude and Jasmie alone together. the last thing Jude ever thinks about is when he killed Cara Imega, and he was laughing about her! he is so mean!! and also, Callie Rose has this friend called Toby, and it is really like the relationship between Sephy and Callum when they were younger; Toby is a nought.
And remember Kamal Hadly? on Jude's orders Callie Rose goes to see him and he disowns her! anyway, i wont tell you the rest, you should go and buy it!!!!
rachel

Thanks for that melody maker and Anakkron!!! I really want to read it now!!! Yeah I thought Callum would write it so Sephy would forget about him... but I thought in the end of Knife Edge, Callie Rose died because Sephy strangled her or something so she couldn't breathe?

Anyone read Catherine Robinson's teen novels?
Have read Tin Grin and now on Celia, I like teen books you can relate too, makes them more realistic. I find harry potter easy to relate to with the friendship side of it. Great books!

Yeah, when I read about callum's letter my immediate thought was, "He wrote this so that Sephy would be able to forget about him after he's dead and lead a normal life". I thought it was blatently obvious and that Sephy was really blonde not to notice it. But that's just the way it is with novel characters...

Oh, Callie didn't die, but Sephy had to go to hospital for a bit, you know, post-birth depression and such. Meggie still remembers it though and doesn't trust Sephy...

Awww that book's so sad!!!!!!! (as in boo-hoo sad) it's a good thing it will never ever ever happen in real life!!!!!! So Meggie becomes a baddie? And Callie Rose? weird... Jude is obviously a baddie he's just plain mean...

hes dead!!!

I love a lot of Daphne DuMaurier's books, especially "The Scapegoat". Half the size of a lot of railway station blockbusters, and much more beautifully written. Recently borrowed my dad's copy of "Into Thin Air" by John Krakauer which I found fascinating. I had sent off that year (1996) for one of those brochures on guided tours to the summit of Everest, but thankfully in the true spirit of Everest, I bottled it! My wife just got a book of short stories by Roald Dahl called "Tales of the Unexpected". From the first one it seems really quite fun - I thought he just wrote children's stuff. An unexpectedly good read a while back was "Fermat's last theorem" by Simon Singh - so beautifully and clearly written as to leave one with quite a degree of enthusiasm for the whole idea of mathematics.

I must read Fermat's Last Theorum... Fermat seems to make regular appearances in novels and stuff... first time I came across him was in a play by Tom Stoppard called Arcadia... saw it performed at uni... it's very very good.

If you're going to, you must get the book by Simon Singh, Sarah, there's another one that's not nearly as good (personal opinion, obviously).

Unless you want to dive straight into Andrew Wiles's proof, of course

I think I like The Keys To The Kingdom Series ( anyone read the books ?) and Harry Potter ( of course).

I LOVE
Lord of the Rings (and so does my sis she had read it 16 times!)
All the Dan Brown books
The Princess Diaries
Jaqueline Wilson books
Kensuke's Kingdom (has anybody else read that?)

i have!!! It's amazing!!! It was so sad at the end!!! Call me stupid but Do you think it's true by the way?

I'll bear that in mind need to see if the library have it...


Oh yeah, definitely...

Am halfway through 'The Firm' and its REALLY GOOD! Got any others to recommend?


Are they the Garth Nix ones?

I love all kinds of books:
Lord of the Rings
His Dark Materials
Harry Potter
John Grisham
Patricia Cornwell

I love reading travel writing as well (its always nice to dream that you are actually in the places the author is writing about!)

Has anyone read The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown? it's the freakiest book I've ever read!!!!!!!!!!!!! it's like well written but scary!!!!!!!!!!

Yep - and Angels and Demons, and Deception Point (at least I think it was that one - or maybe Digital Fortress - I've read one or the other anyway. Superbly thrilling but no religious plot like the others.)

Yes, I've read all four of Dan Brown's books. Must say Angels & Demons is my favourite, although I thoroughly enjoyed the Da Vinci Code as well. I'm looking forward to his new book, The Solomon Key, out sometime in 2006 (although admittedly his style gets a bit repetitive after four books ).

Just finished 'the firm'..its fab!! Going to start on Matthew Reilly's Contest now...after that i'll have read his entire works!! LOL

Just finished Cancer Ward by Alexandr Sozhenitsyn. Normally when I finish a good book I feel a bit bereft and wonder what I'm going to read next, but this was so brilliant I'm contemplating reading it all over again (even if it is 500+ pages).

Ooo, I never knew we had a book thread!! *moves in*
I'm in the middle of "Blood and Honey" by Graham Hurley...which is the 6th (I think) in a series of crime novels all set in Portsmouth which as a local is really odd, because I'm reading about places I know!

Yay! Revival of a book thread!! My old account should be on one of these somewhere... Maybe not this one...

I'm becoming rather addicted to Cassandra Clare's 'Mortal Instruments' trilogy (well the first two anyway... the third's being reprinted apparently so I have to WAIT to read it... I'm not good at waiting, unfortunately...)

Also love Twilight, Noughts and Crosses, Shade's Children, Sabriel (and Lirael and Abhorsen!!), Memoirs of a Geisha, etc etc... Could go on forever!!

Just finished Nigel Hawthorne's biography, Straight Face. It was very interesting, seemed a nice chap.

I read this book at school, and also The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Agree with your comments.

I'm just going to start "Everything Is Connected The Power of Music" by Daniel Barenboim.

At school we're reading Pride and Prejudice and some of War of the Worlds (then doing a descriptive piece based on it).

I've just finished "Endurance" by Alfred Lansing - it tells the story of Ernest Shackleton's trip to Antarctica (aiming to cross the continent on foot, but they didn't manage it). A friend got it for me for my birthday. It was great, really interesting to read.

I also love... well the list would take too long to type up but here are a few: Philip Pullman, Noughts & Crosses, Edge Chronicles, Philip Reeve (mortal engines etc), the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy... and lots more.

Lots......
My favourite is Before I Die- sounds sad (it is) but is so beautiful.....
My favourite non-fiction is The Writer's Tale by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook- nothing better than reading Doctor Who scripts to start your day off with a bang!

I've started reading "Dead Famous" by Ben Elton today...nothing like a bit of satirical cynicism to humour and horrify me at the same time!