It seems like people always talk about the same few books (Harry Potter, Twilight, clbumics, etc) when there are literally millions of books out there. So: in this thread, share your more obscure book recommendations with Forumwarz.

My contribution:

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Vertical Run by Joseph Garber

From Amazon.com:

It’s just another day at the office for Dave, until his boss tries to shoot him. Then his wife, coworkers, and kids turn on him, and a gang of FBI sharpshooters trap him in a New York skyscraper. What Dave can’t figure out is why it all went bad. Good thing he’s a Vietnam vet with Green Beret^-type training who handily remembers his hand-to-hand combat, kung-fu, marksmanship, and booby-trap-setting skills. He uses them all to keep his would-be killers at bay while he tries to figure out why he’s suddenly become an endangered species. Garber knows how to spin a web of steadily increasing suspense, keeping his readers on tenterhooks trying to figure out what’s going on while the action builds to a totally unpredictable ending.

I’m personally partial to Leonard Cohens works. He wrote two novels of ‘experimental fiction’ back in the 60s. The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers. I would recommend The Favourite Game to pretty much anyone but Beautiful Losers is ****ed up ****. I mean like seriously, ****ed up ****.

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Here’s what Amazon has to say about it because I suck balls at describing ****:

Leonard Cohen’s 1966 Beautiful Losers is ambitiously filthy. Few Canadian novels before or since are as sexual, but there’s more filth here than just squirming bodies. It is in fact the novel’s psychological intimacy that will make you want a long, hot shower with astringent soap. Beautiful Losers is devoted exclusively to four characters, three of them points in a love triangle—the scholarly narrator, his Aboriginal wife Edith, and his lifelong “friend” and mentor F.—and the fourth a 17th-century Iroquois saint whose life the narrator obsessively researches. The protean, mercurial, and intense F. is a kind of artist of existence, one hopefully found more often in fiction than in reality. Though capable of buying a factory or winning an election, F. is often destitute and glad to rob sustenance and sex from his friends. He has taken the narrator as a protégé (or a victim) of his increasingly dangerous tests of desire. Surviving the hedonistic, self-destructive deaths of F. and the unfaithful Edith, the unnamed scholar even seems humiliated as narrator, as if he’s cleaning up his own apartment after a party he didn’t plan.

Canada has had a bumper crop of poet-novelist switch hitters: Margaret Atwood, Robert Kroetsch, Anne Michaels, Michael Ondaatje. Their novels are sure to dazzle with their language, but some readers may lower their expectations of plot and character. Similarly, Cohen the poet will snare you with his introverted, confessional prose, so easily lent to the aphorism. “Grief makes us precise.” “What is most original in a man’s nature is often that which is most desperate.” “I am not enjoying sunsets, then for whom do they burn?” These dagger-like pensées, along with the sheer inscrutability of F., will sustain those readers who don’t like sunshine (again, it’s very claustrophobic inside this book), while plot purists may find the masturbatory plot, well, masturbatory. —Darryl Whetter

OrsonScottCard Posted:

Good one, although I think William Gibson is fairly well-known…

The one you posted is a bestseller according to its own cover Log in to see images!

GGG_Ace Posted:

I can’t decide which is a better non-trendy book. Twilight or Harry Potter.

Neither, pick a clbumic

Lee_Harvey_Oswald Posted:

it won a nobel prize in literature. also semi-autobiographical as its loosely based upon Hamsun’s own poverty and experiences.

xxEmoxKidxx Posted:

Clockwork Orange

Great piece which will really make you question certain aspects of the government

Catcher in the Rye

An angst ridden persons wet dream. But a good read even if you don’t fit into this catagory.

Pride and Prejudice

Nothing to really say. Log in to see images!

All three of those books you mentioned were and are mbumively popular books that high schools use for English and History clbumes and have been around for a very long time/have always had a cult following. Seriously?

megazeroexe Posted:

All three of those books you mentioned were and are mbumively popular books that high schools use for English and History clbumes and have been around for a very long time/have always had a cult following. Seriously?

When was the last time you heard anyone mention these?

Trendy =/= Timeless.

Cruddy by Lynda Barry is a favorite of mine. It’s a really great book that has its angst and teen romance cut with copious amounts of drugs, profanity, child abuse, stabbings, racism, murder, incest, vomit, arson, and clbumic rock.

Lee_Harvey_Oswald Posted:

well lets see in my english course this semester, uhh… the first two, and jane austens name was brought up.

you missed the point of this thread.

also out of those 3 only one is really worth reading

hint: anthony burgess wrote it

sdgrbbum09 Posted:

Not to mention Catcher in the Rye is every angsty teenager’s faprag. Had to read it in 10th grade English, thought it was really stupid. One of the best/worst moments is when he orders a hooker and just wants to talk about life with her. fabulous person.

Does Don Quixote count as trendy?

Dude. Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorite books of all time. I never had to read it, maybe that’s why.