 | Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Buy new: £5.59 / Used from: £0.01 A great yarn trawling thru time and connectivity and back again. Easy yet compulsive and surreal in spades. The tennuous connections are strong enough (but tennuous).
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 | Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 25th Anniversary Edition by Robert M. Pirsig
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £3.48 This book changes lives - it's powerful introductory chapters, its ghosts, the child of the hero towed around this american adventure - but is it right? What is Quality anyhow??
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 | His Dark Materials Gift Set: "Northern Lights", "The Subtle Knife", "The Amber Spyglass": His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
Buy used from: £8.50 This Trilogy is almost as good as Lord of the Rings and deals in the same fantastic realms. A deeper, darker read that stretches the imagination. Part SciFi, part Fairie tale.
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 | Life Of Pi by Yann Martel
Buy new: £4.99 / Used from: £0.01 The Ancient Mariner meets Robinson Crusoe but smack in the twenty first century. Reality or deleria? Who cares, a great read!
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 | The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Buy new: £3.15 / Used from: £2.25 The pressure builds but the damn doesn't break. A story that twists beautifully against expectations. A life of guilt, a search for atonement. Read it and weep.
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 | The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Buy new: £4.39 / Used from: £0.01 A backwards whodunnit where who, what, where and when are almost obvious but certainty and how arrive obliquely. Steamy monsoon Tao twin adventure.
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 | Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae by Steven Pressfield
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £1.60 A lighter read but still gripping and set in a genuine historical framework. Epic and heroic. Here come the Rooster - he ain't gonna die!!
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 | On the Road (Penguin Modern Classics) by Jack Kerouac
Buy new: £3.16 / Used from: £3.00 A classic 'must read' with zig-zagging drives across america set in the post war years in the only time when this lifestyle could be lived - and lived it was, to the full. Almost autobiographical??
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 | The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Buy new: £4.99 / Used from: £0.01 Brilliant. Something must have been lost in translation (but I can't imagine what) but I'm sure much has been gained in translation too. A multi layered, consistent tale of love, death & lost books!
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 | The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Buy used from: £6.95 An unforgetable journey through modern times with, possibly, some distant present day ancestors of Doctor Who (I'm sorta kidding).
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 | The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Buy new: £4.79 / Used from: £3.20 Terrific evocative fiction dealing with a child's life in Nazi Germany but without being depressing. Hope & optimism are here as well as pain & repression.
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 | Naked Lunch: The Restored Text (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) by William S. Burroughs
Buy new: £5.00 / Used from: £3.58 A classic journey thru hallucinatory paranoias. Entertaining in the most edgy of ways. Frank and honest with no punches pulled.
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 | A Clockwork Orange (Penguin Modern Classics) by Anthony Burgess
Buy new: £3.01 / Used from: £2.58 I thought this style unique. The more widely read may disagree. Great story stylised to accentuate the alienation of the anti-hero - both from the reader and his society.
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 | Pompeii by Robert Harris
Buy new: £5.44 / Used from: £0.01 An easy read that's engaging and pretty educational. More fiction set in reality, the story of Vesuvius erupting thru the eyes of a roman aquafer.
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| 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Buy new: £2.39 / Used from: £0.67 Another life forming, perspective changing tale. Okay - so you've seen the film but this is a different, more comprehensive medium. A good companion read is "Lost Worlds" ISBN-10: 0283986115
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 | The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £3.38 A haunting trip thru japanese subculture with recollections from places and events set in reality - but no reality I've ever seen
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 | The Antipope (Brentford Trilogy) by Robert Rankin
Buy new: £5.49 / Used from: £0.01 I got into Rankin thru Raiders of the Lost Car Park but this is a great comic. Places and characters you almost know but can't possibly be (can they?)
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 | The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts (The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy) by Douglas Adams
Buy new: £6.99 / Used from: £0.01 If you get one then you gotta get the lot so all in one volume's good. Easy reading, entertaining, does what it says on the tin - Don't panic! A must for astral surfers.
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 | Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) by Hunter S. Thompson
Buy new: £4.39 / Used from: £3.13 A comic but scary insight into a world of excess which has less reality in it than Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs. Drug tales wrapped in a tortilla of biography and paranoia.
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 | The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart
Buy new: £4.39 / Used from: £1.15 Who'd really live their life like this? Would I? Should I give it a go tomorrow? If I throw an even number I will, if not I'll carry on as usual. Strange comic dark behavioural addiction.
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Listmania!
