You should read Clara Callan by Richard B Wright. It's fantastic, and Canadian! (and intellectual)

I've enjoyed most of the John Irving canon (except The Fourth Hand, DO NOT READ THAT ONE!), and I recently enjoyed The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, and The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated was good, too.

Best of all, I can lend all these fine works of fiction to you directly!

One I can't lend but that might knock your socks off is Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War.

Don't ever let fiction pass you by. All too soon, it will once again become the last bastion of free speech, but the most important aspect of fiction is its ability to enthrall, captivate, and open the mind. Never let it go!

Awfully sorry about the double post, but, following on the John Irving reference already made, I would suggest "Until I Find You" for your next read. It's a little dark, and not for everybody, but I personally recommend it for a satisfying read.

Two of my favourite books in the last few years are "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell and "Book of Illusions" by Paul Auster.

Highly recommended.

if you haven't --

The Emigrants [W.G. Sebald]
Tristram Shandy [L. Sterne]
Jacques the Fatalist [J. Diderot]
Pop 1280 [J. Thompson]

and not a novel but

Tropical Truth [C. Veloso]

I highly recommend Blindness or All the Names by Jose Saramago. He'll knock you on your ass. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is also quite good. I just got my copy of Tristam Shandy a few days ago, so I can't say anything about it yet other than it's another one of those books I should have read by now.

Oh yeah, The Great Gatsby is always a good one.

If you haven't read 'The Master And Margarita' by Mikhail Bulgakov then you haven't lived ;-) Elsewhere, Pelevin's 'Omon Ra' is maintaining the brilliance of Russian prose. I guess Crime and Punishment goes without saying..

Another vote here for Master and Margarita.

Other favourites of mine:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

blah blah blah...

(((Coming Through Slaughter)))

It is quite brilliant.

Delicious:
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Years of Salt and Rice - Kim Stanley Robinson
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Girls - Lori Lansens
and anything by Halldor Laxness
:)

I presume if you are a McSweeney's fan you have read stuff by that crowd of authors: Rick Moody ("Purple America" struck a chord for me) David Foster Wallace (I really liked "Infinite Jest" but you may not get through that in a month); Jonathan Franzen (liked "Corrections")

Not a McSweeney boy but I am sure they liked him. "Austerlitz" by WG Sebald.

PS: Great looking site, by the way

I just snagged a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces for a buck at the used book place next to my office. It's one I've meant to read for years.

My surprise of the year - George Jonas: Vengeance - historical, but is read smoother than Bond stories, Douglas Coupland: All families are psychotic, and one of my favourites if not the one - Philip K. Dick: Do androids dream of electric sheep?

Also you should try to read The art of war by Sun Tzu, Sun Pin and A Brief History of Time by prof. Stephen Hawking.

If you have a problem with falling asleep I would recomend you all written words by Vladimir Ilich Lenin :>

I have had a few folks complain about the size of Infinite Jest, and it probably is not a great kicking around town kind of book, how about Wallace's short stories "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men"? You may have read a chunk of it already if you were a McSweeney's reader on a regular basis.

Re: Phillip K Dick. I also agree he is amazing and I love everything I have read of his. I really liked "The Man in the High Castle" I think it is funny how hollywood has mined his works and turned them into big budget special effects vehicles, but they usually bear little resemblence to the stories which are often quite intimate and personal.

I recommend The Kite Runner - by Khaled Hosseini, Bel Canto - by Ann Patchett and The Pillars of The Earth - by Ken Follett.
For literally thousands of recommendations for every mood and on every subject imagineable...from a Seattle celebrity librarian Nancy Pearl... get her Book Lust and More Book Lust.

Michelle Houllebecq - Atomised / The Elementary Particles
Probably my favourite modern literary novel

Other than that, here's some classics
Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
800 pages, but every single page is worth it! Best fiction ever written!
Dostoevsky - Demons
Bulgakov - Master and Margarita
Goethe - Elective Affinities
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Tolstoy - War and Peace

If you can stomach some comedy sci-fi
Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
(Maybe a little too English)

Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Bless Me Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya
Life of Pi, Yan Martel
100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Either Jitterbug Perfume or Skinny Legs and All (or both), Tom Robbins

And I second John Irving. My favorites are Cider House Rules and Prayer for Owen Meany. I did not finish Son of the Circus, but that is due to the birth of my first son and not John Irving's fault.

I've got three recommendations: A well-known author, a local (to me) author, and (don't hate me) a fantasy novel.

The well-known author is Ken Kesey, and the novel is his second, Sometimes A Great Notion. It's an exceptionally great work, both in its craft and style and in the huge story it tells.

The local author is Donald Harington, and while I'd recommend The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks: A Novel to people new to our area, for the general reader, I say The Choiring of the Trees.

The fantasy choice is the only fantasy written by an exceptional science fiction writer, John Barnes. One for the Morning Glory is, like his massively powerful Earth Made of Glass, a story about stories (among other things).

i want to be read an interesting novel in my mail