Quote Originally Posted by Purple Banana
Anyone remember The White Mountains?
It's about this society of people, of which one boy who is about to come of age, and these tall tripod things come, and try to do something to his brain, I can't remember exactly, but it was really weird stuff.
Yeah, the Tripod Trilogy... White Mountains, Fields of Fire or something, totally fucking AMAZING books that were written for young adults but so good that everyone should read them. Same with the Susan Cooper series that includes Dark is Rising, Greenwich, Silver on the Tree, etc.

My list includes...

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand- every time I read it I get something totally different out of it- the heroine is one of the best-developed and most complex female literary characters I've run across

One Hundred Years of Solitude- Gabirel Garcia Marquez- One of the coolest epics EVER- weird, funny, at times disturbing, very well done, I think he got a Nobel Prize for lit for it too. Love in the time of Cholera isn't half bad either!

The Poisonwood Bible - oh who the fuck wrote that? GRRRR my memory sucdks but what a great novel about a bunch of girls growing up as the children of missionaries in midcentury Africa and the places their lives eventually take them

The Prince of Tides- Another really amazing novel along the same lines- children of totally fucked up parents, in this case an impoverished, violent shrimp fishermen.

The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco- Very cool medieval mystery. If you liked the DaVinci Code, which I LOVED, you should also read this.

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Hemingway- Hard to pick my favorite Hemingway novel, but in terms of grit and the brutally honest depiction of wartime, it's a masterpiece. I also loved the Sun Also Rises (Fiesta).

And then of course for a good laugh, you HAVE to read the Hitchhikers trilogy- all 5 books of it lol- and Garrison Keillor's 'WLT: A Radio Romance' which I thought was a fucking RIOT but I guess you have to like his style of humor (A Prairie Home Companion- American radio show that airs on PRI on weekends- very nice!)