Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What is your favorite book?

Yeah,... my memory on that was faulty.

But honestly, I don't think not getting it published is what led to his suicide.

I think upon completion of the book, he realized that it was an autobiography.

I just thought of another book that I guarentee many here will appreciate.

Blood Meridian , by Cormac McCarthy. It's set in the west but it's not in the vein of most westerns.

Here, from the book, is an account of an attack on the U.S. Calvary by a huge war party of Comanche's.
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"Already you could see through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and the rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod horses the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled hoard of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpierced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a hoard from hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant."
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http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Meridian-Evening-Redness-West/dp/0679728759

Apart from the choices above, and I concur with them all. please try "BIRDSONG" Sebastian Faulks.... One of the best written novels about WW1, and its aftermath for the individual, a very moving read.

T260

Although in my college days as a double major in English & Religion, I knew then I had only scratched the surface of what I might yet read of great value. I've read many books from many cultures, but don't consider myself an authority as to what are "must reads." Lao Tsu and Sun Tsu are wonderful, though.

Shakespeare is so fluid and enlightening, but I must admit that the writer who affected me most was Fyodor Doestoyevski. He may as well have intended his works for me, for the effect they've had. I had the sense of d�j� vu as I first read his works and that has never left me. In another semester I might have had another major in Russian Literature, but that hasn't ever bothered me.

(I actually didn't know my 2nd Major was Religion until shortly before I graduated - majors, minors & all that more or less escaped me; I never got tuned into it all. If I hadn't had a good advisor, I might still be in college instead of graduating in '69.)

Enough! It's a toss up between The Brothers Karamozov & Crime and Punishment.

Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter. Or most anything else by Stephen Hunter. He wrote several other great novels.(Time to hunt,etc.)
Virgil B.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (in fact I would suggest just about anything he wrote).

Stalingrad by V.E. Tarrant

The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer

Anything by Patrick F. McManus

Bob

As a sidenote, although I haven't read all the books mentioned, I greatly enjoy the mention of those books people like. My oldest child, my beloved Anna Karina, and I can spend hours together discussing books. And that's happening, too, now, with the lovely Alycia.

A few from recent memory:
Mawson's Will
Guns, Germs and Steel
Minus 148
Collapse
Botaney of Desire

Currently reading:
Omnivores Dilemma
The Long Walk
Last Man Standing
Eats, Shoots and Leaves. pak