Raven

I never used to read much as a child - I didn't really start until my mid-late teens - so this isn't a problem I have encountered as described above, but when I did start reading it was manly Star Trek novels, which I suspect I would find to be very badly written if I tried to re-read them today!

A clueless young gent from the coast Had a woman named Maureen as host.... He let down her hair Over shoulders bare

Enigma is a very good book, one of my favourites. Have you seen the Dougray Scott/Kate Winslet film? It's not a bad adaptation (though they sexed it up a bit!).

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick - Kindle - 99p.

For anyone wanting to read this, it is £1.19 on the Kindle today.

For anyone who has never read it, The Catcher in the Rye is 99p on Kindle today.

What alternatives are there to Goodreads? (I'm not very up on book pimping websites...)

Yay! Finished book 2 of the year! (The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino). Not the best Hiromi Kawakami book I've read, to be honest. An interesting idea, but far too many characters. Not sure this one will get a review. Hmm.... What too read next?

I never realised there were so many volumes of Spot the Dog!

1 That is all...

True, but I'm pretty sure it was something else, even though I cannot remember the specifics.

I don't think it is something you will hate - I can't say I hated it - but after reading The War of the Worlds, I just didn't think it was anywhere near as good! A caveat on the above is that The War of the Worlds is one of my favourite books, so I may have been expecting greatness when I read The Time Machine, and was holding it to too high a standard!* *I wasn't, it's just not as good! I understand, but - as with reviews - it helps to know who is doing the recommending so you can put the recommendation into some in of context, otherwise it is just a list! You seem to have taken a bit of flack for this topic, but please don't take my comments as being negative; my comments - and others - are obviously just opinions - you may love the books that I found lacking, and so the wheel turns! (and as someone once said, "if we all liked the same thing, the world would be a boring place"**). **"Someone" who had obviously never read the Twilight saga...

No, I don't think so. I would have remembered The Nutcracker because we saw an animated version of it in school around the same time; this was something else. Thanks for the suggestion, though!

I think I will end up reading them at some point; as I said, I've very much enjoyed the TV series. Sorry! If you have not read it, then The War of the Worlds is infinitely better than The Time Machine and you should enjoy that (it is a far better story and novel all around, really, so I would say read The Time Machine first, and then follow it up with The War of the Worlds!). It would be interesting to know who wrote this list and when, because either they aren't that widely read (on science fiction, anyway) or this is a safe list of well known classics from a few years ago. Iain M. Banks should be on there, somewhere.

I'm the same with After Dark, which was the first one I read.

Finished season 2 of The Clone Wars, which got better as it went along. Also watching - and enjoying - WandaVision on Disney+ and Landscape Artist of the Year on Sky Arts (I really need to start drawing again...). I have also noticed that the Starz adaptation of The Rook, by Daniel O'Malley is free of Amazon Prime at the moment, so I may take a look at that at some point.

I've read 14⅓ of those (the ⅓ being The Northern Lights, as I never got any further with His Dark Materials, but having enjoyed the TV series - so far - I may go back to them). There are several on the list that I have started and not finished as well (Watership Down, Moby Dick & Tess of the D'Urbervilles, amongst them...) I wouldn't waste time on The Time Machine (no pun intended!) as it's a pretty weak story and more heavy-handed social commentary, really, and I can't say Do Androids Dream... is all that special either (there are far better and more imaginative sci-fi novels out there. Hell, it's not even Phil Dick's best book! It largely owes its popularity to Blade Runner, with which it has very little in common!)

I'd go with that; Murakami's books often invoke a sense of melancholy in me as well, and I also don't view that in a negative way. I enjoyed Norwegian Wood, but it is very different beast from most of his novels and is certainly his most main stream and accessible. I prefer his stories that have a more surreal bent, and a degree of mystery to them (A Wild Sheep Chase is pretty good on that score!) I've read pretty much all of his short stories now, and a couple of his longer novels, but I still have the really long ones to go.

That doesn't surprise me...

Bit late in the day to be posting this, but Rendezvous With Rama is 99p on the Kindle today. along with a several George Orwell novels (not sure what Amazon is trying to say about Valentines Day with that...).

No probs! I jumped at this, although I still have his Spitfire book still to read as well!

The excellent, Flowers For Algernon is 99p on Kindle today. Also, John Nichol's Lancaster (about the plane, not the city of house of) is 99p as well.

A writer of SciFi once tried To eat eggs that hadn't been fried To lazy to cook He worked on his book

Damn, I knew it was one of the two of you - I guessed the wrong one!

Well worth the effort, and - although the cause is different - very topical now. I think Willoyd read it a while back and posted a review.