...Read any good books lately?

[Boney King]

With the cliche forum title out of the way, i'm currently making my way through Dante's Inferno and i should be finished soon so i was wondering if anyone had read anything they could reccommend? if its not to much to ask just give me a title and a short plot summary, thanks.

P.S NO Twilight or Potter books please.

I would suggest reading the other two parts of Dante's Divine Comedy.

[I Took the Red Pill]

Not much of a play lover usually, but Euripides: Medea is hot stuff as well. Just wrote a whole paper on it and I'm still keen on it. If you're into ancient greece, I'd go for it.

Euripides is the smurfing man. I recommend The Bacchae if you haven't read it yet. Easily, easily the best Greek tragedy I've read, and I've read a metric e ton.

[The Man]

Martin is a hundred times the writer Jordan was. And I like Jordan (well, except for that pile of utter doge Crossroads of Twilight). Martin needs to hurry the smurf up though. I'm going to forget half the plot by the time Dance comes out.

DGC definitely isn't anywhere near being better than ASoIaF, though it's definitely better than Wheel of Time, and probably one of the better fantasy sequences all things told. My biggest complaint is that it falls into the common fantasy trap of having most characters being obviously good or obviously evil, when most people in real life are shades of grey. At least it didn't divide them up into good and evil based purely on what side they were fighting for.

As for recommendations, if you're up for reading a book where you'll have to look up a lot of references, I'd strongly recommend Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. There are several excellent online concordances for it, and Steven Weisenburger has an excellent companion (though I wouldn't recommend reading that alongside the book since he gives away one of the most shocking and disturbing plot twists in the introduction, which greatly diminishes the impact of the book's ending in my opinion). Pynchon has perhaps encapsulated Smedley Butler's aphorism that war is a racket better than any other writer of fiction I've ever read, and in doing so he has managed to capture the flavour of history in all its complexity. If you're not up for starting an unknown author with a doorstop-sized tome, then The Crying of Lot 49 or Inherent Vice or even Vineland will do nicely by way of introduction. Note also that Gravity's Rainbow richly repays re-reading; the first time around, due to the sheer complexity of the plot and the fact that the full significance of many details is far from obvious, the dominant feeling is one of confusion and paranoia, but the full implication of the plotting and counter-plotting becomes obvious on subsequent readings and one grasps the full extent of the machinations in all their sinister dominance.

For something a bit more humorous, I recommend 3xCarlin: An Orgy of George, a compilation of three titles by the famed comedian. Barnes & Noble has it for $13, I believe. His memoirs are out now as well; I'm reading them as we speak, and I'm quite enthralled with them, though they probably won't be of interest to anyone who's not interested in stand-up comedy or Carlin in particular.