When you've finished the Da Vinci Code...

I got hit up for a recommendation of something to read today. Initially blank, as I'm spending waaay too much time pinging between an epic RPG and a children's book at the mo', it got me thinking. At my last workplace, the beer-sodden Friday night conversation would often turn to books once the backstabbing and breaches of confidence had been exhausted. My new one is all about AV: it's what's on TV, what's on DVD, what on at the cinema. It's also younger. And there's less drinking (and less beeyotching too). What does this say about the youth of today?

So Dawei, a handful of books, fiction being my bag:

• Death of an Ancient King by Laurent Gaudé. An awesome little parable, about war and brotherhood, fantastic, bliblical, mythic. An easy couple of days read, with shades of Italo Calvino or early Paolo Coelho.
  
• The Leopard by Guiseppe Tommasi di Lampedusa. Ok, so I studied it in year 12. And I still rock out just thinking about it. Tancredi, Angelica, Don Fabrizio, the joke and that dog. In the throes of revolution, watch as the gentry mutate to survive.
  
• The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. It beat the bookie's, and my, favourite, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, to the Booker Prize; but it's a great piece of writing about the excesses of London society in the mid to late 1980s. And it's all worth it in the end.
• Atonement by Ian McEwan. Like watching a car crash in slow-motion, you know what's going to happen, but it's all too fascinating and grizzly to look away.
  
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. One man's life charts the history of India from independence.
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Because he has to be on any list of books. And because love conquers all. Eventually.
  
• Anything by David Mitchell or Laurence Durrell. I'm simply not worthy.

I have to draw a line somewhere. So consider it drawn.

Scratch that. If you like Could Atlas, check out If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. Postmodernity in type. I'm feeling weak at the knees jus' thinking about it.

And finally The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. Existential chemistry from a man who threw himself down a set of stairs.