APOLYTON! I need *ALOT* of recreational books, recommend me lots!

[Richelieu]

[Nostromo]

More seriously, you could try out The Nikopol Trilogy by Enki Bilal

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1401203841/qid=1124830812/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-1489743-0296655?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

The Nikopol Trilogy brings together three previously published volumes Carnival of Mortals, Woman Trap and Cold Equator all impressive works of imagination meticulously written, drawn and colored by European comics artist Bilal. It's the year 2023 and Alcide Nikopol has been revived from a state of suspended animation after 30 years orbiting Earth. In the meantime, the planet has suffered two nuclear wars, and France is ruled by the ruthless dictator J.F. Choublanc. The immortal gods of Egyptian antiquity have also reawakened to revive their rule over humanity, and they now hover above the crumbling technopolis of Paris in a massive stone pyramid/airship. Horus, the renegade falcon god, takes possession of Nikopol's body, rendering him immortal, and concocts a conspiracy to overthrow the Choublanc regime. When Nikopol cracks under the pressure of Horus's possession, he is reduced to muttering the poetry of Baudelaire while he wanders the halls of a mental hospital. "Woman Trap" picks up two years later in a war-torn London. Blue-haired news correspondent Jill Bioskop dispatches stories 30 years into the past using a device called a scriptwriter, while she takes pills to eradicate the bloody memories of men she has murdered. In "Cold Equator" the story is further complicated as Nikopol's son boards a train bound for Equator City, an African metropolis afflicted with a freezing micro-climate of minus-six degrees, but surrounded by desert and surrealistically populated by sub-Saharan wildlife. Intricate plot twists and stunning color artwork mark this work as both an extraordinary comics literary achievement and a crackling good story.

Or the Ghost in the Shell mangas, by Masamune Shirow

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1593072287/qid=1124831087/sr=2-3/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_3/103-1489743-0296655?v=glance&s=books

I read the first volume and its great. And I'm not really a manga person myself. His Sci-Fi universe is reminiscent of Blade Runner's. Btw, the two Ghost in the Shell movies a truely amazing, IMO! The TV show is also very good, but not as beautiful as the movies.

Starred Review. First published in English in 1995, this classic cyberpunk manga is the story of a future society dependent on cyborgs (humans with machine parts). It's 2029, and Japan has gathered a troop of military cyborgs in Section Nine, a secret paramilitary security squad. The S-9 squad leader is the tall and sexy female cyborg Major Kusanagi, and the men under her command include the gruff Batou and the uncertain (and mostly human) rookie Togusa. Bafflingly metaphysical and utterly gripping, the book is an episodic chronicle of S-9's missions that illustrates the fluid nature of crime, espionage and geopolitical skullduggery in a world where human personality, vast data networks and cybernetic technology have essentially fused into a single social matrix. The team tracks criminals, spies and terrorists who hack networks or illegally copy the ghosts (or souls) of enslaved humans into black market cyborgs. Their ultimate case is the Puppeteer, a deadly cyberterrorist who turns out to be a ghostless, "self-aware" artificial intelligence spontaneously created out of the vast sea of networked information. Masamune's b&w drawings are dynamic and beautifully gestural; he vividly renders the awesome urban landscape of a futuristic, supertechnological Japan. This new edition restores material (including graphic sex scenes) deleted from the earlier U.S. edition.

[Seeker]

"six and a half feet of smoldering, insatiable alpha male."

Oh dear....

[Wraith]

You could start with a couple epic fantasy series, like George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire or Janny Wurts' A War of Light and Shadow. Maybe throw in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time (but only maybe).

Then some more fantasy, like anything by Glen Cook (I'd suggest either the Black Company books or the Garrett books).

Haven't read them myself yet, but they are on my list; for sci-fi you might want to try out David Weber's Honor Harrington series.

Pretty much anything by Walter Jon Williams (except The Rift) is good.

Anyway, there's a good start. More later.

Wraith
I don't need speed reading. I need speed bookcase building

[Ben Kenobi]

I'd recommend Heinlein if you are into sci-fi. Lots of good books by him.

[Datajack Franit]

sci-fi.. all of you: get your heads out of your asses

Vladimir Nabokov: Invite to a decapitation, Lolita
Milan Kundera: The unbearable lightness of being
J.W. Goethe: Faust

[Jon Miller]

Cherryh
Gene Wolfe
Zelazny
Conrad
Faulkner
MacDonald
Rowling
Bujold
George Martin

Jon Miller

[Donegeal]

The "Known Space" universe is a great reality created by Larry Niven. I highly recomend it.

[Flip McWho]

'Nights Dawn Trilogy' by Peter F Hamilton. Good big read. Space opera excellently done.

Pick up Pandora's Tomorrow too, also by Peter F Hamilton. The sequel hasn't been written yet though unfortunately, can't wait for it.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Your college doesn't have a library?

The town its in doesn't have a library?

You have time for significant amounts of pleasure reading in college?

It's okay, you can admit it: you're actually going to prison, aren't you?

[Jon Miller]

depending on what you are into I can see having time for significant ammounts of pleasure reading in college, I did.. (at times)

JM

[monolith94]

King Solomon's Mines.

[ColdWizard]

I enjoy Anne Mccaffrey's Pern series. Basically a series where the descendants of the original colonists attempt to defend themselves from a non-sentient space organism, amongst other issues.

[Datajack Franit]

why don´t you suggest him to read pokemon cards then

[Minute Mirage]

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King.

I guess you could classify this as fantasy, but this is pretty damn far from Tolkien.