[Taqwus]

I recently read a translation of Camus's short psychological novel, "The Stranger". Similar genre to Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment", or perhaps (more distantly) to various bits of Kafka ("The Trial" and "The Castle" being interesting reads).

Hrmmm. Time to toss out some highly random items from a variety of genres.

War (theory): Clausewitz's _On War_. Clavell's translation of _The Art of War_ is good.

War/Conflict (novels/serials): Tolstoy's _War and Peace_ (Napoleon's 1812 campaign); Pasternaks' _Dr. Zhivago_ (Russian Revolution), Luo Guanzhong's _Romance of the Three Kingdoms_ (warring states in China, ca. 170 AD. OK, so you're probably NOT going to find this one lying around your bookstore, unless it's damn big or a speciality store).

Fantasy: Haven't read much for a LONG while, but concur on Martin's "Game of Thrones" series. Although the reliance on slightly modified Medieval Europe Fantasy staples e.g. knighthood, "Ser" instead of "sir", and so forth, annoys me a touch. At least it's not plagued with too much Tolkien-derived material; he has the decency to make up *his own* fairly refreshing world.

Morgan Llelywnn (sp?)'s "Finn mac Cool" is a nice retelling of a Celtic legend. So is Nikolai Tolstoy's "The Coming of the King", which IMHO is far more impressive than T.H. White's "The Once and Future King", at least for adults.

Sci-Fi: Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy is darn good "hard" science fiction, IMHO. I'm also partial to John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar", "The Shockwave Rider" (pref. read Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock" before reading TSR), and Orson Scott Card's Ender books are also quite thoughtful.

History of espionage: "The Puzzle Palace", "The Man Called Intrepid", and "The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive" are interesting to varying degrees.

Thrillers: Frederick Forsyth wrote pretty good works ("Day of the Jackal", for instance). Others? Perhaps works by Eric Ambler ("A Coffin for Dmitrios"), or John le Carre (quite a few Cold War spy novels).

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night