I've read the New Testament, and a bit of the Old one, but I agree with Demea that it gets real boring real quick, what with people having names the length of a page, and having 17 children that live for 1000 years. It's just not credible...
Les Miserables is amazing, even the "long" version, but the problem is that a lot gets lost in the translation. I'm sure it's the same way for a lot of foreign books, but there is something about hugo's style in French that is very hard to translate. I guess if we had a time machine, maybe Shakespear could do it...
I love Russian litterature, especialyl Dostoievski, and The Karamazov Brothers is one of my all time favourite books. War and Peace is quite awesome too. The real difficulty with those books are Russian names. Not only are they long and similar, Dostoievski often uses nicknames for his characters, with any warning, so it took me a while to realise Mika was Alenxandre. Once you get past the names and the first 100 pages, then it's like drinking from the fountain of chocolate in heaven.
French litterature mixes the great with teh gretly boring. I hate Zola, Flaubert, Stendhal with a passion, probably cos I was forced-fed them at school. But Celine, Vian, Joseph Kessel are immense authors, and in my opinion much better than the overrated and hard-drug-inducing Zola.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is defrinately amaing, and "100 years of solitude" is by far my favourite (tho admitedly I've only read "love in the time of cholera" fromhsi other books).
Philospsohy is very hit and miss. Voltaire (Candid), Descartes, Plato (The Republic), Sartre (my favourite philosopher), Russell (His History of Western Philosohy is unbelievavbly amazing) and Rousseau (everything) are easy to read, but guys like Nietzche, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Hegel, are completely impossible. It's adifferent language, and I pesonally think they are ******* for not writing in a comprehensible manner. The concepts are not that complicated, but the academic language means every word means in fact something different from its usual meaning. I defy anyone who has not studied philosophy at University to come here and tell me they can read Hegel, Foucault or Wittgensteind's original work and understand anything.
As for the American authors, I was slightly disappointed by "On the road". I enjoyed it, but not as much as I thought I would. I also thought Paul Auster was quite Crap.
