I read Slaugherhouse 5 a year ago. Not the best book, not the worst. I just read Things Fall Apart, which was in that same decent but not incredible catagory. Now I am about to read The Art of War.
Thanks for that suggestion. Unfortunately Basil Bunting wasn't in the Oxford Library of English Poetry, and as for Heaney - Seamus Heaney - he's Irish. The intro to the three-volume "Library" says:
Hmm...
Well, here's the blurb for starters: Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired to have some fun by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth.
So you could call it a forerunner (1988) of The Da Vinci Code, and in fact Umberto Eco does once quote from its source The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, but FP much more intellectually taxing. I must confess I didn't find it easy to follow. Reading it in small installments before bed probably didn't help - it might be more suited to holiday reading. A friend gave it to me last year for my birthday. I remember he was intrigued when I told him that my Italian ancestors (four generations back) had come from Piedmont, the region where last year's Winter Olympics were held. He remarked how Eco had said that the Piedmontese were renowned for their wicked sense of humour and scepticism, or something like that. This is from chapter 5:
Last book by an Irish write I read was In Code: A Mathematical Journey by Sarah Flannery. Don't think she's Aspie; her social skills sound too good for that.
And finally, to answer Tiger of Malaysia's question - Body Language: The secret language of body gestures and postures that reveal what we really think and mean by Carolyn Boyes.