I just finished reading THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving. What a fantastic book. So good in fact, that I actually read 300 pages yesterday, something I haven't done in a very long time.

The bulk of the book is quirky and funny, but at the end, I found it all tied together with some solid emotion I wasn't expecting. The characters and situations in this book will stay with me for some time. Great stuff.

Love it.
Have re-read it every summer since I first got (stole) it when I was twelve.
It's the book that made me want to become a writer...

You should read A Prayer for Owen Meany. Thats what got me into Irving in the first place. Its absolutely incredible.

My g/f is a huge Irving fan, so the first two books I read are A Prayer for Owen Meany and World According to Garp. I enjoyed them, but reading them back to back, they seemed almost interchangable in the unfolding of the plot and the general tone. Perhaps I just should have spaced them out a bit ....

I have found that there are two sorts of people in the world -- those who think that Garp is the best thing that Irving wrote, and those who think that Owen Meany is the best thing that Irving wrote.

Willie, you should do more research to see if a person's favorite matches the book he/she read first.

I look forward to reading more Irving, but if his style is similar in other books, I cerainly want to take a break. But I will say that I'm already looking forward to reading Garp again. I'd like to figure out why/how it works.

Order of reading isn't usually a factor for anyone I've asked. Unlike readers of, say, Tom Robbins, for whom the first one they read is usually the favourite.

wy wife gave me that book when we were still dating....well, i married her didn't I

I love Garp and Meany. Other great ones are The Cider House Rules and The Hotel New Hampshire.

I think his pre-Garp novels are OK but nothing special.

Owen Meany is my favorite, but I've always been kind of partial to his first novel, Setting Free the Bears.

I loved Garp, read Owen Meany after, I really don't remember it too much. I should probably read it again.

I bought the Garp VHS after I finished the book, but never watched it. How does it compare to the book?

On its own, it is an excellent, enjoyable film. Unfortunately, John Irving books are impossible to translate to film. Impossible.

Although Door in the Floor was a masterful job of adapting a very small part of Widow for One Year...

Yep. Door in the Floor was pretty good. As you said, it suffers the problem that most of the movies face.

Yes, yes, yes! A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY is one of the very, very, very few books which made me sob like a baby. (Too bad its movie adaptation, SIMON BIRCH, turned out to be so crappy.)

You may also enjoy THE 158-POUND MARRIAGE and THE CIDER HOUSE RULES.