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What are your favorite books?

  • Thread starter swords
  • Start date
Maybe it's time to list our favorite books again (last thread was in 2005).
Try and keep the list below 15 items for brevity.
Trilogies (Lord of the Rings) and parts of a set can all count as "one" book.
 
Here's mine (for this moment in time):

Fiction:
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
The Complete and Unabridged HP Lovecraft (just released by B & N for $13!)
The Collected Works of Marquis de Sade
The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka
Alhazred by Donald Tyson
The Collected Poems of Allen Ginsberg (1947 - 1997)

Psychology:
Prometheus Rising & Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson
The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (# I-X)
Meta-programming the Human Biocomputer by John Lilly
The Politics of Psychopharmacology by Timothy Leary
Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennet

Philosophy:
The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact by Jean Baudrillard
Fearless Speech by Michel Foucault
A Derrida Reader Selected Essays of Jacques Derrida
Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Resistance, Rebellion and Death by Albert Camus
 
Into Thin Air by John Krakauer (Probably my favorite... amazing story - managed to bring a lot of emotions out of me.)
The Catcher In The Rye by J.D Salinger
Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
The Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl series

I also really like reading the manga Hellsing by Kohta Hirano.

Theres a lot more I can't really think of right now. lol. I'll edit if I can think of anymore.
 
Wow, a complete Lovecraft for $13? That's some brain-splitting horror that I can afford!
I have too many favorite books to remember. A few that come immediately to mind are:
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel
William Gibson's Neuromancer
Thomas Hobbes' The Leviathan
David Hume's An Inquiry concerning Human Understanding
Musashi Miyamoto's The Book of Five Rings
Lao Tsu's Tao te Ching (I have an old translation annotated with a number of anecdotes by Chaungze which is a particular favorite of mine.)
George B. Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines
Larry Niven's Ringworld
Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Robert Gilmore's Alice In Quantumland
Chuck Palahnuik's Lullabye
Stephen T. Chang's Internal Excercises
Wally Jay's Small-Circle Jujitsu
There's so many more... lots of physics/math/anthropology/philosophy stuff, pretty much any book in those genres that I find time to read. I'm also a big fan of the classics, both Western and Eastern. I'd really like to find some good translations of the old Arabian classics.
~Joe

PS - Ah, how could I forget Kafka's Metamorphosis? It's definitely a favorite... as is the episode of Home Movies where Brendon gets roped into making a rock opera out of it. (See my signature.)
o/~ I'm a lonely German/A lonely German from Prauge/I wonder what I'll write about?/I think I'll write about Prauge o/~
o/~ I don't know what's wrong with me, I think I'm turnin' into a bug/I see double what I see, I think I'm turnin' into a bug/I ain't got no self-esteem, I think I'm turnin' into a bug/Bet you fifty dollars - I'm a man, I'm a scholar - and I'm turnin' into a bug/Momma like a daddy like a baby like a baby like I'll turn into a bug/Yeah, yeah! (He is Franz Kafka!) o/~
 
overall......prolly Peter Hathaway Capstick's Death in the Long Grass and Death in Silent Places.......recently read Death in a Lonely Land a compilation of some of his magazine articles and liked it aswell....they are nonfiction...

fiction:
also Jack Whyte's Camulod Chronicals

David Morell's Brotherhood of the Rose

Michael Crichton's Jurrasic Park series

nonfiction:
David Macdonald's The Velvet Claw
Robert Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies
 
The Warriors series - Erin Hunter
Maximum Ride series - James Patterson
Surving Antarctica - Can't remember name.
Code Orange - Can't remember either.
 
Slaughter House V by Kurt Vonnegut
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Deadly Feasts by Richard Rhodes
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway
Farewell to Arms by Hemingway
A collection of H.P. Lovecraft tales I cant remember the title of by well H.P. Lovecraft
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost
 
Christy Matthewson biography
Baseball Encyclopedia
Hot 100 of the 70's
Hot 100 of the 80's
NFL statistics encyclopedia
A History of Christianity - Paul Johnson
Getting Even - Woody Allen
Tropical Fish Hobbyist
Savage Garden
The Oddyssey
Bible
Introduction to Statistics
Happy Hollister series
Encyclopedia Brown series
Little House on the Prairie series
 
It's not exactly a book, but Gödel's proof of the incompleteness theorem is a pretty impressive work of exposition.
~Joe
 
  • #10
David Morell's Brotherhood of the Rose

Yes! One of the best books I have ever read. Did you read the others in the very loose "trilogy?" One is about a completely different guy, and the third is both the the main characters from Brotherhood of the Rose and Fraternity of the Stone. I think it is called A League of For and Night, or something like that. Brotherhood and Fraternity are phenomenal.

Here are my favorite books. I personally believe these are all timeless. I never put a book on my "favorite" list unless I know it will never be removed.

Science Fiction
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
Gateway by Frederik Pohl

Fiction
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
Timeline by Michael Crichton
Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Brotherhood of the Rose

Fantasy
The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan
Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever

Philosophy/Values
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo

Great thread. I almost love getting book recommendations more than I like reading them!

xvart.
 
  • #11
actually.....didnt know there were anymore....never looked for whatever reason.....will add them to the list to look for......that book seemed more or less like the full story so i didnt think to look for more in a series......
 
  • #12
The Dog Song by Gary Paulson
The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
The Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett (all 36 books... can't wait for the next two that should be coming out soon)
 
  • #14
actually.....didnt know there were anymore....never looked for whatever reason.....will add them to the list to look for......that book seemed more or less like the full story so i didnt think to look for more in a series......

Yeah, I didn't realize it either. It's a very loose trilogy, if you can even call it that. The "second" book has absolutely nothing to do with Brotherhood, and no overlap at all. They are the same style with the former spy/assassin, and then the "third" book has characters from the previous two in it; so, I believe they are all individual stories, and don't need to be read in any particular order.

xvart.
 
  • #15
cool........will be stopping by my favorite used bookstore in January, will look for them.......
 
  • #16
I liked most of Michael Crichton's books (he died a few weeks ago) especially "Sphere"

I also like Arthur C. Clarke
 
  • #17
Fiction:
Catch-22
Life of Pi

Non-fiction:
How the Earth Moved
Backyard Giants
 
  • #18
Dr. Wurm,
I picked up a copy of The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke at borders and that night on the news they announced his death, that was a weird Jungian synchronicity!

Seedjar:
The new Lovecraft collection is published by Barnes & Noble and is sold in their "Barnes and Noble Classics" section of the bargain books next to Jules Verne and Charles Dickens (all these big hardcover collections are $12.95). It has a big purple picture of a clock / space vortex or something on the cover. It's much nicer than the "Necronomicon" Lovecraft collection put out last year cos this has almost everything he wrote except the poetry from the Fungi From Yuggoth old pulp book and the stuff he re-wrote for young authors and allowed to be published under their name. Of course, if you wanna read them all free online just click: http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/index.html

Another great writer who contributed to the Lovecraft mythos (the gods: Tsathoggua, Ubbo-Sathla, etc) is Clarke Ashton Smith. I might even commit such a heresy as to say I like Smith's stuff more than Lovecraft, or at least equally. You can read all his short stories, weird poetry, nonfiction and unfinished story synopsis / outlines from his notebooks found after his death, free online here: http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/
I see that there is now also recorded MP3s audio books of Smith's stories since I was there last! It's downloading time! ;)
 
  • #19
I have no idea, but here are five that come to mind. I'm in a philosophical phase and at least four of these fit that:

Pheasants of the Mind - Datus Proper
Cadillac Desert - Marc Reisner
Encounters with the Archdruid - John McPhee
Sand County Almanac - Aldo Leopold
Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
 
  • #20
Take your pick from these authors:

Orson Scott Card
David Brin
Peter Hamilton
Julie Czernedas
Brian Stableford
Issac Asimov

I am sure there are others I can not think of right now
 
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