Name your top ten favorite books

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

The Phantom Tollbooth - Alfred A. Knopf...a classic

Woops. A little redaction; The Phantom Tollbooth was actually written by Norton Juster. Sorry folks. Don't wanna lead you kids on a wild goose chase, looking for a book by Alfred Knopf...

Siddhartha

The Feynman Lectures on Physics

The Complete Far Side

Catch-22

The Things They Carried

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Ender's Game

The Velveteen Rabbit

Best Efforts

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Books I dislike:

Atlas Shrugged

The Alchemist

Ultramarathon Man

Pride and Prejudice

Life at These Speeds

Spacetime Physics

Freakonomics

Introductory Quantum Mechanics (Liboff)

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Guns, Germs, and Steel

i'm surprised nobody has listed any poetry so far

A perfect spy - John Le Carre

Waterland - Graham Swift

Islands in the stream - Ernest Hemingway

Lupercal - Ted Hughes

The magus - John Fowles

Kangaroo - DH Lawrence

The Silmarillion - JR Tolkien

With fire and sword - Henryk Sienkiewicz

An American doctors odyssey - Victor Heiser

The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

Top ten books of all time

1. Chuck Klosterman: "Fargo rock City"

2. David Sedaris: "Me talk pretty someday"

3. John Irving: "Widow for one Year"

4. Neil Strauss: "The Dirt: the story of Motley Crue"

5. Augusten Burroughs: "Magical Thinking"

6. David Sedaris: "Dress your Family in Corduroy"

7. John Irving: "The world according to Garp'

8. J.D. Salinger: "Catcher in the Rye"

9. Philip Roth: "The Great American Novel"

10. Stephen King; "Different Seasons"

I wanna read more but this is the best I could come up with so far. some aren't great literature but i take them as interesting antecdote's. If Irving wrote about Tommy Lee or nikki Sixx it would be even more entertaining.

meichenl wrote:

i'm surprised nobody has listed any poetry so far

Alice Runner wrote:

Illuminations, Arthur Rimbaud

Paul Verlaine

A Mother's Gift by Britney Spears

Running for Dummies by Florence Griffith Joyner

The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President by Edward Klein

Michael Jackson's Great Beer Guide by Michael Jackson

The World According to Garp - Iriving

1. 1984 - George Orwell

2. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

3. Walden - Henry David Throeau

4. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

5. Animal Farm - George Orwell

6. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

7. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

8. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

9. White Teeth - Zadie Smith

10. Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer

hard to say a number 1 on that list, or to put them in any sort of order, all classics (although white teeth is somewhat new). for honorable mention i'd of course have to go with catcher in the rye by salinger, the metamorphosis by kafka, and Mysterious Island by Jules Verne (amazing book). i'm also a big fan of fast food nation by eric schlosser, and heart of darkness by conrad is pretty captivating regardless of whether you agree with him or not.

Into the Wild, um no, give me a break.

Call of the Wild, an absolute treasure.

muscle beach wrote:

Of Mice and Men

Great call with Of Mice and Men. I've heard the movie is one of the few movies that does the book justice. Anybody seen it?

-The Harry Potter series

-The Pendragon series

-Eragon and Eldest by Christopher Paolini

not fiction but still a great book haven't finished it yet but it is very good.

-Running with the Buffalos

1. LOTR - Tolkien

2. Inheritance Trilogy - Christopher Paolini (sp?)

4. OAR - John L Parker, Jr.

3. Battlefield Earth

5. The Greatest: Haile Geb Bio

6. Duel in the Sun

7. Long Road to Boston

8. Life at these Speeds

9. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson

10. The Perfect Mile

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (pretty much anything he does)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

Anything from Roald Dahl's catalogue

Beowulf

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Slaughterhouse-5 by Vonnegut

The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

Literary Fan wrote:

9. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson

10. The Perfect Mile

Those are both great. I almost mentioned both originally.

I should also mention Hiroshima by Hersey. I remember having to read it back in 8th grade, and what a big impact it had on me. Before that my thoughts on war were typical of a jr high boy: Bomb every country that we have a problem with. The bigger the bomb, the better. I couldn't figure why the US didn't just drop a couple dozen A-bombs on Vietnam back in the day.

To this day, I recognize reading Hiroshima not only as a turning point in my thinking of armed conflict, but also a signal that the beliefs I had as a boy were not necessarily going to be same that I had as a man. The kind of revelation that throws everything you think you know into doubt.

Lonesome Dove--Larry McMurtry

Ceremony--Leslie Marmon Silko

5th Business--Roberston Davies

meichenl wrote:

Books I dislike:

The Alchemist

You would not say that if you had read the book in Spanish.

American version is very dumbed-down, I think you need to read the original to understand the beauty of Couelho.

Do you mean Portuguese?

No Sir wrote:

You would not say that if you had read the book in Spanish.

American version is very dumbed-down, I think you need to read the original to understand the beauty of Couelho.

You are such a tool. There are so many ways to say what you said in your post but you chose the most arrogant, slimy and condescending way. Again, you are such a tool.