Your favorite books

Status
Not open for further replies.

This

Banned
MBTI
.
Enneagram
.
There is a thread on favorite movies that keeps popping up, but me not being much of a movie watcher it inspired me to make a list of my 10 favorite books and find out what your guys favorite are too :D (I posted pictures cause I wanted to but you guys can just list them if ya want)

Franny and Zooey- J.D. Salinger (Fiction)

Please Understand Me II- David Keirsey (Sociology)

The Discourses- Niccolo Machiavelli (Political)

The Iliad and The Odyssey- Homer (Technically two books)(Fiction)

The Count of Monte Cristo- Alexandre Dumas (Fiction)

Purple Cow- Seth Godin (Marketing)

Anna Karenina- Leo Tolstoy (Fiction)

East Of Eden- John Steinbeck (Fiction)

The Red Queen- Matt Ridley (Biological Phycology)

How to Win Friends & Influence People- Dale Carnegie (Self Improvement)
 
Every one of those books is stellar Sali, except I've never read Purple Cow... which is funny considering I was a marketing major for a bit.
 
Cry, the Beloved Country is on my mind atm, and I've been meaning to reread Ender's Game as well. I hear that series is quite good, but I've got the next two sitting on my shelf unread. Haven't found the time :(
 
The Hitch Hiker's guide to the Galaxy series by douglas Adams, The Discworld series by Sir Terry Pratchett, Thursday next, nursery crime series and shades of grey by Jasper Fforde, The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Childhood's end by Arthur C Clarke, The First Casualty by Ben Elton, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, 1984 by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldus Huxley, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson as wel as just about anything written by Philip Pullman, Stephen Fry, Bill Bryson, Kurt Vonnegut Jr and H. G. Wells.
 
I'll have to check some of those out. I really liked the movie "East of Eden", so I'm sure the book is excellent. I love how books smell (weirdo, lol).

Here are 10 of my all-time favorites:

High Fidelity

About a Boy
How to Be Good
A Long Way Down
Slam
(All written by Nick Horby)

The Commitments
The Snapper
The Van
(a.k.a. "The Barrytown Trilogy", and they are written by Roddy Doyle)

Dracula by Bram Stoker
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
 
The Egyptian by Mika Waltaria
Forever Amber by Kathleen Windsor
I love historical fiction!!

Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan
 
Pride and Prejudice
Wuthering Heights
Twilight Series
The Great Gatsby
Things Fall Apart
Twelfth Night
Othello
Hamlet
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Color Purple
Chicken Soup for the Soul
Kissing Snowflakes
The Break-Up Bible
The Awakening
Gulliver's Travels
Flowers for Algernon
The Things They Carried
Number of the Stars
The Giver
Anthem
Iliad
Odyssey
Forever
Crime and Punishment
Harry Potter Series
War and Peace
Interview with a Vampire

I'll add to this list when I think of more
 
I liked Gatsby and 1984 was amazing. I need to read a more. I was thinking about starting with Crime and Punishment which was supposedly an infp (Dostoevsky).
 
Wasn't there a book one before too?

In any case, here are a bunch of my favorites!

1984 - George Orwell (Although my least favorite of the Dystopian Trifecta. Unless you count Fahrenheit 451 *vomit*)
Anthem - Ayn Rand (I.)
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand (HURT ME MORE!!!)
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy?)
Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut (Goodbye Blue Monday!)
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess (Even though he's a bitch in the last chapter)
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand (Insane? Look around you!)
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde (What Would Wotton Do?)
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli (The lion or the fox?)
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut (War In Reverse)
The Socratic Dialogues - Plato (The Great Gadfly)
The Stranger - Albert Camus (Along with Rand's novels, one with an awesome philosophical speech ending)
The Virtue of Selfishness - Ayn Rand (Uncut Objectivism)
 
Wasn't there a book one before too?

In any case, here are a bunch of my favorites!

1984 - George Orwell (Although my least favorite of the Dystopian Trifecta. Unless you count Fahrenheit 451 *vomit*)
Anthem - Ayn Rand (I.)
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand (HURT ME MORE!!!)
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy?)
Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut (Goodbye Blue Monday!)
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess (Even though he's a bitch in the last chapter)
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand (Insane? Look around you!)
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde (What Would Wotton Do?)
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli (The lion or the fox?)
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut (War In Reverse)
The Socratic Dialogues - Plato (The Great Gadfly)
The Stranger - Albert Camus (Along with Rand's novels, one with an awesome philosophical speech ending)
The Virtue of Selfishness - Ayn Rand (Uncut Objectivism)

So much Ayn Rand and yet no "The Fountainhead"?

Edit: hmmm, don't know how I missed that *Facepalm*
 
Last edited:
i honestly feel that i am not well read enough to be able to assemble this sort of ultimate list of favourite books. i find it a bit difficult to describe what i look for in a work of literature that leads me to evaluate it as important. i really appreciate literature that engages on a deep metaphorical level with its own status as art and through that process finds transcendence of artistic limitations to connect art with life in a meaningful way that demonstrates or enacts how humanity can and will go further than what has been previously possible. i don't know if this adequately communicates how i feel about it but it may be something that can only be achieved through literature itself. some examples of works that i have read and believed achieve this sort of feat include nabokov's lolita, plath's the bell jar, ovid's metamorphoses, walcott's omeros, woolf's to the lighthouse, austen's persuasion.
 
Last edited:
I've read lots of great books but only two stick with me.
Fiction: Jane Eyre
Play: A Man for All Seasons
 
I'll have to check some of those out. I really liked the movie "East of Eden", so I'm sure the book is excellent. I love how books smell (weirdo, lol).

Here are 10 of my all-time favorites:

High Fidelity

About a Boy
How to Be Good
A Long Way Down
Slam
(All written by Nick Horby)

[MENTION=3733]StopAndBeFriendly[/MENTION]


So you must have heard this:

 
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas-HST (the epitome of the failure of the American Dream)

Breakfast of Champions
-Vonnegut (By far my favorite Vonnegut. A bitingly witty and sarcastic commentary on Western civilization, but also a strange and frightful look at the genius that exists between sanity and insanity)

Ishmael
-Quinn (@acd recommended this book to me, and I'd recommend everybody read it at least once. A highly philosophical book that challenged my previous notions as to my place in this world)

The Bell Jar
-Plath (simply brilliant)


A Clockwork Orange
-Burgess (awesome social commentary on the subjectivity of right and wrong, and morality)

1984
-Orwell (Not my favorite Orwell, Burmese Days fills that slot, but this book open up my eyes to the world of literature. I'm a Lit major now, so I kinda owe it a spot on my top list of novels)

On The Road
-Kerouac (God, I wish I could write like Kerouac. Whenever I start this book I can't put it down)

The Crying of Lot 49
-Pynchon (an interesting commentary on being lost in a time of cultural chaos)

White Noise
-DeLillo (a look into the danger of a Rx happy society)

A People's History of the United States
-Zinn (An absolute must read for every American. Zinn writes history from the bottom up, challenging the notion of intellectual power over writing history. He gives us unbecoming and concerning details about the lives of our national "heroes," while telling the story of the masses, the story of 99% of us.)
 
Last edited:
[MENTION=3255]Sali[/MENTION]

Actually I haven't heard of that, so thank you for bringing it to my attention (I live under a rock sometimes).

It seems very interesting (:
 
10 of my favorites, in no particular order.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (I lied, that one's first for a reason. But the rest are in no order.)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Divine Comedy (The Inferno, etc.) by Dante Alighieri
Blindness by Jose Saramago
Wasted by Marya Hornbacher
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Decameron by Boccaccio



At least... those are the 10 that popped to mind without thinking much.
 
The Dark Elf trilogy (love all the Drizzt series)
The Cleric Quintet
^ R.A. Salvatore

The Awakening - Kate Chopin
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
The Seer and the Sword - Victoria Hanley (childhood favorite)
Also Biocentrism - Robert Lanza really opened my mind

I like complex characters and I want to get emotionally involved.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top