Difficult question, that's like asking for favourite songs or movies... 5 of my favourites:

* "Waiting for the Barbarians" by J.M. Coetzee

* "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck

* "The Quiet American" by Graham Greene

* "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel

* "1984" by George Orwell

* "slapstick" kurt vonnegut

* "all my friends are going to be strangers" larry mcmurtry

* "american gods" neil gaimen

* "the monkey wrench gang" edward abbey

* "the captured : a true story of abduction by indians on the texas frontier" scott zesch

coincidentally, the first 4 should be read by any runaway, or aimless traveler. and it probably helps if youre from tx with #2 and #5.

Why I'm Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

Wedge by Mark Riebling (deals with the rift between the FBI and CIA that caused Pearl Harbor, JFK assassination and 9/11)

Animal Farm by George Orwell

I don't read enough books to justify such a list, but screw that:

Lord of the Rings (and the associated Hobbit, Silmarillion)
Harry Potter 6
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
Jaws - Peter Benchley
The Felix and Gotrek series - William King


Heh, I read a lot of fantasy.

'House of Leaves' by Mark Z. Danielewski

'White Noise' by Don DeLillo

'Eyes of the Dragon' by Stephen King

'Filth' by Irvine Welsh

'L’Étranger' by Albert Camus

And many many many many more.

Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power

The god delusion

Hagakure

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

I am reading a lot on ethics and law. If half of the worlds authority had taken an ethics class or held ethics to a higher standard we would be doing very well today.

When the white house asked the DOJ to make a memo on how to lawfully torture some one, they didn't realize how unethical that was. We would be doing the constitution and our reputation a disservice for not prosecuting a single perpetrator and mastermind.

I don't know if you meant to confine this to novels or not, but I'm going wider:

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
Dune (whole series) - Frank Herbert
Live from Golgotha - Gore Vidal
Macbeth - William Shakespeare
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

I'm actually in the middle of Cryptonomicon right now, but I'm already confident it belongs in that list. 5 is too short, anyway:

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Galápagos - Kurt Vonnegut
The Hobbit & LotR - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

There's probably a couple dozen I've forgotten at the moment, and there's a lot of other fantasy novels I really enjoyed, like Roger Zelazny's "Chronicles of Amber". But that's a good start.

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^ I liked Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Diamond Age immensely. My interest started to falter when he went down the road of nazi gold laden submarines and 1,000+ pages.

I probably should have included Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in my list. I read it after I saw Bladerunner and realized that as much as I liked the movie it could have been so much more.

I've read so many great books that it's really hard for me to whittle it down to five that I think are the best, so I'm going to go with the first five that come into my head. I'm guessing that the first five must have made the greatest impression on me, so it's a reasonable place to start a favorites list.

1. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut is probably the single most influential author to me. His protagonists and story lines always clicked with me. It was like he was writing them just for me.

2. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller. Everyone's heard of this one, and it's considered by many to be one of the best novels of the 20th century. If you haven't read it yet, put it next on your to-read list. Notice my first two novels are both set in World War II. I don't know if that means anything or not.

3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon. Considered by many to be Chabon's greatest work. I noticed you read one of his book's, dag. I think you owe it to yourself to read this one. I plan on reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union soon, because I've heard good things about it too.

4. The Trial - Franz Kafka. A dark novel, to say the least. To me it's about the absurdity of life and accepting fate. I don't believe in fate, but I sometimes wonder about the futility of existence. Can't help it.

5. The Foundation series - Isaac Asimov. Read the series when I was a teenager. The idea of being able to use science to not only predict but also control future events fascinated me, and that it was set in the future, complete with space travel, made it even more interesting. I liked how Asimov later was able to merge the Foundation series with the Robot series.

Other novels worthy of mention:

- Tropic Of Cancer - Henry Miller - Almost made the Top 5
- Life of Pi - Yann Martel
- Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut
- Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Breakfast Of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
- 1984 - George Orwell
- Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein
- God Knows - Joseph Heller
- Something Happened - Joseph Heller
- Ringworld - Larry Niven
- The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton

*quality discussion. Helps me find new books to read.

Awarding dag with one star point for this contribution to Sift Talk - declared quality by kronosposeidon.

Where's Waldo? and Kama Sutra ... or maybe Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

only 5? bleh.

- Notes from the Underground - Dostoevsky
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Nietzsche
- Othello - Shakespeare
- The Stranger - Albert Camus
- On Having no Head - Hardind, Douglas
....http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/877326?shelf=favorites

- the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett; also Good Omens, which he wrote with Neil Gaiman
- Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan (first part of Takeshi Kovacs' trilogy)
- Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut (hard to single out any of his books, they're all great imo)
- Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
- The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq
- The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch (a four-strand theory of everything)
and then some

Ooh, the Dune Series was great too, but I sort of lost interest by the fifth and sixth book. I never finished the sixth one, was that Chapterhouse Dune?

What do people do all day - Richard Scarrey
Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook
Hey, wait a minute (I wrote a book!)- John Madden
How to Make Love to a Man - Alexandra Penney
The Tower Treasure (Hardy Boys) - Franklin W. Dixon

HHGTTG 1-5.

>> ^gwiz665:
Ooh, the Dune Series was great too, but I sort of lost interest by the fifth and sixth book. I never finished the sixth one, was that Chapterhouse Dune?


Chapterhouse is incomplete anyway. Herbert never finished it and leaves lots of subplots unresolved. A rather unsatisfying ending to the great (original!) series.

1. For The New Intellectual, by Ayn Rand
2. The Virtue of Selfishness, by Ayn Rand
3. The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins
4. The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
5. The Nature of Consciousness, by Alan Watts

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Kronos: Yes, Michael Chabon is the bomb - I read Gentleman of the Road and loved it but haven't been able to source The Amazing Adventures ... at my local library. I may have to [gasp] buy it.

SRD: I like Revelation Space too - it's a weird but effective combination of gothic and space opera.

surprised to see this many Camus fans. here's mine:

1 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
2 The Fall - Albert Camus
3 Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut JR
4 Animal Farm - George Orwell
5 Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse

I'd give Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and honorable mention, but only because I'm still reading it; great book so far though.

Looking back on it, all are fairly quick reads; great for a weekend or light reading.

Tolkien

Hunter S. Thompson

Kurt Vonnegut

Franz Kafka

Favorite dystopianfuture: The Stand (although it had a typical shitty Stephen King ending)

I need to read more fiction.

Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller

The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume 2 (1934-1939), Anais Nin

On the Road, Jack Kerouac

Sophie's Choice, William Styron

Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes

Quite a few others, too, some of which were mentioned above.

wow - looking at the comments since mine, I'm reminded of more than a few of those couple dozen I expected to forget. (Siddhartha and Discworld, especially)

btw - I was given a Kindle recently. That's how I'm reading Cryptonomicon. My one big complaint is that the screen is not back lit - you need an external light source. Other than that (and the occasionally painfully slow speed of the processor), it is awesome. I'm looking forward to jamming it full of texts I haven't read - many of which will come from the lists here! thanks folks!

I'm too lazy to link, but here goes.

A Sunburned Country and A Short History Of Nearly Everything, both Bill Bryson

Watchmen, by whoever

Animal Farm, by Orwell

The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams.

1. Don Quixote
2. The Idiot
3. Mr Palomar
4. Crime and Punishment
5. The Growth of the Soil

Seems that we like Kurt Vonnegut...

1. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
2. Eunoia by Christian Bök.
3. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
4. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.
5. Hard to decide, perhaps The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris or "What If?" edited by Robert Cowley.

Hmmm. This is a hard one. I'm surprised I don't have more works of fiction on this list.

1. Robert R. McCammon's Boy's Life
2. Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyer: The Power of Myth
3. Ron Paul's The Revolution:A Manifesto
4. Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion
5. Simon Singh's The Code Book

Kurt Vonnegut jr. is indeed the master. It's hard to pick just five, so this list might be a little random, but here are five books I have enjoyed immensely:

1. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut jr.
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
4. Mengele Zoo by Gert Nygårdshaug
5. The Brothers Karamasov by Fjodor Dostojevskij

I especially like the religious themes in Cat's Cradle; that's why I picked it out to be on the list. But I have yet to read a Vonnegut book I didn't like, so many others could be there as well.

I really recommend Mengele Zoo to anyone who hasn't heard of it. It paints a horrible picture of the exploitation of South America, and has a main character you instantly fall in love with.

What the heck, I'll throw in a few more:
Everything by Tolkien, the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin, The Eyes of the Dragon and the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, The Knights Templar series by Jan Guillou.

1. Dune by Frank Herbert

2. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

3. Number9dream by David Mitchell

4. Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood (and yeah that's the source of my name)

5. Hmm i wanna include Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson),
Night Watch (Terry Pratchett),
Pattern Recognition (William Gibson),
Lord of the Flies (William Golding),
Starship Troopers (Robert A. Heinlein)
1984 (George Orwell)

1. Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke

2. Hamlet - Bill Shakespeare

3. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

4. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

5. Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

honorable mention to The Left Hand of the Electron by Isaac Asimov, and The Dictionary

Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

That was a good book. Read it back in college.

Vonnegut is great; he can be so deep and funny all at the same time.

Bucky Fuller's "Utopia or Oblivian" is also a keeper.

completely forgot two that have to get mentioned:

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - Tom Stoppard
Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins

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>> ^Crake:
I think our tastes are very similar.

I concur

I can never, ever remember the best ones when quizzed like this. Same goes for best movies etc.

Ones I have liked of late are (in no order):
The Dark Tower series: Stephen King
The Book Thief: Marcus Zusak
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Dave Eggers (Currently reading another of his books actually)
The Mars Trilogy: Kim Stanley Robinson
LOTR: Tolkien
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: Douglas Adams
Many Discworld novels: Terry Pratchett
Dune: Frank Herbert
The Dressmaker: Rosalie Ham (An Australian gothic novel, just brilliant, I'd love to see this made into a film)
2010: Arthur C Clarke (Yeah, I like it better than 2001, sue me)


But inevitably someone will mention some book and I'll go 'AAAH, yeah, LOVED that one'!... so yeah, there are many others that I'm sure should be here, and probably in place of others here... (I just scrolled up and added some that others had put, because I'd forgotten them)...

Catch 22 : I just wanted to say that for all the praise that this book gets, I couldn't get through it. He made his points, set up his things, and then seemed to repeat the same damn jokes/observations over and over and over again to the point where I just stopped reading it... sorry, but it bored me. Good start, lost me soon after.

for a fiction list slaughterhouse 5 and catch 22 are also in my top-10 as are Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and Faust. The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek also comes to mind. Saul Bellow's Seize the Day, some books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (can't choose) and ofcourse Bambi, A Life in the Woods by Felix Salten.

And hey, because I love to see what other people recommend, and I love my new power... *promote this discussion!

Promoting this Sift Talk post - promote requested by spoco2.

Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"

most things by Vonnegut (esp. Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse-5, and Deadeye Dick)

Cormac McCarthy, "The Road"

Ronald J. Glasser, "365 Days"

Richard Bach, "Stranger to the Ground" (and many others)

Honourable mentions: William Gibson, "Neuromancer" -- Murray Peden, "A Thousand Shall Fall" (w/ Google Books preview) -- Tim O'Brien, "The Things They Carried" -- John Irving, "A Prayer For Owen Meany" -- George Orwell, "1984" -- , Nick Hornby, "High Fidelity" / "About A Boy" -- Roald Dahl, "Skin" / "Over To You" / many others -- Paul Theroux, "The Mosquito Coast" / "Half Moon Street" -- James Howard Kunstler, "The Long Emergency" (preview) -- Vladimir Nabokov, "Lolita" -- many by Bill Bryson -- J.D. Salinger, "The Catcher In The Rye" -- Andy McNab, "Bravo Two Zero" -- Jonathan Safran Foer, "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" -- Alice Sebold, "The Lovely Bones" -- Miriam Toews, "A Complicated Kindness" -- Antoine de St-Exupery, "Wind, Sand, and Stars" -- LGen Roméo Dallaire, "Shake Hands With The Devil" -- Ernest K. Gann, "Fate Is The Hunter" -- (and to be continued most likely)

Lolita, Nabokov. One of the most beautiful, funny, and profane books ever.

Heart of Darkness, Conrad. It's like a big poem.

I'll be good and list things written in English: =)

1. Lord of The Rings - any and all of them
2. Harry Potter series - favorites books 3,4,5
3. Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
4. Pet Sematary - Stephen King
5. Clan of the Cave Bear series by Jean Auel (yes, femme =) )

Also, Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster -- I fell in love with Luke Skywalker after seeing the first Star Wars, and this book was written right after the first movie, in 1978. Luke was in love with Leia, Vader was not his daddy yet, and they just had a fun, exciting adventure!

This is more of a 'top five of the books I can actually see on the shelves over there'.

The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien - Most authors tell a story, Tolkien built a world.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - Guaranteed to impact your life. This book is packed so full of ideas, you can't read it without finding a new perspective on something, whoever you are.

Men at Arms, Terry Pratchett - or just the Discworld series generally, of which I have read the first 31 books.

Various rulebooks, sourcebooks, novels and short stories of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Rick Priestley, Andy Chambers, et al. - For its sheer scope, and provided you disavow everything after about 1998, this is the greatest fantasy setting since Tolkien.

Orgy of the Blood Parasites, Jack Yeovil - If you don't want to read this just on the strength of that title then I can't help you.

>> ^randomize:
I'm too lazy to link, but here goes.
A Sunburned Country and A Short History Of Nearly Everything, both Bill Bryson
Watchmen, by whoever
Animal Farm, by Orwell
The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams.



Oo, that's true, "The Watchmen" is phenomenal. Now you've jogged my memory about graphic novels, Gaiman's "Sandman" library is also fantastic, and Moore's "V for Vendetta" is very good as well.

Hard to pick just five:

1. Hyperion and the rest of the Hyperion Cantos series by Dan Simmons
   
2. Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge (though everything else he's written could easily have taken this spot)
   
3. Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan (and any other Takeshi Kovacs novel)
   
4. Footfall by Larry Niven -- IMO the best he ever wrote
   
5. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
   

• The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
  
• Accelerando by Charles Stross
  
• Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton
  
• Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross
  
• Virtually anything by Robert J. Sawyer (particularly the "Neanderthal Parallax" trilogy)
  
• Snow Crash and Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, though I'm with dag, everything that's followed has been disappointing
  
• Domesday Book by Connie Willis
  
• To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
  
• The Golden Age Trilogy by John C. Wright
  
• Any short story by Michael Swanwick (particularly "The Radiant Doors" -- dft, there's another dystopia to be found in that one)
  

Memoirs of an Invisible Man - H.F. Saint (the movie does no justice to the original text; HIGHLY recommended)

Red Dragon - Thomas Harris

Travels - Michael Crichton

any early Stephen King

...and one from my childhood, the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis

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>> ^NetRunner:


I'll second anything by Charles Stross. If you like Neal Stephenson pre-cryptonomicon - you'll most likely like him. Accelerando was a mind blower.

edit: Also David Marusek is really good and in the Stross/Stephenson mold.
http://blog.videosift.com/dag/What-Im-Reading-David-Maruseks-Counting-Heads

1. Dune - Frank Herbert
Dune remains amoung my favourite book I've read and the only one I've read multiple times. While I was disappointed by the rest of the series, the first book is a tremendous read and very enjoyable.

2. Deadhouse Gates - Steven Erikson (Book 2 of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series)
The Malazan Empire series by Steven Erikson is one of the hardest to read fantasy books I've ever encountered. The author has a complex web of relations and events going on while writing with a fairly high level of english. The second book stands out for its section call "The Chain of Dogs" which details a group of refugees fleeing to safety under the guidance of a powerful leader.

3. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
A great blend of comedy and science fiction. I still remember the first time I read the passage about the two missles screaming toward the Heart of Gold. I burst out laughing as the petunias came into being.

4. The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
The fantasy version of Douglas Adams. Equally enjoyable and both love to use footnotes* for off the wall observations.

5. Sword of Shannara - Terry Brooks
While probably not the best written book and it is clearly Tolkien inspired, it is in my top 5 simply because it was the first real book I ever read. Previously I only read a few kids books, this one was a beefy amount of pages that took my 12 year old mind nearly a year to get through.

*Attaching notes to one foot does seem an odd, and potentially painful way (if you use a tac) to do things.

1. Dune - Frank Herbert
The best exploration of power and control I have read.

2. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein
A manual for revolutionary action.

3. Starship Troopers - Robert A. Heinlein
Exploration of militaristic society and fascism.

4. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Don't panic.

5. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint Exupéry
I found this magical when young.

Special mention: Guards Guards Guards by Terry Prachett, Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke and probably more I cannot recall now.

This list is flexible and totally depended on my largely failing memory of what I read, there was a thread like this before and my answers could be different. My most recent read list has been composed mainly of non fiction dealing with war on terror and the US campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

1. Midnight at the Well of Souls and the Well World novels - Jack L. Chalker (This is the series that got me started on sci-fi.) 1-5 are the best. The later novels were disappointing.

2. Hyperion and the rest of the Cantos series - Dan Simmons (you cried at the end of the last book didn't you Netrunner.)

3. 1984 - George Orwell

4. Caesar - Colleen McCullough

5. Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

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It would be cool to aggregate everyone's lists and make a "VideoSift's Top 5 books" I suspect Dune would be #1. A fantastic book - but definitely not in my top 5.

I'm just going to keep adding to my list as I remember them. And I don't know how I could have forgotten one of the most important books of the 20th century, and one that quite literally changed my life:

Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter


This book is not for the feeble-minded.

1. Lives - Plutarch
2. Aesop's Fables - Aesop
3. 1984 - George Orwell
4. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
5. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

Well I'll give it a go. In no particular order:

1. Dragonlance Chronicles - Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. This is the series that really got me hooked on reading way back in high school and I still really enjoy it today.

2. Wheel of Time - RIP Robert Jordan. Brandon Sanderson is going to complete the final book (A Memory of Light) for RJ as the novel was incomplete at the time of his death.

3. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein. Along with most of Heinlein's other work.

4. Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling.

5. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien.

Plus many more, as you can see I'm an avid reader of fantasy. I also really enjoy A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny, and some other's that I can't think of at the moment...

A lot of my favorites are already mentioned here, like HHGTTG, Pratchett, Vonnegut, Simmons, so here a few others, since I don't want to sound repetitive (in no particular order):
* Winston Churchill - The Second World War
* Walter Moers - The Thirteen and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear
* Scott Adams - The Dilbert principle
* Charlotte Chandler - Hello, I must be going
* Frederick Brooks - The mythical man-month

1- 1984, Orwell
2- Animal Farm, orwell
3- War of the Worlds, Wells
4- The Stranger, Camus
5- Hamlet, Shakespeare

I've read most of these books in the past year or so, but they're the first batch of books in a while that i just haven't been able to put down.

also: the harry potter series, JK Rowling, the thief lord, inkheart and inkspell, all Cornelia funke, and lastly War and Peace, Tolstoy. yea, i went there.

I find this hard as i read so much, and dont consider books "good" in the general sence of others liking them and worthy of recomendation. which is odd considering how many things mentioned i like.

Anyway, basing this on books that have been profund reading moments, id say:

Dune series.

Robin Hobbs 3 trilogies involving the fool and Fitz.

Origin by stephen baxter.

Day after tomorrow and Stranger in a strange land by RH (MiaHM and ST both great too)

Loan wolf and Cub 1-28

The ender series is good, as is Weal of time, and alvin maker.

Sword of shanonara i expected to like but was utterly dire. didnt get past about 1st 100 oages of book 1. ugh.

Deadhouse gates is on my shelves to read.

HHGttG is too depressed. Which i understand is herasy.

peter F hamilton is great, adn i like john meaney too.

the dark tower had its moments. but im unsure about where its going and ahevnt finished it yet.

Ian m banks is interesting.

At some point i might list my favs of the clasic SF era, discounting all the RH i have.

1 - The Stand - Stephen King : In my opinion, one of the best fiction books ever penned.

2 - The Dark Tower (series) - Stephen King : The sheer richness of his created worlds just blow my mind. Dynamic characters absolutely litter the plot. His incorporation of various different stories from history and from his own works make for great fantasy.

3 - The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever - Stephen R. Donaldson : This serious is just mind-bogglingly good. I love a hero I can hate, pity, and admire at the same time.
3b - The Pearlsong Refounding - Michael D. Warden : This is an odd sort of clone of Thomas Covenant, with a Christian sort of background. I actually like this story even more than Donaldson's, but since it's not quite original, I only put it as a side note.

4 - The Christ Clone Trilogy - James BeauSigneur : Terrible title, great series. Take the Left Behind style end of the world story and give it to someone who can actually write well and this is what you get. It certainly starts out slow, but picks up to be a unique perspective on the Christian end of the world scenario. It's by no means a "best book" but I really enjoyed its perspective. There are two printings of this series. If you're interested, get the first one! They totally nerfed the second printing, cut out a lot of the violence and basically a lot of the reality.

5 - Return to Earth (series) - Orsen Scott Card : Card might be the best living fantasy/sci-fi writer we still have living. This is only number 5 on my list rather than higher due to the fact that it sort of pitters out at the end like most Card novels. It's essentially loosely based on Card's Mormon theology. If you liked Dune, you'll probably like this one too. It deals very much with social issues involved with maintaining power and control... plus any book that takes place 11 million years into the future has got to be fun.

Honorable mentions:
The Inferno - Dante (The other two in this series however, meh)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Colridge
This Present Darkness - Frank Peretti
Paradise Lost - Milton (Paradise Regained however, meh)
Dune - Frank Herbert

BTW, I did enjoy the Chronicles of Amber (@ whoever recommended it to me a while back). Thanks.

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Here's a nice review of SF Literature for 2008
http://booksandauthorsblog.com/archives/97

My #1 is definitely Siddhartha.

The only book I liked enough to bring with me when I moved - A Tour of the Calculus by David Berlinski. [Yes, I'm an engineering student.]

Kim by Rudyard Kipling is up there.

My brain has been trashed with five hours of science and math today. I can't think of any more.

that swedish dude Gardell's book on God is very very good.

But I can't make a list.. too many good books in the world. When I was younger, Ursula le Guins books were favourites. I love my cheap Shadowrun novels, and i consume paperback scifi books like chockolate.
"East, West" by Rushdie was very interesting. hmmm. And the classics "1984" "Do androids dream of electric sheep" "Brave new world" etc. love those.
"Mengele Zoo"

Slaughterhouse Five, Small Gods, A Game of Thrones, Ender's Game... In no particular order.

*The Stars My Destination (Tiger! Tiger!) - Alfred Bester

*The Foundation Series - Isaac Asimov

*On the Road - Jack Kerouac

*Zadig or Fate - Voltaire

*Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

Honorable mention: The Forever War - Joe Haldeman

Harry Potter 3-7
Excepting The March, I haven't read a physical book from cover to cover since HP7. The internet kind of makes books obsolete.

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*promote because I had a nice conversation about books today.

Self promoting this Sift Talk post - promote requested by original submitter dag.

i'll just copy and paste from a different book thread...

making history - stephen fry
misery - stephen king
the wasp factory - iain banks
lord of the flies - william golding
to kill a mockingbird - harper lee

just noticed a few animals in the titles. 'twas unplanned.

Whoa, with all these author names being thrown around, I might as well list my pet goat and where the wild things are. I'm so terrible at getting myself to read a good book, even though I invariably enjoy myself when I do.

Nevertheless, these are some of the books/short stories I've enjoyed enough to recall on the spot actually reading. You may now proceed to shun the sub-literate.


Marching As To War - Pierre Berton

The Shadow Out Of Time - HP Lovecraft

World War Z - Max Brooks

April Raintree - Beatrice Culleton

The Stand - Stephen King

Ratner's Star by Don DeLillo
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
The Season of Passage by Christopher Pike
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Other by Tom Tryon

• Barely Legal - Flynt
• Juggs - Dian Hanson
• Watchtower - Jehova Inc.
• Atlas Feltched - Aryan Rand
• Culture Warrior - Bill O'Reilly

Do people read anymore?