What Are Your Favorite Books

[MrsMoe]

by request! he he he

My Name is Asher Lev
Aztec
Fire and Ice series (don't ask, my husband had a book, I picked it up and couldn't put it down...)
Little House on the Prairie series
Harry Potter series
Vampire Chronicles
Anne of Green Gables series

[WITHTEETH]

Ender's Game Series along with the companion novels W/ Bean as the main character.

[Tenspace]

Peter F Hamilton's:

Night's Dawn Trilogy:

The Reality Dysfunction
The Naked God
The Neutronium Alchemist

Also by PF Hamilton:

Fallen Dragon
Pandora's Star

Some of the best Scifi ever.

Tenspace

[Bighead]

Burned Alive - Best book I've ever read....it's about a Palestian who is doused in gasoline and set on fire for commiting an "Honor Crime", and her story about how she was rescued from that area. I think this should be mandatory reading for all high-school students. My own personal opinion though...whatever

[clambake]

A#1 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "Trilogy", I must have read it 10 times by now and I still love every page.

The Foundation books were excellent, as are Asimov's non-fiction books. Actually another favorite Asimov is his "Murder at the A.B.A.", a murder mystery with a humorous camio by Asimov the author.

Arther C. Clarke always has great science backgrounds that make you ponder. I love Ellison too. "Stanger in a Strange Land" was another great book.

Can't forget the classic "Unix Power Tools".

[Mog]

In Non-fiction, I like Hofstedter's wonderful books: "Godel, Escher and Bach" and Metamagical Themas".
Fictionwise, I've enjoyed Philip K. Dick, Rudy Rucker, David Brin's Uplift series.

WithTeeth, Orson Scott Card writes great books, but his personal views are discomforting. http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2005-05-15-1.html Anyway, write me in as a member of "Smartland". :-)

[alaspooryorick]

Dude, My Name is Asher Lev is a GREAT book!

Favorites (bear with me):
Ulysses, James Joyce
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
American Pastoral, Philip Roth
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
Nine Stories, JD Salinger
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

I'll stop now for the sake of everyone's sanity.

[snap crafter]

Here we go! Thank you whoever put this up!

Let's see, my favorite book series would be:
Hitchhiker's guide
Demon war
The wheel of time (It was really boring in the last few books but I like the story)
The Vampire Chronicles (Anne Rice has a really stressing writting style, where your bored to death the first 200 pages then something really exciting happens the last 100.)
The series that began with 'the giver'
The dark tower series by stephen king
Animorphs (childish I know, but at the time I read it I enjoyed the storyline)
Dark Elf trilogy (Drizz't yo)
Harry Potter (though lately Harry is becoming more annoying than interesting)

Actual books:
The cobra event
The hot zone
Uncle Tom's Cabin
How to be Born Again by Billy Graham (I laughed the entire time I read it)
Mere Christianity (Very well written)
The war of the worlds (lookin' forward to the movie)
The Heritage of Shannara

Book I wouldn't suggest you read:
Dracula (I just couldn't take the writing)
Any book written after a movie, IE 'Terminator dreams' and 'Blood Enemy'

[Nicole]

Dragons of Pern series (actually, anything by Anne Mcaffrey or her son)
anything by Arthur C. Clarke...especially 'Rendezvous with Rama' and Childhoods' End
quite a few of Issac Asimov
Ursela Le Guins' Lefthand Of Darkness
Ender's Game (Think I would've liked Beans' perspective better if I had read it first)
Flowers for Algernon
A few of the John Grisham including The Painted House
Brave New World
Slaugherhouse 5
Don't Know Much About Geography/The Bible
this may sound stupid but anytime I want to learn something I really enjoy those ......for dummies books.

[ocmpoma]

Books I think everyone should read (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/MGC5WWXVZ7B9/ref=cm_aya_lm_title.more/102-3955697-7352908):
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Water, Alice Outwater
A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn
Walden, Henry David Throeau
1984, George Orwell

[Sir Sin-O-Lot]

Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar, cannot remember
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Fahrenheit 451, George Orwell
Common Sense, Thomas Paine
Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman

[Jennifer]

The wheel of time (It was really boring in the last few books but I like the story)
Snap Crafter I'm with you. What happened there, it was great through book five and the *Ugh*!

[Jennifer]

Anything By Vonegutt
The Enders Game series
The Stand by Stephen King
The First Four books of the Wheel of Time series
Snow Crash by Stephenson
The Diamond Age by Stephenson
Cider House Rules by Irving
A Prayer for Owen Meany by Irving
World According to Garp by Irving
The Gate to Women's Country By Tepper
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

[Rhinoqulous]

I too agree that the the first 4-5 books of the Wheel of Time series was good, and then sort of slid into a ditch and spun mud for awhile.

Let's see, my favorite books...

- The Ender's Series (Speaker is my favorite); Orson Scott Card
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy; Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea
- Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy; Robert Anton Wilson
- Principia Discordia, Or, How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her: The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger
- Philosophical Investigations; Ludwig Wittgenstein
- The Robot Series; Isaac Asimov
- Almost anything by Neil Gaiman
- Pretty much everything written by Arthur C. Clarke
- Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?; Edmund Gettier. Not a book, a two page essey published in '63. Why is a two page essey on my list? Because it's that beautiful. He wrote it while in the hospital waiting for surgery, it was just something he was thinking about, and didn't think anything would come of it. It ended up changing the entire field of epistemology.

[Jennifer]

- The Robot Series; Isaac Asimov
How could I have forgotten. Shameful.

[snap crafter]

The wheel of time (It was really boring in the last few books but I like the story)
Snap Crafter I'm with you. What happened there, it was great through book five and the *Ugh*!
Woah, I didn't know anyone else would have read that thing. The first five books blew me away, then it became so enthralled with details and small battles that I once just skipped ahead to the last hundred pages to see what happened. I'm glad everyone recognised the slip off at book 6.

[alaspooryorick]

It seems everyone did...I couldn't even finish Path of Daggers it was so bad.

[MrsMoe]

My husband tried to get me to read this WoT book. I barely got through the first one. I thought it was crap. He says after book 3 it just gets worse and worse. I dunno how he even go to book 3! :P

[HMS Beagle]

A few I've read multiple times:
PaddyClark Ha Ha Ha, Roddy Doyle
Lolita, and Pale Fire by Nabokov
Roughing It, Mark Twain
The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussel
Maus I and II

Plus anything by Dr. Seuss

[Ownthink]

1984, George Orwell
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

[Evil_Mage_Ra]

Absolute favorite book--> The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan.

Fiction that I like:
--Pretty much anything by Neil Gaiman, Michael Crichton, or H.P. Lovecraft
--The Dark Tower series by Stephen King
--Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
--The Harry Potter series

Non-fiction:
--Pretty much anything by Sagan
--Pretty much anything by Michael Shermer
--Atom by Issac Asimov
--The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg
--How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
--Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

I tend to like books that either clear up science misconceptions (like Bad Astronomy by Philip Plait) or what could best be described as "quiz books" in physics (like Mad About Physics by Jargodzki and Potter).

[Revmonkeyboy]

Some of my favorites that have not been listed yet:

The map that changed the world. Simon Winchester

Cosmos. Carl Sagan

Origin of Species. Charles Darwin

revmonkeyboy

[ocmpoma]

Some of my favorites that have not been listed yet:

The map that changed the world. Simon Winchester
One of the better books that I have read.

[CFett]

Wow, lots o support for WoT..at least...the start of it.
Personally, I love the whole thing, and can't say i even noticed any differences, but I guess that's because I got more into the rising intensity of events...how anyone can not like the Asha'man is beyond me.

Other stuff:
1984
Fahrenheit 451
LOTR
Jurassic Park and The Lost World by Crichton
Dune series
Hitchhiker's Guide
Pretty much any Guy Gavriel Kay "historical fantasy"
Hamlet
On The Road
Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler, it's a great story about the Moscow Trials and the power of government

[NihilistThug]

"Man, Economy & State with Power and Market" by Murray N. Rothbard
"The Philosophy of Egoism" by James L. Walker
"Atheism: The Case Against God" by George H. Smith
"Insanity: The Idea and It's Consequences" by Thomas Szasz (and by the way, Tom Cruise was right and Matt Lauer is a worthless ignorant Statist lapdog like all the other media punks)
"Tales of the Dying Earth" by Jack Vance
"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert A. Heinlein
"Diaspora" by Greg Egan
"At the Mountain of Madness" by HP Lovecraft
"Conceived in Liberty" by Murray N. Rothbard
"Civil Rights: Reality or Rhetoric" by Thomas Sowell