What's your favorite book?
 

I think I'm going to evade my own question and list a few of my favorites in no particular order:

1) The Catcher in the Rye
2) A Clockwork Orange
3) One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
4) Breakfast of Champions

I seen Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy mentioned on here a couple times. I've never read it, but I have a feeling I would like it. I know my brother read it and liked it a lot.

Hear hear on A Clockwork Orange. It's not my favorite, but it's high on the short list. However, my absolute favorites are just about any of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books and, of those, the two Wee Free Men books and ReaperMan are my all-time favorites.

1) Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
2) Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do - Peter McWilliams
3) The Great Libertarian Offer - Harry Browne
4) Vampire Chronicles (I know it's several books) - Anne Rice
5) The Emperor Wears No Clothes - Jack Herer

1) The Mists of Avalon
2) The Belljar
3) Canterbury Tales
4) Candide
5) Slaughterhouse Five
6) Hitch-hikers's Guide to the Galaxy as an addendum to slaughterhouse five!

1) The Agony and the Ecstasy
2) The Once and Future King
3) The Star Fraction
4) The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
5) Moby Dick

1. Slaughterhouse Five
2. The Hobbit
3. The Sirens of Titan
4. Alice in Wonderland (actually a book of Carroll's collected works)
5. Fight Club

"The Sirens of Titan" probably shouldn't make this list, but I finished it last night and really enjoyed it, so that's fresh in my mind.

I have been all excited since the weekend when we went to some thrift stores, and rummage sale and *squee* a book sale our local library was hosting because they're moving. I got my kids a bunch of books, and snagged new copies of The Catcher in the Rye and Atlas Shrugged, I got a really cool book about Mennonites which has recipes (no, not for cooking Mennonites), and tons of other stuff, for a grand total of TWO DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS! Yay me.

I love libraries. What a great idea. From a very informal survey (I asked everyone around me for a couple of days), I have come to the conclusion that the two major factors as to whether a person becomes an avid reader are:

1) You were read to as a child.
2) You got your own library card as a child.

Ooh, I love this thread! :)

My favorite books are:

Hobbit/Lord of the Rings
Poisonwood Bible (really, anything by Barbara Kingsolver)
Mists of Avalon
The Loop
Grass (ditto Sherri Tepper)

Welcome to the party, Sonia.

Thanks! I've been lurking about the cellar for a while and couldn't resist posting to this topic. I love to read.

The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
The Amber Series - Zelazny
The Lord Darcy Stories - Garrett
The Sherlock Holmes Stories - Doyle
Anything Heinlein up through "Time Enough for Love"
The Pern Series - McCaffrey
Snow Crash - Stephenson
Zodiac - Stephenson
Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead - Card

Card was one of my favorite authors until I started going to his website.

Best to pretend that Card's books appear magically on the page. He is an excellent author, and his prejudices are actually barely noticable in his fiction, unless you seek them out.

Holy crap, I almost listed Ender's game. Good call.

I loved the Ender's Game series, liked some of Card's other books, never went to his website. What'd I miss?

Ok, I'll get specific:

!) Enders Game, and nothing else in the series
@) Two Towers, and everything else in the series
#) Shogun, Tai-Pan, Gai-Jin
$) Habbakuk (ignore the fact that it's part of a "religious" book, it's just an amazing work of literature, although the english translations lose some of the poetry)
%) A new addition to the list, but EVERYTHING BY TAD WILLIAMS. He rocks. clearly the marathon author of fantasy/sci-fi, but worth every one of the 8,000 pages in his books.

-sm

He had (maybe still does) political opinion pieces on his website that really rubbed me the wrong way. Also, I found him to be very egotistical and self-aggrandizing when he talked about his own writing.

It was serious enough that I went from being a huge fan to avoiding his stuff and having a low opinion of him and his work. It's too bad, because I really liked his stuff, and now it's tarnished for me.

If you enjoy his work, don't go to his website. It may ruin it for you.

Series? I wasn't aware he made another book with that character. I will have to look into it.

naked lunch--any comers???

I imagine at a naked lunch there would be comers.

The second book, Speaker for the Dead, was pretty good. It details Ender's further adventures of a more peaceful variety with the Buggers. Then the rest of the series is pretty lame until Card goes back in time and writes a book from Bean's point of view called Ender's Shadow.

Not if you read it....it was EEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeWWWW

Yes, a whole series.

Children of the Mind, Shadow of Hegemon and Shadow Puppets weren't so great.

I'd rate Speaker for the Dead better than "pretty good". It's not without flaws. But some of the writing really impressed me. I think the scene where Ender speaks for two men shows real skill.

Hmmm..

1. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, R.A.Heinlein
2. Wimsey books by D.L. Sayers
3. Snowcrash, Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
4. Earthsea books by Ursula LeGuin
5. Uplift series by David Brin
6. Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, etc. by William Gibson
7. McCaffrey's Pern books
8. Anything by Douglas Adams
9. Heechee books by Fredrick Pohl
10. Ringworld, Larry Niven

Neuromancer is another good call. I considered that and Lord of the rings on my list. But I'm more into non-fiction these days then when I was younger. I used to like a lot of the classics....

A Tale of Two Cities
Of Mice & Men
Treasure Island
Moby Dick
The Hobbit
Toby Tyler
The Shining
Frankenstein

and all the other books one reads when they're a kid

William Gibson is great, so is Bruce Sterling. But I didn't like The Difference Engine very much.

I hated Sterling's "Holy Fire." I couldn't finish it.

These are in no particular order. I don't think I could ever pick my absolute favorite book.

Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Restond
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein
The Demon Breed, James Schmitz
The Soul Bird, Michal Snunit
Come and Hug Me, Michal Snunit
All books in the Earthsea Trilogy (all five of them), Ursula K. LeGuin
Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson

Aren't we up to six?

A Wizard of Earthsea
The Tombs of Atuan
The Farthest Shore
Tehanu
Tales from Earthsea (including Dragonfly)
The Other Wind

Heh, yeah, you're right. Tales from Earthsea is a sneaky one.

1) The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown
2) Anything by Neal Stephenson
3) To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
4) Animal Farm, George Orwell
5) Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
6) Lamb: The Gospel According To Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, Christopher Moore
7) Jennifer Government, Max Barry
8) Anything by Harry Turtledove
9) Anything by Mario Puzo (except The Fourth K)
10) Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

Animal Farm, Brave New World, Fahrenheit - only three books I enjoyed reading that school assigned. My nonfiction list will need a little more thought.

i'm gearing up to read The Stand again. i haven't done that in years.

:repuke:

-sm

1) Cat's Cradle - Vonnegut
2) 1984 - Orwell
3) Naked Lunch - Burroughs
4) Hitchhiker's Guide (I've got the compendium, so I'm counting the whole series as one book) - Adams
5) Any of Terry Pratchett's <i>Discworld</i> novels
6) The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Kundera
7) Air-Conditioned Nightmare - Miller
8) On the Road and/or Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac
9) The Illuminatus Trilogy - Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
10) The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

so, maybe I tend toward the cynical...is anyone surprised?

This is truly not an easy question for me to answer.

I read voraciously. I tend to have a stable of favorite authors that I return to time and time again, like Harlan Ellison and Andrew Vachss, but as I think back a lot of the favorite books actually go back to my childhood ...

The Jungle Books - Rudyard Kipling
The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
Black Beauty - Anna Sewell
The Dark is Rising Sequence - Suzanne Cooper
Children of Green Knowe - L.M. Boston (and the sequels)

Other favorites include

1984 - George Orwell
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter (gotta read that one again soon)
Known Space Series - Larry Niven (up to Ringworld Engineers)
Quiller Series - Adam Hall
The original James Bond books by Ian Fleming. Those abominations that were written by other authors leave me cold.

I also have to confess a fondness for certain "Hairy Chested Men's Adventure Series" particularly Jerry Ahern's "Survivalist" and Axel Kilgore's "They Call Me the Mercenary". After I had been reading both sets for some time I discovered (via character crossover initially) that both series are written by the same author. I also enjoyed "Saigon Commandos" by Jonathan Cain, but still haven't managed to see the B-Movie based on the first book (which I believe stars Willem Dafoe).

Tough for me, too. I see a lot of common threads here, though, that jive with many of my faves.

1) Stranger in a Strange Land
2) Breakfast of Champions
3) Ringworld
4) The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
5) Hitchikers Guide Series
6) LOTR Series, including The Hobbit (I have no idea why people insist on separating this one...)
7) The Stand, The Shining, 'Salem's Lot and most of the earlier King works.

moar!


eta: I'm getting The moon is a harsh Mistress ...because it is here a few times...and The Sirens of Titan because Perth said so, and Orson Scott Card likes it too.

I never put mine out there. It's hard to pick just a few. And I'm not sure how to rate them, since every book has a different feel.

1. Ender's Game - Card
2. Earth Abides - Stewart
3. Dune - Herbert
4. Cryptonomicon - Stephenson

Huh. I went back to see if/what I had already posted since the thread was so old... and I said this:

I don't even remember reading that (or starting to, anyway.) My memory's really going.

I can't really rank them, but in the top echelon are:

Cryptonomicon, Anathem, and The Baroque Cycle - Neal Stephenson
the Galactic Milieu trilogy - Julian May (except I'm finding that I like her other stuff a whole lot less, which is a shame)
Dream Park - Larry Niven & Stephen Barnes (anyone who ever did any RPG gaming will love this one)
The Talisman - Stephen King & Peter Straub

To my earlier picks add:

The Warlock in Spite of Himself
The Warlock Unlocked

both Christopher Stasheff

There are more in the series, but they're not up to these.