Did we do this before? If so, I can't find it. My favorite books are 1. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and 2. "The Maltese Falcon" by Dashiell Hammett. How about everyone else?

I'm afraid I am going to make this quite long. I, of course, love Stephen King some of my favorites are: "It", "Dreamcatcher", "The Storm of the Century", "Carrie" and "Cujo". An author similar to King is really good as well. I am sure most of you are familiar with the work of Michael Crichton. He is the author of "Jurrasic Park", "The Andromeda Strain", "Timeline", and "Airframe". All of whicha are really good books, even if some of them may not have made great movies. Thomas Harris is a great author as well, he wrote all of the Hannibal Lecter series and FYI, there is another Hannibal novel coming out. I also enjoy some of the smarter literature as well. Ayn Rand is really good especially "Anthem". "The Great Gatsby" is classic, I learned about it through a highschool assignment but liked it enough to actually buy the book. and a couple recent purchases that I haven't gotten around to reading yet are "What is the Matter with Kansas" and Jon Stewart's "America".

Note: I am going to have to add "Ben and Jerry's Double-dip: Lead with Your Values and Make Money Too" It was a really informative book by the makers of some really good ice cream.

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I recently have read a lot of Agatha Christie. As And Then There Were None to the Witness of the Prosecution. I've only read one of Dan Browns books, The Da Vinci Code but will probably soon read others. I really liked a couple of Orson Scott Card's books as Enders Game and Enders Shadow. I really liked some of Phillip Paulmans books as The Golden Compass and The Subtle knife. When I was younger I read lots of Roald Dahl books as BFG and The Witches.

Ummm.. I recently read The Catcher in the Rye and really liked it. I am reading a book at the moment called Avarat and really like it. I am also reading Amy Tan's They Joy luck Club and like it. Other books I've really liked in the past are Holes, The Phantom Tollboth, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and other Narnia tales. I could go on for a long time but Ill stop there.

For some reason, I'm compelled to give you the entire history of my favorite books and authors.

Back in early elementary school, it was all about the Goosebumps. Damn, those were good, when I was in 3rd grade.

But those got old, and I'd read nearly all of them, anyway, so I moved on the the Animorphs series, which actually had a continuous plot, and was pretty awesome. Then I matured again.

I moved on the the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. Bascially a medieval word, except all the characters are varius rodents and small mammals. Those books are awesome, each story was epic, and I recommend them to any young person interested in reading. But I grew out of those too. He wasn't churning out books fast enough for me, anyway.

I became very interested in the works of Tom Clancy. Half of his books are excellent thrillers, and the other half are really boring, especially to a 13 or so year old kid.

However, I judge book based on how much I am entertained, and nothing else, so Rainbow Six and Without Remorse are still among my favorites.

My favorite genre, though, is fantasy. I don't even care who writes them, I just get absorbed in the fantasy worlds, which are so awesome, and cooler than the real one.

Harry Potter is also pretty awesome.

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Back in early elementary school, it was all about the Goosebumps. Damn, those were good, when I was in 3rd grade.

But those got old, and I'd read nearly all of them, anyway, so I moved on the the Animorphs series, which actually had a continuous plot, and was pretty awesome. Then I matured again.

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I did that exact same thing. Goosebumps were cool, I would read a book a day way back when, and animorphs was very original.

Oh, I forgot when I was that young. I read a lot of goosebumps and all the animorphs. Now that I remember it, they might have been read to me, but whatever.

Yes, I loved Goosebumps and Animorphs too when I was younger. I tried getting in to Redwall but I just couldn't.

Hmmm...from age 5 to 9 my dad would read "The Hobbit" to me once a year or so, and I loved it. I finally read it myself when I was ten and it was even better. I then read the Lord of the Rings series when I was 13 or so and to this day they are probably my favorite books.

I love The Catcher in the Rye. I have gotten the privelidge to read it in English class two years in a row (I switched schools) and analyzing all of the symbolism and motifs in the book is amazing.

Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons were great. Ender's Game too. (You may be noticing that I'm saying a lot of the same books as my brother E.M., but that is because I read the books first and consequently convinced him to read them).

Hey, there is a book thingy here.

Must read:

All Robert Anton Wilson, ESPECIALLY Cosmic Trigger

All PK Dick

All Kurt Vonnegut Jr

All Douglas Adams

All Robert Sheckly

Behold the man By Micheal Moorecock

All Isaac Asimov

All Harlan Ellison (This guy gives great Title)

...and so on.

There's little to argue with here, bm, though:

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Originally posted by burning man:
All Isaac Asimov

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To paraphrase Professor Frink from last season's robot wars episode of The Simpsons, so many novels, so few good. For all the slavish esteem in which I hold Asimov as a man, when he tried to tie the Robot novels to the Foundation novels late in his career, I wished he had left well enough alone.

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Originally posted by burning man:
All Harlan Ellison (This guy gives great Title)

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Oh, yes he does. He's the Charles Mingus of fiction. Or Mingus is the Harlan Ellison of music.

I think the works of Robert Sheckley is one of the great, gaping holes in the my reading. The closest I think I've been is the film version of The 10th Victim. Where do I start?

Do you read Howard Waldrop?

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Give me a title, and I will.

As far as Sheckly goes :"Dimension of miracle" is THE first stop. Then try "The robot who looked like me" for a short story that is the last word on time travel "The thief of time".

As for Asimov, my "serious" love for reading started there. You only have to read the original three "Foundation" novels to know where Star wars came from.
Yeah, I know the man ran out of steam (ideas) and probably even went senile in the end, but for sentimental reasons......

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Sadly, I don't have much time to read fiction. I read a fair bit of non-fiction biography and music history. Along with the Wilco biography, I've recently read the Go-Betweens book and Britpop!, a nice social/musical study that's just out in the US.

Fiction-wise, I read T.C. Boyle and Raymond Carver when I can.

I'll peruse various collections of poetry when I have time. My faves include Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, the World War I poets (notably Wilfred Owen, whose work I've found fascinating), Philip Larkin, and (my first poetic love) W.B.Yeats.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by philosopherEric:
Sadly, I don't have much time to read fiction. I read a fair bit of non-fiction biography and music history. QUOTE]

This is exactly where I'm at now. I got jaded by fiction some while ago. It was just no longer giving me the information I was looking for. One of my fave non-fic, is "God and the new physics" by Paul Davis, and a lot of Robert Anton Wilson is non-fiction. Try "Cosmic trigger", I tells ya.

It's a question of time for me, but it's also a question of style.

I've read SO much academic stuff in philosophy and the social sciences in the past few years that I've sorta forgotten how to read fiction. I can't really read fiction as a non-philosopher anymore, which is a shame.

I can't write creatively anymore, either. At least, I can't write as a non-academic. Poetry, prose, none of it. Only dry, boring papers on objective values, metaethical realism, role morality, or whatnot. Kind of a shame, really, because I was once enamored with writing and reading fiction...

Hey, pE, if you've got time to moderate MC, you've got time to read some kick-ass fiction. I stand by my choices at the top of the thread. Whether you've read them or not, I'd check out "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "The Maltese Falcon." The latter is so streamlined and entertaining, you could easily read it in a day. The former is an incredibly-heady combination of history, fantasy, humor, poetry, philosophy, horror, truth, irony, and, most-of-all, beauty, that it will take you awhile to digest and enjoy, but it'll be mind-blowing, no matter how many times you read the sucker!

You must have a LITTLE free time during the holidays! If not, make some.

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Originally posted by mark f:
Hey, pE, if you've got time to moderate MC, you've got time to read some kick-ass fiction. I stand by my choices at the top of the thread. Whether you've read them or not, I'd check out "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "The Maltese Falcon." The latter is so streamlined and entertaining, you could easily read it in a day. The former is an incredibly-heady combination of history, fantasy, humor, poetry, philosophy, horror, truth, irony, and, most-of-all, beauty, that it will take you awhile to digest and enjoy, but it'll be mind-blowing, no matter how many times you read the sucker!

You must have a LITTLE free time during the holidays! If not, make some.

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Could I have an author on "One hundred years...", and yeah about the rest,too. I know you prbably got a lot o' people suggestin' this and suggestin' that, but I really must insist you read "Cosmic trigger". All questions will be answered, all fears, allayed.

My most-newest, most-greatest friend (ha ha ), "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and although not meant for you, "The Maltese Falcon" is by Dashiell Hammett.

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Originally posted by mark f:
My most-newest, most-greatest friend (ha ha ), "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and although not meant for you, "The Maltese Falcon" is by Dashiell Hammett.

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Yes,I know, but your synopsis sounded so compelling. Can I read it anyway. Oh, and I shoulda guessed the author. What a numbskull. I think the short term memory loss is slopping over into long-term.

Mark, you are definately right that there was a thread like this before, I can't seem to find it either though. My favorite authors are Philip K Dick and Robert E Howard. Apparantly I like authors with middle initials in their pen names! At the moment I am slowly, very slowly, reading Koushun Takami's Battle Royale as well as Jim Marrs' Rule By Secrecy. I also finished Lord of the Rings recently(again), which I read to my girlfriend who had never read it, and almost never reads fiction. She works much earlier than I do, so to help her fall asleep I read it to her, which was actually quite fun. The bits with endless descriptions of scenery got her snoozing in no time! The most important authors I feel I have read are Zecharia Sitchin and of course Friedrich Nietzche. Nietzche's book, The Anti-Christ was massively influential for me, as were Sitchin's The 12th Planet and Stairway To Heaven. Reading those books was like a validation of my theories on humanity, and made me feel that I am not alone in my outlook on our world and beyond. The Buck 65 song I always harass him to play live (Giants-from Granelli's Music Has It's Way With Me) is basically a summary of The 12th Planet in a poetic form. My girlfriend and I do collect religious books as well, so we have copies of the Bible, the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, the Qur'an, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Urantia book(which is frighteningly bizarre!), and a whole ton of others, including all the "lost" gospels. Of course, I have not had time to read all of these, but I have at the least skimmed through most of them. I do enjoy graphic novels quite a lot as well, Louis Riel by Chester Brown and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi being recent ones that I have loved. Patrick Woodroffe's The Second Earth:The Pentatench Retold has some of my favorite artwork. I also have a copy of Napoleon's Description De L'Egypte, which is absolutely stunning and fantastic! I grew up reading comics, mainly from Marvel, although Frank Miller's Batman:The Dark Knight Returns probably stands as my favorite. The worst author I have ever read is Eric Von Lustbader! I read the first part of a trilogy of his that was so bad I had to stop reading it-with one page left to go! I picked it up a few years later when I was reminiscing on this and read the last page, there was no need, it was as awful as the rest of it!

So, S, you trust me enough about "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "The Maltese Falcon"? We're talkin' some serious shit, and I'll check out the one you recommend the most. I've already got burnie's to catch up on (even if all my fears are ALREADY allayed!)

Here's the original thread. It took me a little hunting to find it and this one already has quite a bit more action than the original. It's great what new blood will do for us.

It's been years since I've read Solitude, but mark is right as ever. It's a must read. So, too, is The Maltese Falcon. I had never read it until about two years ago. A close friend wrote his dissertation on Hammett, so I had to read it if I was going to understand a word he was talking about. While I had always understood its importance within its own genre, I had failed to grasp that it's genre status had overshadowed the fact that it is probably one of the truly great American novels. Beyond being a wonderful whodounit populated by rich and profound characters, there is an elegance to Hammett's writing that I would argue puts him in league with only a few of the very greatest American authors.

Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye deserves a similar nod while I'm at it.

I liked CompmanJX3's narrative about how his reading developed over the years. One of my favorite books is Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles if only because it was the book that, at a young age, made me realize somebody actually writes these things and if I like this one, I might like his others, too. I did.

One my favorite authors is England's W. Sommerset Maugham. I've enjoyed all of his work, but my favorite is The Razor's Edge, which is a wonderful novel about the search for spiritual meaning. Given others' favorites around here, it might be right up your alley. It's been made into a film twice, with varying success.

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Originally posted by philosopherEric:
Fiction-wise, I read T.C. Boyle and Raymond Carver when I can.

I'll peruse various collections of poetry when I have time. My faves include Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, the World War I poets (notably Wilfred Owen, whose work I've found fascinating), Philip Larkin, and (my first poetic love) W.B.Yeats.

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I'm glad you mention poetry in general and Carver in particular. I, too, spend time with poetry collection, though not as often as I would like and Carver is a favorite. Several years ago Tess Gallagher edited a large collection of his poetry that I love. I'm also a great fan of T.S. Eliot.

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