I have to profess a love for Eliot, don't I? Given his tenuous connections to Wash U and all...

Reading:

Diary by: Chuck Palhuniak <---favorite author

Series of Unfortunate Events by: Lemony Snicket

Mark, LT, and all the other "adults" here at the forums read this series!! You're never too old. And, for the record their better and more complex than HP IMHO...

A Year at the Movies by: that MST3K guy

Really funny, really informative...a must read for any so called "movie buff"...

Les Miserables by: Victor Hugo

This is the book that opened my taste of literature to the classics. Wonderful WONDERFUL novel!!

Waiting for my reserved copy of "Fast Food Nation" so we'll see how good that is when it comes in the mail.

Hey Mark! My girlfriend has a copy of Solitude, so I will one day get down to reading it. Hopefully I'll get some reading done while I'm on lay-off looking for a new job, it's been a long time since I had some dedicated book time.

quote:

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Originally posted by philosopherEric:
I have to profess a love for Eliot, don't I? Given his tenuous connections to Wash U and all...

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Right you are! Though, as my wife who didn't enjoy living in St. Louis the few years she lived there as much as I did twenty-five, Eliot was only one of many well-known FORMER St. Louisans.

Let's not forget Josephine Baker smuggled herself out of the city in furniture!

quote:

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Originally posted by Eccentro:
Series of Unfortunate Events by: Lemony Snicket

Mark, LT, and all the other "adults" here at the forums read this series!! You're never too old. And, for the record their better and more complex than HP IMHO...

---

I have heard so many good things about this series, E., that's it's high on my list of recreational reads. Thanks for the tip!

Now Playing: "Angel Eyes" Andy Bey American Song (Savoy)

Ok.... I'll do my top three books for a couple of categories.

Many of these books have come from my brother or have been recommended by him.

Mystery

1. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie.
Such a fun, "cool" mystery, you will never guess who it is until the end.

2. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
A very well written, classic masterpiece.

3. The Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Great twist, have to love Agatha Christie.

Fantasy

1. The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman
The first of his dark materials. You will get absorbed into this great book of magic and adventure.

2. The Phantom Tollboth by Norton Juster
Even though it isnt one of my favorite at the moment, I loved it when I was younger. Full of all different types or creatures and fun.

3. Abarat by Clive Barker
Filled with all different types of extrordinary creatures. One of the most recent fantasy novels I have read.

Nonfiction Books....

Ummmm.... Yeah.... Well, I dont really have anything to put here.

Science Fiction

1. Enders Shadow by Orson Scott Card

Even though Enders Game was first, I enjoyed this one more and found it better.

2. Enders Game

Right behind the first, the original.

3. Short Stories by Phillip K. Dick

I cant really choose on in particular in this book/collection.
Other Fiction

1. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

I dont have to say why I put this amazing classic here...

2. Holes by Louis Sacher

Read it when I was younger, still love it. Loved the movie as well.

3. The Giver by Lois Lowry

Read it in 5th grade. Look back on it, realize how very good it was.

When I finished the English version of ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, it was a bit litle waking from a beautiful dream. I felt the same way when I finished THE MILAGRO BEAN FIELD WAR and THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP. Few books have moved me like OHSOS. I read it the year it came out and have read it in Spanish, too. Took me three years, but I finished it. I still take it out about once every 2 years and re-read . . . always finding something beautiful I hadn't noticed before.

My favourite authors off the top of my head:

Joseph Conrad
J. D. Salinger (Particularly "Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters")
Emily Bronte
Steve Aylett
D. H. Lawrence
Keri Hulme
Bret Easton Ellis
Jean Rhys
Nadine Gordimer
George Orwell (though I mostly like "Homage to Caralonia" and his short stories)

My favourite poetry is mostly anonymous medievel lyrics, like "Alysoun" and "The Fowles and the Frissches".

However, some of my favourite poets include:
Jean Toomer
William Dryad
Coleridge (the stuff he wrote when he was coming off his opium addiction)
William Blake
Ezra Pound (only his later stuff, like "Ts'ai C'hi" and "In a Station of the Metro")
Gwen Harwood

William Faulkner

all of it. and the various studies/commentaries

I even used to have a WF coffee mug.

.

fav authors:

Chuck Palahniuk
Bret Easton Ellis
Kurt Vonnegut
Albert Camus
J. G. Ballard
Anthony Burgess
Aldous Huxley
Ray Bradbury
Hunter S. Thompson
Will Christopher Baer
Mark Z. Danielewski

"I never read that much until I started watching movies" - Annonymous... ok I said that so what.

Damn it! How did I forget Camus?!? The Outsider is definately one of the best novels I have ever read! Nice choices Navidson!

My favorites- these guys all have several great books

Robert Coover
Thomas Pynchon
Hermann Hesse
Murakami
Douglas Hofstadter
Greil Marcus
Djuna Barnes - really just the book nightwood, but it's good enough for her to make the list.

Here are my top 11 of all time.

Cold Mountian-Charles Frazier
Provinces of Night-William Gay
HMS Ulysses-Alaister McLean
The Dark Tower(complete)-Stephen King
Whip-Martin Caidin
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-Douglas Adams
The Black Flower-Howard Bahr
Last Citadel-David Robbins
Ender's Game/Shadow-Orson Scott Card
Misery-Stephen King

You can trust me, I'm a librarian!

My Favorite book is probably Childhoods End, by Arthur C. Clarke

My God, hardly any mention to foreign language writers !!!!!

Taht is, apart from Garcia Marquez and Hermann Hesse and one or two I may have forgot.

Try and analyse a bit Harold Bloom's list of geniuses and his Western Canon.

This guy PhilosopherEric (or something) said he likes poetry - well, then how about some Nikola Vaptsarov, some Endre Ady, some Eugénio de Andrade, some Tomas Transtromer ?

Have you read any of them ?

One per author:

Franz Kafka - The Trial
Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer
William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom!
Thomas Pynchon - V
Ken Kesey - Sometimes a Great Notion
Immanuel Kant - A Critique of Pure Reason
James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Oscar Zeta Acosta - Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot
William S. Burroughs - The Ticket That Exploded
Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities

etc.

I mostly like nonlinear/ multi-perspective prose, absurdist writing, trippy ones (Hunter S. Thompson's Screwjack for eg.), Victorian novels and also enjoy poetry (free verse).

quote:

Immanuel Kant - A Critique of Pure Reason

That's one big book. I took a class on it and still barely made a dent. Kant was a darn important philosopher, but his books are sooo hard to read. I had a teacher swear that he was ctually a good writer, but he always seemed like he could have used a decent editor to me.

Hemorrhoids- how much have you actually read of this book? I'm impressed with anyone who understands more than 100 pages of it, a goal I have yet to come anywhere close to meeting.

I almost forgot one of my all-time pet set of novels - Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable trilogy. ("Adultery out of absent-mindedness" ha...who else can come up with that except for Beckett).

Also Frank Tipler's "Physics of Immmortality" is a favourite of mine. His attempts at proving that science and religion go hand-in-hand with the Omega Point Theory are a bit far-fetched but I loved his thought-processes.

quote:

Originally posted by keylimetrev:

quote:

Immanuel Kant - A Critique of Pure Reason

That's one big book. I took a class on it and still barely made a dent. Kant was a darn important philosopher, but his books are sooo hard to read. I had a teacher swear that he was ctually a good writer, but he always seemed like he could have used a decent editor to me.

Hemorrhoids- how much have you actually read of this book? I'm impressed with anyone who understands more than 100 pages of it, a goal I have yet to come anywhere close to meeting.

Yes, I went through the whole of it during my second year at college. I haven't re-read it fully, but being the Engineering Grad student geek that I am, I find myself re-reading portions of it from time to time and being fascinated by its implications, be it his treatment of intuition, experience, transcendental aesthetic - space and time, unity of consciousness and also his cosmological theories.

I don't know if I've understood it fully but I know it has enriched my life. I sat through Hegel's Logic too but found it a bore.

1.The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
2.The Little Prince (St Exupéry)
3.House of the Spirits (Allende)
4.Pillow Book (Sei Shonagon)
5.Jacques the Fatalist (Diderot)
6.Tom Jones (Fielding)
7.Life of Pi (Martel)
8.The Singing Creek where the Willows Grow: (Whiteley)
9.Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
10.Manon Lescaut (Prévost)
11.The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov)
12.The Garden of Forking Paths (Borges)- short
13.Evening Clouds (Shono)
14.Cutting it Short/The Little Town Where Time Stood Still (Hrabal)
15.Tales (Miyazawa)
16.Snow Country (Kawabata)
17.Jude the Obscure (Hardy)
18.Slaughterhouse 5 (Vonnegut)
19.Macbeth (Shakespeare)
20.The Alchemist (Coelho)
21.1984 (Orwell)
22.The Summer Book (Jansson)
23.The Rock of Tanios (Maalouf)
24.The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Sterne)
25.Our Mutual Friend (Dickens)
26.The Speckled Band (Conan Doyle)- short
27.The Cricket in Times Square (Selden)
28.Dangerous Liaisons (Laclos)
29.The Owl Hoots Twice at Catfish Bend (Burman)
30.The Rainbow (Lawrence)
31.The Sound of Waves (Mishima)
32.The Tightrope Men (Bagley)

Kenji- Nice list, One book I'll have to take question with is Master and Margarita. I read that book a couple years ago after hearing that Bulgakov was the 2nd greatest russian author after Dostoyevsky, and thought it was nothing particularly special. What did you find so good about it that it falls at #11 on your favorite books of all time?
Maybe, I just had a bad translation, although I don't think so.

Well i just liked the humour, the masterful writing (well i thought it was masterful) and the unpredictable developments, switches, range of ideas. Not that i've studied it in any depth or seriousness- just one read- but i did find it devilishly entertaining and satisfying. If you'll excuse the puns.