Best book you've ever read

[midlifebear]

Ok, like . . . I tried, OK? But this is sooooooooo hard! Wurst books are easy but favoritest most bestest ever book(s) is like . . WAY too many . . 'K? So here's a start. But, I'm like, not holding myself to this er anything, 'K? I started to use little stars to show my absolute favs, but got tired.

French
* Cherí and La Fin de Cherí – Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
À la recherche du temps perdu – Marcel Proust
Journal du voleur – Jean Genet
Jean de florette – Marcel Pagnol
Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
Candide, ou l'Optimisme – Voltaire (much better than Samuel Clemens)

Spanish
Platero y Yo – Juan Ramón Jimenez
*Cien años de soledad – Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Residencia en la tierra – Pablo Neruda
Eva Luna – Isabel Allende
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (English translation is good, too – really)

English - U.K and Affiliates
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass– Lewis Carroll
The Annotated Alice – Martin Gardner, editor (best buy for the Buck)
Complete Works of Shakespeare – William S. (could live without Richard III, though)
A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
The Raj Quartet and Staying On - Paul Scott
A Passage to India – E. M. Forster
The Razor’s Edge – Somerset Maugham
* Brideshead Revisited, Handful of Dust, and The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
Oroonoko – Aphra Behn

‘Mericuhn Writers
*To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (she is like, just WAY too fabulous, really!)
* Play It As It Lays – Joan Didion
Welcome to Hard Times – E. L. Doctorow
Light in August and Sartoris –William Faulkner
East of Eden – John Steinbeck
*Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers

Other Countries (English translations)
Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco (absolutely fab romp, that!)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
In the Heart of the Country – John Maxwell Coetzee
Metamorphoses – Ovid
Satyricon – Petronius Arbiter (Nero’s A list “queen.” We all know one.)

Non fiction
TheTao of Physics - Fritjof Capra
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Out of Africa --Isak Dinesen
The Hero With a Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell
Plato’s Dialogues – That Greek Guy With the Big Wide Head
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything – Christopher Hitchens



Oh, my heck. . . uh, like -- there are soooooo many more! Like there's all that Joyce Carol Oates stuff, she's soooo cool! And Norman Mailer can suck my dick! OHMYGOD, I can't believe I just wrote that!

 

[D_O_Revoir]

I've read tons of great books, here are a few recent ones that come to mind that many of you will not have read.

NON FICTION

Thomas Paine's Rights of Man - Christopher Hitchens.
God is not great - Christopher Hitchens.
Why Orwell Matters - Christopher Hitchens.
The Cosmic Connection - Carl Sagan.
Freakanomics - Forget the Author
***EGB, The Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hoffstadter***

FICTION
(I admittedly dont read much fiction)Entire Hitchiker's guide series - Douglas Adams (SO FUNNY)
The Silmarillion - JRR Tolkien (especially if you like LOTR)
The Luck of Ginger Coffee - Forget Author
The Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Shogun - James Clavell

I have to add, that I could not believe my eyes when I read that a certain poster did not enjoy The Zen of Motorcycle Repair, I found that book riveting.

-Z
​

​

 

[naughty]

Ok, like . . . I tried, OK? But this is sooooooooo hard! Wurst books are easy but favoritest most bestest ever book(s) is like . . WAY too many . . 'K? So here's a start. But, I'm like, not holding myself to this er anything, 'K? I started to use little stars to show my absolute favs, but got tired.

French
* Cherí and La Fin de Cherí – Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
À la recherche du temps perdu – Marcel Proust
Journal du voleur – Jean Genet
Jean de florette – Marcel Pagnol
Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
Candide, ou l'Optimisme – Voltaire (much better than Samuel Clemens)

Spanish
Platero y Yo – Juan Ramón Jimenez
*Cien años de soledad – Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Residencia en la tierra – Pablo Neruda
Eva Luna – Isabel Allende
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (English translation is good, too – really)

English - U.K and Affiliates
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass– Lewis Carroll
The Annotated Alice – Martin Gardner, editor (best buy for the Buck)
Complete Works of Shakespeare – William S. (could live without Richard III, though)
A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
The Raj Quartet and Staying On - Paul Scott
A Passage to India – E. M. Forster
The Razor’s Edge – Somerset Maugham
* Brideshead Revisited, Handful of Dust, and The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
Oroonoko – Aphra Behn

‘Mericuhn Writers
*To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (she is like, just WAY too fabulous, really!)
* Play It As It Lays – Joan Didion
Welcome to Hard Times – E. L. Doctorow
Light in August and Sartoris –William Faulkner
East of Eden – John Steinbeck
*Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers

Other Countries (English translations)
Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco (absolutely fab romp, that!)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
In the Heart of the Country – John Maxwell Coetzee
Metamorphoses – Ovid
Satyricon – Petronius Arbiter (Nero’s A list “queen.” We all know one.)

Non fiction
TheTao of Physics - Fritjof Capra
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Out of Africa --Isak Dinesen
The Hero With a Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell
Plato’s Dialogues – That Greek Guy With the Big Wide Head
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything – Christopher Hitchens



Oh, my heck. . . uh, like -- there are soooooo many more! Like there's all that Joyce Carol Oates stuff, she's soooo cool! And Norman Mailer can suck my dick! OHMYGOD, I can't believe I just wrote that!

LOL! I am sure Norman Mailer heard worse than that in his lifetime. Great list.

 

[CUBE]

Kindred by Octavia Butler. Not a hard read but the character of Dan is so real and the point is interesting. I also think when I was younger Jonathan Liv. S. was important

 

[actioncfc]

A Seperate Peace by john Knowles. A hate to read but that book was motivating and I went on to read other books he had done.

 

[Osiris]

That is what was so hard about this thread, I can't pick just one and I'm looking at all the others lists and seeing loads of books I love.

AUUGH!!!

 

[midlifebear]

. . .Brokeback Mountain by......damn forgot her name. . . quote]

Yeah, that was Ann Proulx in her collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories. It's an odd style for her, but I liked it. Bit butch, though (LOL!).

I totally forgot Gore Vidal's Myra Breckenridge. But then probably so has he.

That Christopher Hitchens, though . . . Hell I wish I had my neurons wired as well as his, but it's all those drugs I took in the 60's; they finally wore off!

 

[Nekoman]

The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

 

[rob_just_rob]

I'm not even going to attempt a list, because if I do, I'm sure I'll leave out something worthy.

 

[lucky8]

"A Brief History of Time"- Stephen Hawking

 

[naughty]

I'm not even going to attempt a list, because if I do, I'm sure I'll leave out something worthy.

Add as you go...

 

[rob_just_rob]

Add as you go...

Can only edit for an hour.

 

[monstro]

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki
All Things Are Lights by Robert Shea
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Valis by Philip K. Dick

Nonfiction:
The Sense and Nonsense of Revolt by Julia Kristeva
Listen, Little Man by Wilhelm Reich
Gestalt Therapy Verbatim by Dr. Frederick Perls
Love's Body by Norman O. Brown
LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West by Francis Parkman
Liber al vel Legis

And, oh, several thousand more

 

[naughty]

Can only edit for an hour.

Well then as you think of them send me the list and I will add to your list!

 

[psidom]

Liber al vel Legis...the little red book.
every man and woman is a star.
ever check out liber aleph?
it is the sequel to book of the law.

excellent picks monstro.:smile:

 

[naughty]

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki
All Things Are Lights by Robert Shea
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Valis by Philip K. Dick

Nonfiction:
The Sense and Nonsense of Revolt by Julia Kristeva
Listen, Little Man by Wilhelm Reich
Gestalt Therapy Verbatim by Dr. Frederick Perls
Love's Body by Norman O. Brown
LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West by Francis Parkman
Liber al vel Legis

And, oh, several thousand more

Your depth never ceases to amaze...:smile:

 

[BigPug]

The Alienist by Caleb Carr

 

[rob_just_rob]

off the top of my head:

Voltaire's Bastards - John R. Saul
The Lord of the Rings - John Ronald R. Tolkien
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
Peter The Great - Robert Massie
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Rites of Spring - Modris Eksteins
A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn
Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe
The "Bernard Samson" series - Len Deighton
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Humboldt's Gift - Saul Bellow
The Last Ship - William Brinkley
All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

I forgot one of my fav's: My Family And Other Animals -- the childhood biography of British naturalist, Gerald Durrell.

The book is set in Corfu, Greece, about the author's pre-WWII English family who moved to Corfu to escape English winters. It was both funny and moving.

That’s a good book, hotmilf, but personally I prefer his brother Lawrence, who wrote Prospero’s Cell, a semifictionalized treatment of the same period the family spent on Corfu.

Lawrence Durrell was the first famous writer I met. I was in Paris in the mid-1980s, the time when Durrell was publishing, sequentially, the volumes that made up The Avignon Quintet. He was constantly on the cover of various French literary revues, so I had a very definite idea of his appearance.
I wanted to sample one of the cafes on the Avenue Montparnasse, at the corner of Raspail, if memory serves. These were the cafes were Hemingway and Fitzgerald and lots of other prominent writers used to hang out in the mid-1920s.
I looked into the window of Le Dome and saw a little man, very undressed, sitting alone at a café table. I could swear it was Lawrence Durrell. And since the café was only slightly more expensive for breakfast fare than any standard Paris café, I decided I would go in.
I sat at the table next to the man and noticed, significantly, that he was reading the International Herald Tribune. A good sign, I thought.
When he finished his paper and seemed to be preparing to leave, I got up, walked over, and said, ‘Are you Mr. Durrell?’
He nodded.
And then I blundered ahead: ‘Lawrence Durrell?’
This was beneath his contempt and he just looked at me.
And now I had to decide what I would discuss with him.
I told him I had a copy of The Black Book, one of his earliest books, in my suitcase.
‘I wrote it when I was 21 and I fear I’ve quite lost all memory of it,’ he said.
And then I asked him about acupuncture, having just read several articles about how acupuncture had helped him overcome his alcoholism. (Acupuncture is big in France.)
I told him I’d like to try acupuncture to improve my hearing, which was not proving as sharp as I’d have liked in my French classes.
So Durrell wrote down the name of his acupuncturist in the south of France.
He then asked me a few questions about my experience of France, then wished me luck and walked out.
I spent the rest of the day trying to decide whether I’d received some transmission.

French
Cherí and La Fin de Cherí – Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
Journal du voleur – Jean Genet
Candide, ou l'Optimisme – Voltaire

Spanish
*Cien años de soledad – Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Residencia en la tierra – Pablo Neruda

English - U.K and Affiliates
A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
A Passage to India – E. M. Forster
Orlando – Virginia Woolf

‘Mericuhn Writers
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

Other Countries (English translations)
Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The Tin Drum – Günter Grass

Non fiction
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen
The Hero With a Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell
Plato’s Dialogues – That Greek Guy With the Big Wide Head
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything – Christopher Hitchens

I like all these, midlifebear.
I might prefer Woolf’s To The Lighthouse to Orlando.
I love Neruda’s book of poems, The Captain’s Verses.

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess

Nonfiction:
Listen, Little Man by Wilhelm Reich
Gestalt Therapy Verbatim by Dr. Frederick Perls
Love's Body by Norman O. Brown

Those were interesting books at a time.
Reich, I believe, was off his rocker, but very interesting.
I don’t think I could take Norman O. Brown seriously today.

I love Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which someone has mentioned.
Ditto for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta, when first published in Britain). Also, A Moveable Feast, his perfectly-pitched memoir of life in Paris in the 1920s.

 

[monstro]

Your depth never ceases to amaze...:smile:

Thanks, sweetie!

Those were interesting books at a time.

They still are.

Reich, I believe, was off his rocker, but very interesting.

Reich had a persecution complex for sure, but maybe for good reason.

I don’t think I could take Norman O. Brown seriously today.

Give it a shot.