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05/21/2005 11:16:55 PM · #1 |
We've seen all sorts of favourites... now how about literature? For me, this is the hardest list of all because I really love reading. In no particular order, here are some of my favourite authors, books, plays, poems, etc.:
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Everything by Robert Heinlein, but especially Stranger in a Strange Land, Friday, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
- Poetics, by Aristotle
- Oscar Wilde, especially An Ideal Husband
- Alfred Lord Tennyson, especially The Lady of Shalott
- Stolen Child by W. B. Yeats
- Pretty much everything by William Shakespeare :)
- Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi
- Lysistrata, by Aristophanes
- Pretty much everything by Tennessee Williams
- The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan
- The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
- Portuguese Spinner, I think by Marsha McCabe
- Most of Anne Rice's work :)
- Edgar Allen Poe... need I say more?
...and many more. I'm sure I'll think of others to add to the list, but those are the ones that really pop out at me right now :) |
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05/21/2005 11:26:05 PM · #2 |
Don't get me started... I've read an average 0f 5-7 books a weel since I was 10 years old. One I never get tired of is Powys Mather's unabridged translation of "The Thousand Nights and a Night", one of the great prose translations into English of all time. 4 Volumes. Priceless.
A snippet from one of the poems in the text:
See for yourself! Even Allah, like a lover,
from molten threads of the syrup of life wove her,
and made all gems and fruits with what was over...
Praise of a woman can't get any higher than that...
Robt.
Message edited by author 2005-05-21 23:27:09.
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05/21/2005 11:31:54 PM · #3 |
A Selection of My Favorite Works:
Hemingway, Ernest - The Sun Also Rises
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Twain, Mark - Innocents Abroad
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Voltaire - Candide
Eliot, T.S. - The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock (Poem)
Adams, Douglas - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Sturluson, Snorri - Heimskringla
Lewis, C.S. - Mere Christianity
Zacharias, Ravi - Jesus Among Other Gods |
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05/21/2005 11:34:46 PM · #4 |
Originally posted by bear_music:
Praise of a woman can't get any higher than that... |
Hmmmm.... musta' been where I went wrong.
Then again the "Hey Honey - you must have changed the sheets - they're not sticky anymore - Thanks!" always seemed to get me a cold dinner.
Hmmmmm...
Message edited by author 2005-05-22 00:17:13. |
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05/21/2005 11:36:06 PM · #5 |
With two kids ages 6 and 8? After them reading childrens's books to me and me reading Green Eggs & Ham & Junie B to them I am lucky if I get to read my Maxim & Look at Playboy every month.
Edit: for Jacko
Message edited by author 2005-05-21 23:40:29.
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05/21/2005 11:39:33 PM · #6 |
| my favorite author right now is Jodi Piccoult i have read 10 out of 12 of her books in a row i am now on number 11 |
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05/21/2005 11:39:41 PM · #7 |
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05/21/2005 11:43:17 PM · #8 |
I've weakened "literature" to books as several of these are not high lit. But they're favs. In no particular order:
The Brothers Karamozov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 10 of 10 -- extremely profound, also extremely long. Took me a year to read.
Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins, 10 of 10 -- Tom Robbins is a genre unto himself. He is metaphor soup.
Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy, 8.9 of 10 -- Pat Conroy can write in a way that convinces you that you too grew up in SC marshes.
Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver, 9.2 of 10 -- Exquisite use of the language. Very rich story and characters.
Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder, 8.2 of 10 -- His other work is also fabulous.
Of Mice and Men, 10 of 10, John Steinbeck -- still makes me cry.
The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 8.5 of 10 -- one that comes back to me so often, I must have loved it.
100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 9.2 of 10 -- It's just beautiful. The things he does with language are amazing.
Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut, 9.8 of 10 -- These short stories I find stronger than any of his books, although I like those too.
The Temple of My Familiar, Alice Walker, 8.6 of 10 -- Excellent storytelling.
Griffin & Sabine Trilogy, Nick Bantock, 8.4 of 10 -- the story and the artwork compete for attention and top billing. Excellent.
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger, 8.0 of 10 -- truth be told, I'm not much of a Salinger fan, but these stories are great.
Ishmael, Daniel Quinn, 8.0 of 10 -- interesting spin on the environmental issue.
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 8.9 of 10 -- I'm a sucker for Jane Austen. So what if I think she was just the Danielle Steele of her day, still fun reading.
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, 9.5 of 10 -- I read this very young and remember it being one of the first things to start shaping my ideas of morality.
Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, 9.5 of 10 -- a very touching look at people struggling to survive and the way the world treats them.
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, 9.7 of 10 -- a novel about making it against the odds that's told without the sappiness of most novels on this topic.
Possession: A Romance, A.S. Byatt, 8.4 of 10 -- I really liked the mixing of genres, the discovery of love.
Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte, 8.9 of 10 -- Everything I love about Jane Austen, done even better by Bronte.
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas, 10 of 10 -- Brilliant. Very fulfilling to my sense of justice. People call it a revenge story, but to me it's a story of justice.
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05/21/2005 11:46:20 PM · #9 |
Originally posted by bear_music:
I've read an average 0f 5-7 books a week since I was 10 years old. |
Damn man that is a lot of books. I done this once and read a book in one week. But stopped after that. Nah seriously I read occainsionally but only one author has ever been able to get me to read the whole book. That is Stephen King.
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05/22/2005 12:13:46 AM · #10 |
Originally posted by bear_music:
...I've read an average 0f 5-7 books a weel since I was 10 years old.... |
I've pretty much stopped reading anything but poetry for decades now. I find myself reading the same works over and over again.
The Classics: Homer, Ovid, a little Confucius, Sappho, Catullus, Boethius, Rihaku (Li Po)...
Romance: Betrans de Born, Walther von der Vogelweide, Arnaut Daniel, Cavalcanti...
The English Lineage: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Landor
The Americans: Pound, Olson (Charles)
...Gertrude Stein.
Chekov and Thomas Mann is the only prose left I'm fit to read.
Message edited by author 2005-05-22 00:14:18.
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05/22/2005 12:17:47 AM · #11 |
Originally posted by just-married:
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 8.9 of 10
Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte, 8.9 of 10 |
I can't believe I forgot these two. I love Jane Austen... most of the books I read tend to appeal to me because I have such a fascination with the sociopolitical aspects of the stories (ie with Heinlein) but I enjoy books that are a little silly, and just plain relaxing. (Hence my reading light, fluffy fantasy books :)) Jane Austen's books are fantastic for this, and the writing is much more pleasant :) |
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05/22/2005 12:18:31 AM · #12 |
| ANYTHING by Brock and Bodie Thoene. |
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05/22/2005 12:21:01 AM · #13 |
A couple of my favorite fictional books are To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Dune by Frank Herbert. The most interesting book I remember reading recently was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon.
There are two non-fiction books I read more or less recently that were very interesting. one is called The Big Year : A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession, and is about competitive birdwatching, and the other is called Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players.
I am not into Scrabble outside of a casual living room game, and I am not a birder either, not really. I just enjoy photographing birds. Not the same thing at all; ask any birder. But the books themselves are highly entertaining reading about competition and obsession - what struck me as interesting is the number of parallels the books have to each other when they are ostensibly about two completely unrelated topics. What the books are really about is how intense and driven people can be about something that is their passion, regardless what that passion is.
Ought to be a book on DPChallenge around the corner then to round this into a trilogy :-)
Message edited by author 2005-05-22 00:24:22. |
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05/22/2005 12:27:30 AM · #14 |
I'm with ZZ, I keep reading poetry over and over and over, but I don't even count that as 'reading" oddly, it engages a different part of my brain.
Two more books I'm deeply enamored of: "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the madness of Crowds" and Julian Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Brain". This last is simply extraordinary, albeit it's heavy going. His theory is that human beings did not even HAVE "consciousness" as we define the term until well into historical times, and he uses literary clues (among other things) to prove this. Essentially, from his perspective, a "true" shchizophrenic is a throwback to pre-consciousness humanity. When the ancients "heard" the voices of the Gods speaking to them, this was the other half of their brain, he says.
And oh, yeah: "Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter...
Robt.
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05/22/2005 12:59:41 AM · #15 |
Originally posted by bear_music:
And oh, yeah: "Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter...
Robt. |
Talk about your "heavy going" -- I didn't make it through that one ... |
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05/22/2005 01:13:07 AM · #16 |
Bukowski.
Poe
Sir A.C. Doyle
Chinua Achebe
Walt Whitman
a bunch of others
I read just about anything I can get my hands on. Most current novels are so easy to read that I barely enjoy them because I'll just sit down with something like a Grisham book and just read it straight through in a few hours, which leads me to believe that I didn't get my money's worth...
I have a bookcase full of engineering texts and references that I ahve read too, but usually, they are not exactly "literature".
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05/22/2005 01:22:20 AM · #17 |
Anything and everything by these authors-
James.A.Michener
Somerset Maugham
Taylor Caldwell
William Horwood
Pearl.S.Buck
John Steinbeck |
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05/22/2005 01:55:57 AM · #18 |
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
Deliverance by James Dicky
Chesapeake by James A. Michener
Veeck as in Wreck by Bill Veeck
Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris
The Iowa Baseball Confederacy by W. P. Kinsella
Men at Work by George F. Will
Ring by Jonathan Yardley
Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
and probably the best serous fiction ever written -
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
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05/22/2005 02:05:28 AM · #19 |
I'm glad that I'm not the only one who actually likes Aristotle's Poetics. I've studied screenwriting for years and this is still the best book ever written on the subject.
But my personal favorite book, Dear Reader, is "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole.
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05/22/2005 02:15:37 AM · #20 |
Ken's Books - mostly history, psychology and reference.
I'm not a fan of fiction, everyone knows I don't like made up stories! :P
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05/22/2005 02:46:04 AM · #21 |
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05/22/2005 03:01:46 AM · #22 |
Jane Eyre ~ Charlotte Bronte
Rebecca ~ Daphne du Maurier
Lysistrata ~ Aristophanes
Steppenwolf ~ Herman Hesse
Turn of the Screw ~ Henry James
The Name of the Rose ~ Umberto Eco
A Confederacy of Dunces ~ John Kennedy Toole
Lady Chatterly's Lover ~ D. H. Lawrence
Dragonwyck ~ Anya Seton
Sense and Sensibility ~ Jane Austen (anything by Austen, actually)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ~ Robert Persig
Shakespeare's Sonnets (plays, too)
anything Kurt Vonnegut
anything H. P. Lovecraft
everything Stephen King
and about a million others i just can't think of at the moment.
edited for spelling
Message edited by author 2005-05-22 03:21:32. |
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05/22/2005 05:52:58 AM · #23 |
The whole darn Xanth series by Piers Anthony...
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05/22/2005 05:53:35 AM · #24 |
its been a while since i did some serious reading
these periods come and go
a few i love, remember and recommend
Salt on my skin - Benoite Groult
the Parfume - Patrick Suskind
the Process - Kafka
and everything by Milan Kundera (Unbearable lightness of being)
Message edited by author 2005-05-22 05:59:42. |
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05/22/2005 06:14:50 AM · #25 |
The Lord of the Rings
Dune
The Stand
Angela's Ashes
L'enfant des sept mers (PL Sulitzer)
Message edited by author 2005-05-22 06:27:24. |
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