[OT] Favorite Books/Novels.

[djrdjmsqrd]

I was wondering what your favorite Novels and/or books are in requards to Fantasy, Sociology, Philosophy, Fiction, Psychology....

Please give me like your top ten in each genre!

thank you,
djordje

 

[blackshirt5]

The Silmarrillion.
And 8-bit theater.

 

[Chauzu]

The Hobbit / The Lord Of The Rings

Jurassic Park

 

[chillrb]

Two of my faves:

Incarnations of Immortality Series - Piers Anthony
-- On a Pale Horse
-- Bearing an Hourglass
-- With a Tangled Skein
-- Wielding a Red Sword
-- Being a Green Mother
-- For Love of Evil
-- And Eternity

and the Elric Saga - Michael Moorcock
--Elric of Melniboné
--The Fortress of the Pearl
--Sailor on the Seas of Fate
--Weird of the White Wolf
--The Vanishing Tower
--The Revenge of the Rose
--The Bane of the Black Sword
--Stormbringer

 

[Uruush]

That would be a lot of books to list. I'll a couple favorites in several genres:

Microserfs, Coupland (Fiction)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers (Fiction)

A Theory of Everything, Wilber (Philosophy)
The Aristos, Fowles (Philosophy)

Declarations of Independence, Zinn (History)
Nonzero, Wright (History)

Little, Big, Crowley (Fantasy)
Into The Green, de Lint (Fantasy)

The Denial of Death, Becker (Psychology)
Escape from Evil, Becker (Psychology)

The Selfish Gene, Dawkins (Science)
The Blank Slate, Pinker (Science)

The Dark is Rising, Cooper (Children's Lit)
The Book of Three, Alexander (Children's Lit)

Diet For a New America, Robbins (Enviro-Health)
Cradle to Cradle, McDonough & Braungart (Enviro)

Collected Poems, Millay (Poetry)
Selected Poems, Elliot (Poetry)

 

[Agback]

[BPlease give me like your top ten in each genre! [/B]

Ouch! Big ask. And all my books are packed, so I can't skim my shelves.

Novels & Fiction: The Last of the Wine (Mary Renault), Trio for Lute (Roberta MacAvoy), The Book of the New Sun (Gene Wolfe), The Broken Sword (Poul Anderson), Earthsea Quartet (Ursula LeGuin), Lyonesse (Jack Vance), Lord of Light (Roger Zelazny), The Convenient Marriage and A Civil Contract (Georgette Heyer), Kim (Rudyard Kipling).

Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology: The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith), Histories (Herodotus of Halicarnassus), Phaedo (Plato), Politics (Aristotle), Sociobiology (E.O. Wilson), The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype (Richard Dawkins), The Future Eaters (Tim Flannery), Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond), Buddhism: an Introduction and Guide (Christmas Humphries).

Regards,


Agback

 

[BronzeDragon]

I was wondering what your favorite Novels and/or books are in requards to Fantasy, Sociology, Philosophy, Fiction, Psychology....

My books are mostly stashed and will remain so for about two years, so I am bound to forget something, but here goes...

Fantasy
---------------------------------------------
*Lord of the Rings trilogy - Tolkien
*Dragonlance Legends trilogy - Weis & Hickman
*Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy - Weis & Hickman
*The Odyssey - Homer
*The Silmarillion - Tolkien
*The Hobbit - Tolkien (by this time you already know I'm a Tolkien fan, don't you? )
*At the Mountains of Madness - H.P. Lovecraft
*Dune - Frank Herbert

History
----------------------------------------------
*A History of Warfare - John Keegan
*The Great Transformation - Karl Polanyi
*The Crusades Through Arab Eyes - Amin Maalouf
*History: Analysis of the Past and Social Project - Josep Fontana
*Pascalian Meditations - Pierre Bourdieu
*The Face of Battle - John Keegan
*War in the Middle Ages - Philippe Contamine
*Hitler's Generals - Collection of works, Correlli Barnett is the coordinator

Sociology
----------------------------------------------
*The Capital - Karl Marx
*Main Currents in Sociological Thought - Raymond Aron (he's a Weberian, but a very good one)
*Economy and Society - Max Weber
*Anything by Pierre Bourdieu...and I mean ANYTHING
*The Century of Total War - Raymond Aron

Philosophy
----------------------------------------------
*Phenomenology of Spirit - G.W.F. Hegel
*Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit - Martin Heidegger
*Meditations - Dèscartes
*Problems in Modern Physics - Collection of articles by Max Born, Pierre Auger, E. Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg.

Fiction
----------------------------------------------
*The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
*The Lost World - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
*Paradise Lost - John Milton
*Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne
*Most Sherlock Holmes stories - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 

[Arken]

Bear in mind I'm only 17 so I haven't read all that so I might miss some stuff that I'll respect hugely later in life or after being through University (I just got replies from the universities I applied to to study english ). Also I'm doing this quickly so I'm sure to miss something

Fantasy: (Haven't actually read that much)

1. The Lord of the Rings
2. Discworld Novels (sorry couldn't seperate them)
3. The wizard of earthsea
4. The hobbit
5. The Silmarillion
6. Gormengast trilogy
7. Owlflight, Owlsight, Owlknight - Mercedes Lackey
8. Weaveworld
9. The Finovar Tapestry trilogy
10. The Dragons of Pern series

Sci-Fi: (even shorter list)

1. The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy etc.
2. Dune
3. 1984
4. The Otherland series
5. The war of the worlds

Fiction: (Can't really rank them unfortunately...so jsut a list of greats)

Shakespeare's plays - Particularly The Tempest and King Lear, Love those
Anna Karenina
Gulliver's Travels
Dickens in general - let's say Great Expectations
The Brontes - Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in particular
The Tale of Genji
Sherlock Holmes stories
Dracula
The Solitaire Mystery, Sophie's world
The God of Small Things
Erewhon
Lord of the Flies
Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 20,000 leagues under the sea
Morte D'Arthur
George Elliot in general
A passage to India
The Pilgrim's Progress

Whatever there are loads more that I value just as highly but never mind I'll stop there...

Poets:

1. Ovid's Metamorphoses
2. Homer, the Illiad and the Oddesy
3. Virgil, The Aeneid
4. Dante's Inferno, Pergetorio and Paradiso
5. Andrew Marvell
6. Edgar Allen Poe
7. Robert Frost
8. Milton, Paradise Lost
9. Blake
10. Spenser

Old Texts and Mythology

1. The Norse Myths especially the lead up to Ragnarok
2. Beowulf
3. The dream of teh Rood
4. Sir Gawain and the Green KNight
5. The Myths of the Cordillera in the Phillipines
6. Tam Lin (I think that's what it's called)
7. Anansi stories
8. The tale of Perseus
9. The tale of Theseus
10. Native american Mythology

Again hard to pin down that catagory and there are a lot of things I would have mentioned but couldn't...

Children's Stories.

1. The Dark Materials Trilogy
2. The Narnia Stories
3. Winne the Pooh
4. Alice in Wonderland and through the looking glass
5. The Neverending Story
6. Harry Potter
7. Just So Stories
8. The tale of the Firebird
9. The fairytales of the brother's grimm
10. Oscar Wilde's children's stories
11. Hans Christian Anderson's fairytales

Lol. I think I'd better stop now, I'll do philosophy and sociology etc. some other time.

EDIT: On second thoughts I might as well put them down now...

Philosophy, Psychology, History etc.: ( no order)

The Heart of Buddha's Teaching - Thich Nhat Hanh
Certain Books of the Bible - Genesis & Exodus, the book of Job, Psalms, The four Gospels, Revelations
Apocryphal books of the bible - The Gospel of Truth, The Gospel of Thomas (I've only read parts of them)
Politics - Aristotle
Summa Theologica - Aquinas (heavily edited )
Meditations - Descartes
Books introducing Philosphy (varied, sorry not to be more specific)
The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin (Though you may want to find an updated version, I've seen them about)
The Capital - Karl Marx
The Tao of Pooh the Tee of Piglet - Philosophy through Winnie the Pooh, REally good but I can't remember the author

There are a few more I can't remember but nevermind.....

 

[darkbard]

though i'm sure this will be moved shortly from this to another forum, i'll post a few faves:

fantasy/sci-fi: the waterborn & the black god [j. gregory keyes], dune, 1st 2 books [frank herbert], the various deryni chronicles [katherine kurtz], foundation series [isaac asimov], lord of the rings [of course!] [tolkien], assorted stories [h.p. lovecraft], conan stories [robert howard]

fiction: on the road & the dharma bums [jack kerouac], tropic of cancer [or anything else by henry miller], moby dick [herman melville], the magus [john fowles], ulysses [james joyce], to the lighthouse [virginia woolf], coming through slaughter [michael ondatjee], crime & punishment [fyodor dostoevsky], extinction [thomas bernhart], three lives [gertrude stein], frankenstein [mary shelley]

philosophy/sociology/history/science: a new science of life [rupert sheldrake], in the spirit of the earth & the way of the human being [calvin martin], in the absense of the sacred [jerry mander], nature & madness [paul shephard], a people's history of the u.s. [howard zinn]

drama: hamlet [shakespeare], wild duck, a dool's house [ibsen], man & superman [shaw], long day's journey into night, those 3 sea plays, whatever they're called [eugene o'neill]

poets: shelley, blake, t.s. elliot, li young lee, lucille clifton, basho

 

[Daiymo]

I'm really a nonfiction sort of guy,so some of my favorites:

General Popular Science:
Anything by James Burke, or Stephen Jay Gould
"The Demon Haunted World" by Carl Sagan

History:
Anything by John Keegan
"Virtual History" by Niall Ferguson,Alternate or Speculative History
"Japan: A Reinterpretation" by Patrick Smith
"The Civil War" by Shelby Foote, history with a great narrative voice
"Lords of the Horizon" Jason Goodwin, history of the Ottoman Empire
"The First Century" William Klingman, comparative history of Rome and China in the 1st Century AD

Misc:
"Confucius Lives Next Door" TR Reid
"For the Sake of Argument" and "Blood, Sweat and Nostalgia" by Christopher Hitchens
"Genius of the System:Hollywood Filmaking in the Studio Era" by Thomas Schatz