10 favourite books

[WICKES]

Can be absolutely anything, from novels and plays to books on science, history, religion or art...anything. Your 10 favourite books.

1. Dudley Young: The Origins of the Sacred (a work by an eccentric American who taught English and American literature at my univeristy. He lived alone on his own farm and was just the greatest lecturer and talker I've ever encountered. The book is a strange, hypnotic, slightly mystical work tracing our religious and mystical impulse/experience from our earliest primate ancestors up to Homer and the Old Testament. It is written as he talked- with both dazzling intellectual depth and wit)

2. James Kirsch: Shakespeare's Royal Self (an analysis of Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth from a Jungian perspective.)

3. Fritjof Capra: The Turning Point (a cheerful, stimulating and thrilling work by an Austrian physicist on the West's move away from the mechanistic/materilistic worldview that has dominated since the 17th century. A great antidote to Camus, Sartre and Beckett.)

4. Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (his autobiography)

5. Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall (in my humble opinion the funniest novel in the English language- beats even the great P G Wodehouse)

6. Aldous Huxley: Those Barren Leaves (not the critics favourite, but I like it. It is nicely poised between his darker and more philosophical later works and his cynical, satirical and slightly despairing earlier ones)

7. Bertrand Russell: A History of Western Philosophy
(amazingly readable. He also helps you to see philosphers in their historical context. It sounds rather daunting at 700 pages but it is very easy to read- Russel has a great gift for making difficult ideas seem simple)

8. Philip Larkin's Collected Poetry

9. Harold Bloom: Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human (a huge, yet very readable, conclusion to the Yale professor's lifetime of analysing and discussing Shakespeare's plays. )

10. Bill Bryson: A Brief History of Everything (a history of science by a wide eyed amateur, written in a light and cheerful way with plenty of wows.)

[Dark Muse]

1. The Magus ~ John Fowles
2. The Red Tent ~ Anita Diamant
3. The Fountainhead ~ Ayn Rand
4. Middlesex ~ Jeffrey Eugenides
5. The Legend of Nightfall ~Mickey Zucker Reichert
6. No Exit ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
7. Siddhartha ~ Hermann Hesse
8. The Catcher in the Rye ~J. D. Salinger
9. The Complete Works of Poe (does that cound as a book? LOL)
10. Island of the Blue Dolphins ~Scott O'Dell

[WICKES]

7. Siddhartha ~ Hermann Hesse



That very nearly made it onto my list. :thumbs_up

[ponypal772]

1. Montana Sky by Nora Roberts
2. Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers
3. Suzanne's Diary to Nicholas by James Patterson
4. Sail by James Patterson
5. The Cowboy by Joan Johnston
6. Trilby by Diana Palmer
7. Sam's Letters to Jennifer by James Patterson
8. I do love Nancy Drews!

And other great books!!!

[kelby_lake]

I love Nancy Drews too!! :)

[Dark Muse]

That very nearly made it onto my list. :thumbs_up

It is a wonderful book

[loe]

1. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
2. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
4. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
5. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch by Henry Miller
6. Stiller by Max Frisch
7. Complete Works by Lord Byron
8. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
9. Hunger by Knut Hamsun.
10. Oblomow by Ivan Gontscharow

and many many more...
(What a hard work to limit to 10 books)

[balehead]

My top ten are...

1. The Ill-Made Mute (Cecilia Dart Thornton)
2. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
3. Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Louis De Bernieres)
4. The Secret Agent (Joseph Conrad)
5. The Sword in the Stone (T.H. White)
6. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
7. Beastly (Alex Flinn)
8. Assassin's Apprentice (Robin Hobb)
9. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
10. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)

[mal4mac]

Can be absolutely anything, from novels and plays to books on science, history, religion or art...anything. Your 10 favourite books.

I'm sick of all these lists :D So, if you'll forgive me, I'll criticize yours rather than making *yet another* list.

I agree that Bertrand Russell: A History of Western Philosophy is very readable. But it comes in for a a lot of criticism in "Confessions of a Philosopher" by Bryan Magee - the philosophy book that would make my top ten. For instance, Russell skates over Kant and Schopenhauer, philosophers he didn't understand very well. Also the book was produced from a series of lectures to American adult education classes and was deliberately kept shallow & full of Christian philosophy to please the audience. A far better "general" book by Russell is "My Philosophical Development".

I agree with the choice of Philip Larkin's Collected Poetry! Great stuff.
Also Harold Bloom: Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human is a spot-on choice. I'm reading through Shakespeare "Complete" at the moment and re-reading Bloom's comments on each play immediately after I finish the play. He pulls things together so well!

Bill Bryson: A Brief History of Everything would be my top choice for a "general science" book for my arty friends. (I've a science degree which makes me an expert :D) It won the Aventis prize, the science Booker. Scientists should feel really ashamed that a travel writer could come in and sneak their prize! Doubt it will get them writing better though...

I agree about Siddhartha - great book!

[Rogers_68]

Off the top of my head and in no particular order:

1. The Bible, specifically much of the stories in the Old Testament and Paul letter's in the new.
2. Underworld - Don DeLillo
3. Searching For God Knows What - Donald Miller
4. V. - Thomas Pynchon
5. On Writing - Stephen King
6. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
7. The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
8. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dosteovsky
9. Moon Palace - Paul Auster
10. The Brothers K - David James Duncan

Runners up:

1. Ulysses - James Joyce
2. The River Why - David James Duncan
3. Falling Man - Don DeLillo

[Pollopicu]

In no particular order

Don Quixote-Cervantes
On Ugliness -Umberto Eco
YES yoko ono
The history of Art of this century gallery (peggy guggenheim & Frederick Keisler)
Jane Eyre-Charlotte Bronte
Fortunes Rock-Anne Shreve
Anthem-Ayn Rand
Art Lover (Story of Peggy Guggenheim)
Sister Wendy's 1000 masterpieces
Count of Monte Cristo-Dumas

[Desolation]

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The Portable Nietzsche
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Candide by Voltaire
The Complete Works by Arthur Rimabud
Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Ask the Dust by John Fante

[mortalterror]

I don't feel like limiting myself to ten.
Book of Job, Be Bold by Archilochus, The Oresteia, The Oedipus Cycle, The Bacchae, Lysistrata, The Republic, The Metamorphoses, Thyestes, Satyricon, Pharsalia, Song of the Wagons by Tu Fu, Song of Unending Sorrow by Po Chu-i, Shahnameh, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, The Inferno, Montaigne's Essays, Tom O'Bedlam, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Fuente Ovejuna, Life is a Dream, The Maxims of La Rouchefoucauld, Andromache by Racine, The Farce of Sodom, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Leopardi's Poems, Danton's Death, Pere Goriot, Ulysses (Tennyson), A Hero of Our Times, The Three Musketeers, The Cask of Amontillado, The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Walden, Flowers of Evil, Madame Bovary, The Haystack in the Floods, Les Miserables, Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Little Women, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Light that Failed, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness, The Call of the Wild, The Way of All Flesh, Mending Wall, Of Human Bondage, The Wreck of the Deutschland, Winesburg Ohio, The Second Coming, The Wasteland, The Most Dangerous Game, Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby, Steppenwolf, Journey to the End of the Night, Of Mice and Men, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, Go Down Moses, The Dwarf, No Exit, 1984, Waiting For Godot, Lolita, On the Road, The Catcher in the Rye, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, The Old Man and The Sea, The Shield of Achilles, Howl, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Seize the Day, Catch-22, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Everything that Rises Must Converge, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Lion in Winter, Slaughterhouse-Five, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fences, Fight Club

[kinkajou]

The order depends on the mood of the day...

The Dhammapada
The Rotter's Club - Jonathan Coe
All The Names - Jose Saramago
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.
Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
The Plague - Albert Camus
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Stupidest Angel - Christopher Moore
The Persian Boy - Mary Renault
Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco

[Zeniyama]

Let's see if I can do this:

1. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
2. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
4. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
5. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
6. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. Complete Piano Works in Urtext by Modest Mussorgsky (a constant prescence on top of my piano)
8. The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer
9. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carol
10. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

This isn't a very accurate list. I think I'll look over all of my books and try to make a more faithful list in a few days.