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Thread: Fave Books?

  1. #1

    Fave Books?

    'Cos it requires its own thread. *insists*

    Mine...

    Henry James - The Wings of the Dove,
    Antoine De Saint-Exupery - The Little Prince,
    Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights,
    Marguerite Duras - The Ravishing of Lol Stein,
    Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth,
    Borges - Dreamtigers,
    Oscar Wilde's Fairytales,
    George Eliot - Daniel Deronda,
    C.S. Lewis - The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe,
    Dodie Smith - I Capture the Castle,
    Virginia Woolf- Orlando,
    Thomas Hardy - Tess of the D'Ubervilles,
    Boris Pasternak - Doctor Zhivago,
    J.M. Barrie - Peter Pan (the novel),
    Andre Gide - Strait is the Gate,
    C.S. Lewis - Till We Have Faces,
    Marguerite Duras - The Lover,
    Laclos - Les Liaisons Dangereuses,
    E. Nesbit - The Phoenix and the Carpet,
    Lermontov - A Hero of our Time,
    Nancy Mitford - The Pursuit of Love,
    Salman Rushdie - The Ground Beneath her Feet,
    Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South,
    Simone de Beauvoir - All Men are Mortal,
    Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited,
    Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
    Graham Greene - The End of the Affair,
    John Masefield - The Box of Delights,
    Angela Carter - The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman,
    Zola - Nana,
    Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives and Daughters,
    Zamyatin - We,
    Genet - Miracle of the Rose,
    Hans Christian Anderson's Fairytales,
    Juan Rulfo- Pedro Paramo,
    L.M. Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables,
    Alain-Fournier - Les Grand Meaulnes,
    Stanislaw Lem - Solaris,
    Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown,
    Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart,
    Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma

  2. #2
    The Pan megladon8's Avatar
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    Jane Austen - "Persuasion"
    Richard Matheson - "I Am Legend"
    Stephen King - "'Salem's Lot"
    Theodor Dostoyevsky - "Crime and Punishment"
    Charles Dickens - "Great Expectations"
    Ian McEwan - "Atonement"
    Jules Verne - "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"
    Orson Scott Card - "Ender's Game"
    Charlie Huston - "Already Dead"
    Kurt Vonnegut - "Cat's Cradle"


    That's all I can think of right now that I would want to put in a favorites list.
    "All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"

    "Rick...it's a flamethrower."

  3. #3
    Producer Lucky's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting SpaceOddity (view post)
    Laclos - Les Liaisons Dangereuses

    I love this book as well. Always great to find another person who appreciates it as much as I do.

  4. #4
    Since 1929 Morris Schæffer's Avatar
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    I've enjoyed every Dan Brown novel immensely. Yes, I'm that guy.

    Crichton's Sphere and Airframe were tremendously absorbing also, especially the former.

    and Harry Potter of course, possibly my fave novels of all time!
    [+] closer to next rating / [-] closer to previous rating

    • Dark (S3) ✦✦✦½ [-]
    • Fall (Mann, 2022) ✦✦✦½ [-]
    • Ms. Marvel (S1) ✦½ [+]
    • Dark (S2) ✦✦✦✦
    • Moon Knight (S1) ✦✦½ [-]
    • Get Carter (Hodges, 1971) ✦✦✦½ [+]
    • Prey (Trachtenberg, 2022) ✦✦✦ [-]
    • Black Bird (S1) ✦✦✦✦
    • Better Call Saul (S6) ✦✦✦½ [+]
    • Halo (S1) ✦✦✦ [-]
    • Slow Horses (S1) ✦✦✦½ [+]
    • H4Z4RD (Govaerts, 2022/BE) ✦✦½ [-]
    • Gangs of London (S1) ✦✦✦½ [+]
    • We Own This City (S1) ✦✦✦½ [+]
    • Thor: Love and Thunder (Waititi, 2022) ✦✦ [+]


  5. #5
    Too much responsibility Kurosawa Fan's Avatar
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    I'm going to hold off on this until I finish The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, because if the last 100 pages is as good as the first 250, it'll make my list for sure.

  6. #6
    Whole Sick Crew Benny Profane's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Kurosawa Fan (view post)
    I'm going to hold off on this until I finish The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, because if the last 100 pages is as good as the first 250, it'll make my list for sure.
    Have I ever steered you wrong?

  7. #7
    Too much responsibility Kurosawa Fan's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Benny Profane (view post)
    Have I ever steered you wrong?
    Definitely not. Though I'm still ashamed that I never got around to writing you a review of Go Tell it on the Mountain. I just have no desire to write any reviews anymore, be it for film or books.

  8. #8
    dissolved into molecules lovejuice's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Morris Schæffer (view post)
    Crichton's Sphere and Airframe were tremendously absorbing also, especially the former.
    sphere is actually a damn good, intense read. so is airframe to some degree. if you like both, i strongly recommend congo and...yes...jurassic park. (but no, sphere is his best.)

    like stephen king, crichton used to be my favorite auther. his scientific tidbits are very enjoyable to read. and in a way, it sets him apart from many sci-fi writers. the guy is a harvard graduated after all, you know.

    our falling out comes when he wrote that abyssmal jurassic park with knights and time-machine book.

  9. #9
    Whole Sick Crew Benny Profane's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Kurosawa Fan (view post)
    Definitely not. Though I'm still ashamed that I never got around to writing you a review of Go Tell it on the Mountain. I just have no desire to write any reviews anymore, be it for film or books.
    No worries, that's fully understandable. The important thing is that it was read and liked.

  10. #10
    Whole Sick Crew Benny Profane's Avatar
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    Copy and pasted from the larger thread.

    Favorite Books without repeating authors:

    One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Marquez
    Crime and Punishment -- Dostoevsky
    Ham on Rye -- Bukowski
    The Master and Margarita -- Bulgakov
    Go Tell it on the Mountain -- Baldwin
    V. -- Thomas Pynchon
    The Sound and the Fury -- Faulkner
    1984 -- Orwell
    East of Eden -- Steinbeck
    War and Peace -- Tolstoy
    The Heart is a Lonely Hunter -- McCullers
    Herzog -- Bellow
    Slaughterhouse Five -- Vonnegut
    Under the Banner of Heaven -- Krakauer
    Darkness at Noon -- Koestler
    A Handful of Dust -- Waugh
    Tender is the Night -- Fitzgerald
    The Road -- McCarthy
    Rabbit, Run -- Updike
    Nostromo -- Conrad
    Catch 22 -- Heller
    Atonement -- McEwan
    The Remains of the Day -- Ishiguro
    A Confederacy of Dunces -- Toole
    The Fountainhead -- Rand
    The Stranger -- Camus

  11. #11
    What is best in life? D_Davis's Avatar
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    I'll just list my top 5 (6 with a tie):

    Days of Life and Death and a Trip to the Moon - William Saroyan
    The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch/A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick
    The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester
    Einstein's Dreams - Alan Lightman
    The First Elric novel - Michael Moorcock

  12. #12
    Not a praying man Melville's Avatar
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    Copied from the other thread, with Eugene Onegin added:

    1. Moby Dick, Herman Melville, 1851
    2. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky, 1880
    3. Being & Time, Heidegger, 1927
    4. Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922
    5. Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky, 1864
    6. The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner, 1929
    7. Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky, 1866
    8. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 1885
    9. Hunger, Knut Hamsun, 1890
    10. Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges, 1944
    11. Jacques the Fatalist, Denis Diderot, 1796
    12. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1902
    13. The Trial, Franz Kafka, 1922
    14. Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1960
    15. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne, 1767
    16. Pan, Hamsun, 1894
    17. The Crocodile, Dostoevsky, 1865
    18. The Outsider, Camus, 1942
    19. The Seducer’s Diary, Kierkegaard, 1843
    20. The Bacchae, Euripides, 406 BC
    21. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien, 1954
    22. Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1938
    23. Lolita, Nabokov, 1955
    24. Hamlet, Shakespeare, 1600
    25. The Double, Dostoevsky, 1846
    26. The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford, 1914
    27. Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Herman Melville, 1852
    28. Madame Bovary, Flaubert, 1857
    29. King James Bible: Ecclesiastes the Preacher, 250 BC
    30. The Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam (trans. E. Fitzgerald), 1120 (1859)
    31. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, 1861
    32. 1984, George Orwell, 1949
    33. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner, 1930
    34. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, 1924
    35. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
    36. The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot, 1917
    37. The Aeneid, Virgil (trans. Dryden), 19 BC (1697)
    38. A Portrait of the Artist…, James Joyce, 1914
    39. Eugene Onegin, Pushkin (trans. Johnston), 1833
    40. Lord of the Flies, William Golding, 1952
    41. Collected Stories of H. P. Lovecraft, 1917-1935
    42. A Christmas Carol, Dickens, 1843
    43. Medea, Euripides, 431 BC
    44. Season of Migration to the North, Salih, 1966
    45. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, 1940
    46. The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1852
    I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?

    lists and reviews

  13. #13
    Not a praying man Melville's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting SpaceOddity (view post)
    Antoine De Saint-Exupery - The Little Prince,
    Marguerite Duras - The Lover,
    Lermontov - A Hero of our Time
    Great choices.

    Quote Quoting SpaceOddity (view post)
    Andre Gide - Strait is the Gate
    How does this compare to The Immoralist? I loved that book, but I've never heard of anything else by Gide.
    I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?

    lists and reviews

  14. #14
    Here till the end MadMan's Avatar
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    Some ones off the top of my head:

    The Old Man and the Sea-Ernest Hemmingway
    Jurassic Park-Micheal Crichton
    Fahrenheit 451-Ray Bradbury
    Dracula-Bram Stoker
    LOTR trilogy-JRR Tolkien
    Dark Tower series-Stephen King
    King Solmon's Mines-H. Rider Haggard
    The Lost World-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
    Matilda-Ronald Dahl
    The Best Democracy Money Can Buy-Greg Palast
    BLOG

    And everybody wants to be special here
    They call your name out loud and clear
    Here comes a regular
    Call out your name
    Here comes a regular
    Am I the only one here today?



  15. #15
    Quote Quoting Melville (view post)


    How does this compare to The Immoralist? I loved that book, but I've never heard of anything else by Gide.

    It's soooooo superior. *insists*

    "You think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for as long as that? ... And that life can breath upon it everyday without extinguishing it?"

    *sniffs*

  16. #16
    Quote Quoting Lucky (view post)
    I love this book as well. Always great to find another person who appreciates it as much as I do.
    I loved it so much I bit it.
    *grins*

  17. #17
    Body Double Thirdy's Avatar
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    some of my favourites, one per author:

    The Waves (Woolf)
    The Magic Mountain (Mann)
    Ficciones (Borges)
    One Hundred Years of Solitude (Márquez)
    Ocean Sea (Baricco)
    Jane Eyre (Brönte)
    Orthodoxy (Chesterton)
    A Grief Observed (Lewis)
    Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
    1984 (Orwell)
    A Handful of Dust (Waugh)
    East of Eden (Steinbeck)
    Lolita (Nabokov)
    On the Road (Kerouac)
    Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald)
    The Plague (Camus)
    Niebla (Unamuno)
    In Cold Blood (Capote)
    Crime and Punishment (Dostoevski)
    Rosa Krüger (Sánchez-Mazas)
    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)
    Persuasion (Austen)
    The Virgin Suicides (Eugenides)
    The Trial (Kafka)
    The Leopard (Lampedusa)
    Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
    Platero and I (Jiménez)
    The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde)
    Four Quartets (Eliot)
    The Bell-Jar (Plath)
    The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro)
    GreguerÃ*as (Gómez de la Serna)

  18. #18
    The Pan Qrazy's Avatar
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    I really need to watch fewer films and read more... but I'm 80 percent done 1,001 films to see before you die and I'm fiend-ing to finish it.

    Some favorite authors:

    Gogol
    Hemingway
    Fitzgerald
    Steinbeck
    Camus
    Dostoyevsky
    TS Elliot
    Wallace Stevens
    Spinoza
    Dickens
    Huxley
    George Orwell
    Joseph Heller
    Voltaire
    Keats
    Eugene O'Neill
    Kafka
    Chaucer
    Shakespeare
    Joyce
    Isaac Asimov
    Stephen Crane
    Robert Jordan
    William James
    Ibsen
    Beckett
    Zola
    Balzac
    Hume
    Sartre
    Heidegger
    Kant
    Nietszche
    Faulkner
    Nabokov
    Maugham
    Moore

  19. #19
    The Pan Qrazy's Avatar
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    So is Ayn Rand worth reading or not? I've heard so many bad things about the author and objectivism in general over the years that I've stayed away. However I don't feel like I can really condemn her without reading at least one of her works.

  20. #20
    Not a praying man Melville's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Qrazy (view post)
    I really need to watch fewer films and read more... but I'm 80 percent done 1,001 films to see before you die and I'm fiend-ing to finish it.

    Some favorite authors:

    Gogol
    Camus
    Dostoyevsky
    Kafka
    Joyce
    Sartre
    Heidegger
    Kant
    Nietszche
    Faulkner
    Nabokov
    Excellent choices. But no Hegel?

    I've also avoided Ayn Rand, and I'll probably keep it that way. It doesn't seem worth reading an 800 page book just to find out whether I should condemn the author.
    I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?

    lists and reviews

  21. #21
    Best Boy
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    The Golden Compass
    Farhenheit 451
    Franny and Zooey
    1984
    Animal Farm
    The Illustrated Man
    A Clockwork Orange
    Harry Potter series
    The Martian Chronicles
    The Autobiography of Malcolm X

  22. #22
    Screenwriter Duncan's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Qrazy (view post)
    So is Ayn Rand worth reading or not? I've heard so many bad things about the author and objectivism in general over the years that I've stayed away. However I don't feel like I can really condemn her without reading at least one of her works.
    I've just read The Fountainhead. I think certain elements of her philosophy work, and others are awful. You can decide about that for yourself if you decide to read one of her books. Regardless, I think one of the reasons she has remained popular (aside from easing the consciences of Gordon Gekko's acolytes) is that she is so obviously passionate about what she believes in. Her conviction and fervor made the book readable for me. Her critics would call it arrogance, but she genuinely believed she was saying important things. That said, I pretty much got all the "important" stuff she was saying less than 50 pages in. Or at least I extrapolated her ideas to conclusion. I kept hoping she would develop them beyond that, but she just beats the hell out them for 600 pages, slowly shedding pretensions of subtlety until she reaches a point of being brutally didactic. On the upside, a lot of things happen. The plot clips along. I read the book very quickly.
    Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.

  23. #23
    I read The Fountainhead a couple years ago and more or less agree with Duncan's assessment. Rand is so in love with her lead character and what he embodies that it's almost detrimental to the story, but she keeps things moving and there are other characters that really shine as well. It's a pretty well-crafted piece, with a lot of interesting if ultimately wrongheaded ideas. The philosophy Rand espouses is very heavy-handed and has grown even more repugnant to me since reading the book. Several months after I read The Fountainhead, I attempted Atlas Shrugged. I probably made it through about 20% of the book before throwing up my hands and moving on to something else. It's everything that was weak about The Fountainhead, magnified exponentially. After my second 30-page long, didactic screed about the evils of caring for your fellow man, consisting of long conversations around tables of Rand's villains, phrasing things in ways that revealed the author's contempt for them, I just couldn't take it anymore. It was drier than any philosophy book I've read, and it was passing itself off as a novel.

    Anthem, I haven't read since high school, but my memories of it tell me it's a pretty tidy little work that has an exaggerated point that's much easier to get behind.

  24. #24
    The Pan Qrazy's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Melville (view post)
    Excellent choices. But no Hegel?

    I've also avoided Ayn Rand, and I'll probably keep it that way. It doesn't seem worth reading an 800 page book just to find out whether I should condemn the author.
    Haven't read any of his major work yet, only excerpts. I'm sure I'll add him when I finally get the chance.

  25. #25
    The Pan Qrazy's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting Melville (view post)
    Excellent choices. But no Hegel?

    I've also avoided Ayn Rand, and I'll probably keep it that way. It doesn't seem worth reading an 800 page book just to find out whether I should condemn the author.
    Have you read any Leibniz or Berkeley? I haven't, and from what I know of their beliefs I don't think I could get on board with their primary arguments but I also realize that the manner of investigation is often more valuable than the end result... so they're probably still worth while, yes?

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