Favourite 5 Books

[2Knights]

Like Dixie Flatline, I'll list my favorite Philip Dick books then a few others

1. Ubik, Philip Dick. His best book, working his classic theme of "what is real".

2. A Scanner Darkly, Philip Dick. A drug-user's descent into madness.

3. Zap Gun, Philip Dick. His funniest book, featuring weapons design as fashion industry and a hilarious conspiracy theorist.

4. A Perfect Spy, John le Carre. Writing about his own father, his best book in my opinion.

5. Moby Dick, Hermann Melville. Call me a twat or whatever, but this is just marvellous writing. Have read it a dozen times.

 

[DarwinRoo]

Like Dixie Flatline, I'll list my favorite Philip Dick books then a few others

1. Ubik, Philip Dick. His best book, working his classic theme of "what is real".

2. A Scanner Darkly, Philip Dick. A drug-user's descent into madness.

3. Zap Gun, Philip Dick. His funniest book, featuring weapons design as fashion industry and a hilarious conspiracy theorist.

4. A Perfect Spy, John le Carre. Writing about his own father, his best book in my opinion.

5. Moby Dick, Hermann Melville. Call me a twat or whatever, but this is just marvellous writing. Have read it a dozen times.

No offense but you appear to like Dick a lot.

 

[medusala]

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Game, Set and Match trilogy - Len Deighton
Power of the Dog - Don Winslow
The spy who came in from the cold - le carre
The old man and the sea - Hemingway

 

[Jess Moondragon]

Demons - Dostoevsky (really it could be any of his)
Steppenwolf - Hesse
Rum Diary - Thompson
A Confederacy of Dunces - Toole
The Sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe

 

[DarwinRoo]

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Game, Set and Match trilogy - Len Deighton
Power of the Dog - Don Winslow
The spy who came in from the cold - le carre
The old man and the sea - Hemingway

Have you read Winter and the other 2 trilogies in the Bernard Samson series?

 

[medusala]

Have you read Winter and the other 2 trilogies in the Bernard Samson series?

Yes, they were brilliant as well (and a few non Samson ones which I thought were nowhere near as good).

Cant understand why there isnt more love for him, he is every bit as good as Le Carre and far more readable, with far more interesting characters IMO.

 

[FlyingBurittoBro]

a farewell to arms
the great gatsby
anna karenina
the outsider (short)
the sound of waves (translated)

 

[Dagless]

Updated in no particular order

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Woman In The Dunes - Kobo Abe
The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

 

[thefamilyguy]

friends don't let friends start Robert Jordan...had to physically wrench book one from my friends hands the other day. So much awesomeness for the first few books then soul destroying crap for the rest. I'm not putting him through that.

Loved magician so much. Great book and the whole series after (rift war series, enclave of shadows) were great too.

Book opinions are so funny, I used to manage a second hand bookshop and the regular customers would always recommend books that were 'the best ever' or 'so well written'. I've read so much unmentionably bad rubbish through people recommending books it's ridiculous. Seriously the amount of people, usually older men, who would try to convince me that Clive custler or Wilbur Smith were the best authors ever...

Stephen king was one of the most popular too, and most of his stuff I find painful.

Each to their own I guess.

The power of one by Bryce Courtney was the first book I read through in one sitting, stayed up all night, I seriously could't put it down. Great book, powerful story apre well written. If you haven't read it I thoroughly recommend it.

 

[bradrowe#32]

The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster

Love this book. I've read it a couple of times and get something new from it each time.

 

[Dagless]

Love this book. I've read it a couple of times and get something new from it each time.

It was the type of book that when I first read it I sort of enjoyed it but not that much. But upon reflection and re-reading it, just kept on growing in stature.

 

[CharlieMortdecai]

Mighty difficult to narrow it down to 5 but here goes:

The Killer Inside Me - Jim Thompson. Easily my favourite author is the "Dimestore Dostoevsky", This is a disturbing journey into the mind of psychopath, Lou Ford.

Great author, shame he died broke and largely unknown.

Fatal Shore and Requiem for a Dream were good choices too, so I'll have to check out your other two choices when I get a chance. Historians get snooty about The Fatal Shore, saying Hughes added nothing to our knowledge of the convict era, but the fact is not one of them (to my knowledge) has been able to write such a brilliant and readable account of the period bringing together all the various strands of their scholarship.

As for my five, it's too hard, but I'll just have a crack off the top of my head:

1. Life: A Users Manual by Georges Perec
2. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
3. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
4. Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
5. Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski

In reality The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron should probably slip in there somewhere, but I seemed to be on a translations from another language kick (in order French, Turkish, German, Japanese and Polish). Road to Oxiana is one of the best and laugh out loud funniest travel books ever written.

Also, I haven't found space for the Dutch author Cees Nooteboom, but he is also brilliant as is Roberto Bolano (currently reading).

Favourites in English

1. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
2. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
3. The Bell by Iris Murdoch
4. Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron
5. Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson

All subject to change of course.

 

[Chops_a_must]

Love this book. I've read it a couple of times and get something new from it each time.

It was the type of book that when I first read it I sort of enjoyed it but not that much. But upon reflection and re-reading it, just kept on growing in stature.

So we have some other Paul Auster fans here?

Good stuff. He's easily the best contemporary novelist for mine. Very happy I found him, except I've run out of his stuff.

If you read Mr. Vertigo, a lot of the characters make a whole lot more sense from the trilogy. He's pretty good at getting characters from other stories to come in at weird times.

 

[ssfc0203]

I'm a big fan of period novels. I love the charm of the language.

In no particular order..

1. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
2. Emma - Jane Austen Austen (I don't know why everyone hates it)
3. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
4. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley (subbed this in because it blew my mind)
5. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Obviously a lot more where those came from. If I could put in A Midsummer Night's Dream I would. Same with Romantic (of the Romantic era, not mushy) poetry by Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Percy Shelley.

 

[KillaKanga]

Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell) - Orwell was a master of his craft, and creates a perfect dystopian society... And one of the better endings to a book out there... Masterpiece...

One Flew Over The Cookoo's Nest (Ken Kesey) - Not much to say... I have a lot of love for this book... Top notch villain... If you can't tell I have this whole mind/authoritative control obsession

A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess) - Yes it was a book first... And it has a much better ending IMHO... Bloody Americans.

3 Fantastic reads there!!!!! Narrowing down to 5 might be tough though!!

 

[KillaKanga]

1. Watchers By Dean R Koontz.


Then Daylight to these!!

2. Cujo By Stephen King

3. Lord Of the Rings By J. R Tolkien

4. Da Vinci Code By Dan Brown

5. Creature By John Saul

Watchers def the best of the Koontz's. My major gripe of his is the similarities between alot of the stories. A smart dog, down on his luck good guy and pure evil as the villian.

Cujo was a fantasic book - they could do a much better job of it now particularly showing more of the backstory and the the tennis dude!!!

 

[KillaKanga]

Intriguing choice. Just read it. It's highly rated so I thought I'd see what all the fuss was about.

Meh. Was ok, but I'll put this down in my "Novels that are over rated shelf" along side kerouac's On the Road and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

What is it about this boook that you and everyone else rate so highly?

Not in my top 5 but I really enjoyed it. I think for me the draw card was I had a 4 month old son at the time of reading and really lived the story.

A bit like reading Pet Semetary - tough when you have kids but pretty gripping (NOT the movies hahaha)

 

[Dagless]

Updated in order

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Woman In The Dunes - Kobo Abe
Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

Updated for accuracy

 

[Dagless]

3 Fantastic reads there!!!!! Narrowing down to 5 might be tough though!!

Two of em have dropped out in recent times.

 

[KillaKanga]

Alrighty....

Biography - Anthony Kiedis "Scar Tissue"
Horror - Stephen King "The Shining"
Comedy - Catch 22
Drama - Richard Price "The Wanderers"
Odd - Bret Easton Elis "American Psycho"
War - Ian Fleming "Dr. No"
Apocolyptic - Richard Mathieson "I Am Legend" (Don't judge it based on the movies!!)
Kids Book - The Phantom Tollbooth
Literature - Grapes of Wrath

Honerable mentions

LOTR, The Road, To Kill A Mockingbird, Clockwork Orange, The Dead Zone

ok ok I'll stop (this is hard!!)

 

[placebo]

Updated for accuracy

Anyone who likes Borges gets a certain special respect in my mind.

 

[Cursed Cat]

1 the Illearth War - Stephen Donaldson
2 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
3 To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
4 Of Mice and Men - George Steinbeck
5 Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

I am a small part through the epic Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and it is brilliant, if a bit disorienting (I'm just starting to unravel it slightly).

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler and Broken Shore by Peter Temple are among my favourites also.

Blood Meridian I feel somewhat pretentious for listing as I feel I only grasped part of it's meaning - I will read it again. But the prose was amazing, and the story was such a gruelling, feverish affair that it will live with me forever.

Nineteen Eighty-Four I read as a young lad and it really opened up my mind in many ways - I have since returned to it a number of times and it continues to push my buttons.

I first read both To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men in high school and enjoyed them, but since returning to them as an adult I absolutely love the deep humanity of both books.

The Illearth War I wouldnt ever recommend to anyone because I estimate only one in thirty people would enjoy it like I did. It is the second volume in a long-running existential fantasy series. I enjoyed all the books in the series but this volume stood head and shoulders above the rest, an incredible tale riddled with ethical dilemmas.

 

[Tex_21]

Ignoring non-fiction, as most of what I read is about economics/finance, which I find most of my favourite books, favourite 5 fiction books: (in no particular order)

Nineteen Eighty-Four
Brave New World
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Fight Club
Tomorrow When The War Began (wow, that's out of place)

 

[John]

5 favourite books? Yikes! How about 50 and counting.

How about I list something for everyone.

5 books of various genres that have given me great reading pleasure.

For the sports fan. Papa Jack Johnson and the era of White Hopes by Randy Roberts.

For the Sci Fi/Fantasy fan. Lord of Light byRoger Zelazny

For the Music Fan. Positively George Street by Matthew Bannister

For the history lover. Seahenge by Francis Pryor.

For the reader of the novel. From Here to Eternity by James Jones.

 

[Cursed Cat]

5 favourite books? Yikes! How about 50 and counting.

How about I list something for everyone.

5 books of various genres that have given me great reading pleasure.

For the sports fan. Papa Jack Johnson and the era of White Hopes by Randy Roberts.

For the Sci Fi/Fantasy fan. Lord of Light byRoger Zelazny

For the Music Fan. Positively George Street by Matthew Bannister

For the history lover. Seahenge by Francis Pryor.

For the reader of the novel. From Here to Eternity by James Jones.

what's this one John (bolded) ?