Here are my top ten favorite books. I never tried to pick ten books before. It’s pretty hard to do. It’s especially tough for me because I have such varied interests. As a result my list has fiction, historical, philosophical, psychological, and political books.
 Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
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 When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight Over Christ’s Divinity in the Last Days of Rome by Richard E. Rubenstein
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 The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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 Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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 What It Takes: The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Cramer
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 At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity by Stuart Kauffman
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 The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
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 The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. (na) Salinger
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What’s in your top ten?
No particular order
I have lots of favs, really, but with my lit background i can’t avoid it lol. I used to include several Thomas Hardy books among my favs but they have since “fallen from grace” though i still love them (lol) . Also, not included since they aren’t really books arte hundred of Japanese and German folktales and Fables. Grimm, Hand Christian Anderson, etc. Just 10? Are you mad?
is outstanding. I prefer:
THE MASKS OF GOD, 1959-1968 (4 vols., Primitive Mythology, 1959; Oriental Mythology, 1962; Occidental Mythology, 1964; Creative Mythology, 1968).
But Hero with a thousand faces is a lot shorter and gets the idea explained.
You are right… but Masks of God is also up there for me.. but I’m always trying to figure out what makes a good character in fiction and in life and HOTF fits the bill perfectly. From a philosophical point of view Masks of God IS better.
Like last night’s movie thread, this is a book i haven’t read yet but just noticed in a new arrival list … and I’m so pleased to see that the author is Catherine Crier of CourtTV:
Contempt: How the Right Is Wronging American Justice
by Catherine Crier
Synopsis:
You can’t play politics with people’s lives.
America’s federal courts have an enormous impact on the daily lives of Americans. They also make up the last relatively independent branch of government. But, there is a committed and well-organized confederation of ultra-conservative politicians, reactionary interest groups, and fundamentalist religious sects working to change that once and for all. And they are succeeding.
I meant to add that she used to be a judge in Texas, and I’d always assumed that she was Republican.
“The Whole Truth” by Nancy Pickard. It’s available from Powell’s and you get to support a BooTrib member to boot.
My top ten favorite books — based on re-reading them at least four times each…
1-3. The Trilogy of the Ring by Tolkien — actually three books.
4-6. The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson — also three books.
a definite preference for fantasy sagas and science fiction. You must have loved the Tolkein movies.
Best damn movies ever.
But, how can you class the Illuminatus Trilogy as SF&F when so much has become too damn true? I mean, the Mad Dog Texans have finally merged with the Mayflower New Englanders and their bastard child is George W. Bush! Or, is the anarchist Celine actually Osama cruising the seas in his yellow submarine? I can’t read significant SF anymore. “Pattern Recognition” was to close to the bone, you know?
Off the top of my head:
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
The first half of Rowing to Latitude by Jill Fredston
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (incredible amount of research packed into one book)
Eragon by Christopher Paolini (better than Harry Potter at our house)
Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini
Any of Phillipa Gregory’s historical fiction are a fun read
the good review on the Paolini book; I picked up Eragon and Eldest on sale (2 book set) at Target before the vacation, but haven’t found the time to start them yet; they’re a bit weighty to lug around in the daypack when I’m out and about.
Boo, the Rubenstein book looks fascinating; I may go order a copy from Powell’s to donate in my dad-in-law’s name to their church library (instead of buying books that he’ll have to add to the stack, we’re going to donate the books to the church library, then let him know the title so he can check them out at his leisure…).
from your list is the Kauffman one. I’m fascinated by ideas about emergence and complexity. So far the best by far that I’ve read on the topic is an older one: The Collapse of Chaos by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, which gets the strongest possible recommendation from me. (These two also wrote some of the best recent science fiction I’ve come across, particularly a novel called Heaven. Great, if much overlooked, stuff.)
I can never think in terms of lists, somehow. I’d have to go way back to stuff like Huck Finn, The Decline of the West, Naked Lunch, Howards End, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, Lame Deer Seeker of Visions, Lives of a Cell (and everything else Lewis Thomas wrote), The Unexpected Universe (and everything else Loren Eisley wrote), The Poisonwood Bible, everything by Vonnegut. Well, it’s kinda like the old potato chip ad: can’t stop eating ’em.
Next week the list would be completely different, probably. With all the poets, scientists, political types that were omitted today. All this makes me remember how profoundly books shaped people until very recently. I have a feeling that’s much less the case now. What do you think?
PS. I absolutely can’t stand DF Wallace. He almost caused me to stop reading Harper’s, maybe the best mag on earth. Don’t know what it is, but just reading one of his footnoted paragraphs may one day cause me to stop reading altogether. And I don’t really know why.
I may pick up that book on conciousness, looks interesting (I’ll buy it through your powell connection of course if I do).
Maybe I’ll list my ten favorites later.. would have to think about that..
There is no 10 for me. There is just remembered, and current, and recent.
I’ll mention a few types not said so far:
mysteries: Rankin, particularly the Rebus novels. Alan Furst, spy novels set between WWI and WWII in Eastern and Western Europe, good for a non-Western, non-U.S. viewpoint.
An old favorite: The Other America, by Michael Harrington.
Misc., some with a distinct Southern flavor: North Toward Home, Willie Morris, one of the great Southern writers (though he edited Harper’s for many years); Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee & Walker Evans; John McPhee’s Coming in to the Country (and almost anything else he wrote); Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; and Rising Tide, about the great 1927 flood of the Mississippi River, by John Barry.
Just off the top of my head:
anything by the Dalai Lama
The Wisdom of Insecurity – Alan Watts
Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
There are so many and I’m too lazy to head over to my bookshelf to scan the titles. 🙂
I remember reading Frankl’s book as an undergrad back in the 1980s. Very powerful material.
Favorite books
Doestoyevski – Brothers Karamozov
Fitzgerald – Tender is the Night
Twain – Huckelberry Finn
Eliot – Middlemarch
Tolstoy – War and Peace
Woolf – To the Lighthouse
Scott – The Raj Quartet (4 books, actually)
Hemingway – For Whom the Bell Tolls
Campbell – Masks of God (4 books-magnificent)
Conrad – Nostromo
Greene – The Comedians
Baudelaire – Fleurs du Mal
Contemprorary authors’ books that are on top of my list
Shaddid – Night Draws Near
Kingsolver – Prodigal Summer
Tan – Bonesetter’s Daughter
The God of Small Things
Confederacy of Dunces
Midnight’s Children
The Exorcist
A Suitable Boy
The Magic Mountain
Bleak House
The Store
Train to Pakistan
The Crow Eaters
Hmm:
Hi Pastordan,
I’m the guy you thought was Booman when we met at the march last week. I understand your major disappointment ;o) Hell, I’m disappointed I didn’t try to play it off for a while! I doubt I could’ve pulled it off for very long though, knowing how sharp Booman is.
Anyway, it was nice to meet the famous Pastordan.
Peace to you
Oh, hey! Good to “see” you again. Wondered if you maybe got crushed to death in that crowd at the start of the march.
Nah, I didn’t get crushed in the march. I actually went off in a different direction with CabinGirl and Military Tracy to get crushed somewhere else!
Good to see you again too.
What about the Bible? 🙂
I have so many interests, it’s impossible to pick.
Here’s a few
Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee
The Last of the Mohicans
A People’s History of the United States
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
To Bear Any Burden
1968 The Year The Dream Died
Harpers Pictorial History of the Civil War ( I like big pictures :oP )
Treasure Island
The Sentinal
Da Vinci Code
I love American History, especially Civil War history.
I love anything about demons, possesions and the battle between good and evil although I’m not a believer. Go figure :o)
Paleo Indian history, Anthropology, Archeology and on and on……
Ohers have already listed many that would be on a top 10 list for me, and it would in any event change almost daily. Here are some from my current reading stack (I tend to read in multiples, rather than sequentially):
John Adams, by David McCullough
Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror, Betsy Reed, ed. (essays)
How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill
A Painter of Our Time, by John Berger
High Country, by Nevada Barr
The Future of Ice, by Gretel Ehrlich
i also enjoyed infinte jest. many hours of fun … even though the joke was on me in the end.
zen and the art of motorcycle maintanence was mentioned … love that as well.
I couldn’t come up with any particular top 10 but using the “don’t think too hard and just range broadly over your favorites over the years” approach, I came up with some books that have struck my fancy for various reasons (some light, some heavy, some heartfelt, some intellectual, some just cracking good reads). And there’s no way I got even close to thinking about all of them, but each of these had a role in my reading that makes me remember them fondly. With apologies to the many dog-eared beloved books that simply didn’t make it to my brainpan today-Hmmm…I’m anthropomorphizing my books now…it has been a long week.
Pride and Prejudice
Morte D’Arthur
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
God: A Biography
Bird by Bird
March of Folly (might have to read that one again…)
LOTR
Winter’s Tale (yes I know he’s not left, but damn, I loved that book)
Carter Beats the Devil
The Elegant Universe
March of Folly – excellent. Second favorite Tuchman to A Distant Mirror.
Also loved a Distant Mirror. But March of Folly seems so appropriate right now…
Yes, it is completely appropriate.
Sadly.
Another Tuchman:
Stillwell and the American Experience in China.
In parts, you could substitute current names and get a pretty good picture of how U.S. foreign policy is operating now. <sigh>
Like others have said, the list is likely to change daily, but here it is for today:
When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone
The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Women’s Ways of Knowing by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Herland: A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
The Dancing Wuli Masters by Gary Zukav
Lest Innocent Blood be Shed by Philip Hallie
So many great books, so many profound writers, that each day different titles ascend according to the mood and whim of the moment. I’m very glad to see Robert Graves, Tim Robbins, Joseph Campbell, Ray Bradbury and several others mentioned here.
Off the top for today;
The Iliad; Homer
Ficcionnes; Jorge Luis Borges
Lord of Light; Roger Zelazny (sci-fi)
Black Elk Speaks;
Another Roadside Attraction; (and any other book by Tim Robbins)
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism; Chogyam Trungpa
Tao Te Ching; Lao Tzu
Magister Ludi; Hermann Hesse
The Invisible Man; Ralph Ellison
Looking back, this list seems a bit “cliche”; all the books are biggies, after all. But, they are great ones.
Black Elk Speaks – excellent!
And Zelazny, just about any Zelazny. I love his humor.
Impossble to choose–
The Raj Quartet
The Color Purple
A Handmaid’s Tale
Infitite Jest is my favorite book ever. What’s not to love about a book that includes feral hampsters and the Millitant Grammarians of Massachusettes?
I also love Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again.
Some other favorites:
Possession – A.S. Byatt
Money – Martin Amis
Small World – David Lodge
Galatea 2.0 – Richard Powers
The Song of the Lark — Willa Cather
Hemingway’s short stories
Lost in the Funhouse – John Barth
Anything by:
Vikram Seth
Julian Barnes (esp. Flaubert’s Parrot and Cross Channel)
Nicholson Baker
Bill Bryson
Ian McEwan
It’s odd – I mostly read non-fiction these days, but all of my favorite books are fiction.
Blood and Oil
Cadillac Desert
How the other half live
Let us all praise famous men
Don’t know about a top ten list but I’ll write down the first 10 really good one’s I can think of:
Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way – Ursula K. LeGuin
The Way of Chuang Tzu – Thomas Merton
Okla Hannali – R.A. Lafferty
Enders Game – Orson Scott Card
A Distant Mirror – Barbara Tuchman
Richard the Third – P.M. Kendall
Please Understand Me – Character & Temperament Types – David Keirsey & Marilyn Bates
The Illustrated Man – Ray Bradbury
A Conneticutt Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Mark Twain
The Ring Trilogy – J.R. Tolkein
The Foundation Trilogy – Isaac Asimov
Hard to pick a favorite Bradbury or a favorite Twain but those two will do for now.
I see you have an R. A. Lafferty title in your excellent booklist.
I’ve been trying to recall the name of a fairly early book by Lafferty in which at least one of the characters was modelled after Kissinger. This creature ate rats and soaked it’s head in a bucket, among other things I don’t recall. (I remember really being impressed with his book “Past Master”, but, as impressed as I was, I don’t recall the story in “Past Master” and so I don’t know if it’s the book that includes the character I describe above.
Does this ring a bell with you at all? I’ve searched high and low and haven’t found it anywhere.
No… sorry. Don’t think I can help you on that. Okla Hannali is the only Lafferty I remember though I do seem to recall reading a book of shorts way back when. But don’t know the story you are talking about… though I will say that the idea of Kissinger soaking his head in a bucket after eating rats is a good one.
I can’t let this go without saying to you and to anyone else that might read over our shoulders…
read Okla Hannali
It is a giant of a book telling a giant of a story that not enough Americans know.
If you need a good cry, an uproarious belly laugh, and a strengthening of heart into indomitable spirit with the sure knowledge that we simply cannot be defeated no matter what happens…
read Okla Hannali
I have been reminded of so many books I want to read here-oh grrrr.
Just off the top of my head:
Anything by Katherine Kurtz or Madeleine L’Engle (especially the latter’s religious writings)
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
David Eddings’ Belgariad and Malloreon series
A book from my past I’m trying to track down — The Velvet Monkeywrench by John Muir (no, not the naturalist guy, some other dude); it was ideas for a total reworking of American society. Read it waaaaay back in high school and it’s been stuck in my mind ever since…
Kurtz… excellent as well. Saint Camber and the whole bit. Good stuff.
This is quite the impossible task Booman, too many categories to just pick ten.
So I’m going to say that in the specific area of fictional detectives there are 3 characters that I’m extremely fond of. Someone who writes a fictional character and ages them over the years and makes you care about this person, how their ethics could relate to you, how they make you think about the world to me is an amazing feat for a writer. Especially when they do this consistly over a series of many books with that character.
These 3 writers and the characters they have created have done that for me.
Joseph Hansen-David Bransetter series of books from around 1970 to 1991 I believe. I suppose I have to note that this character Hansen created is gay.
Marcia Muller-Sharon McCone-a fascinating and complex detective who over the years has only grown, gotten more interesting and fascinating.
J.D.Robb-Eve Dallas, detective with a tortured past and set around 2050.
All of these while entertaining have always given me something to think about..what more can you ask for in any book.
Hey Boo! Interesting that you’d have Dennett on your list – I just read an interview with him and was planning to add “Consciousness Explained” to my to-read list.
OK, here’s my list:
Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu
Walden – Thoreau
Leaves of Grass – Whitman
Moby Dick – Melville
Deep Ecology – Devall & Sessions
Small is Beautiful – E. F. Schumacher
Human Scale – Kirkpatrick Sale
(as timely today as it was in 1980)
Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire – Gibbon
(hard to choose which book to list on the fall of Rome)
Beak of the Finch – Johnathan Weiner
(If you’re not convinced of evolution after reading this, you’re just brain dead – pull the plug.)
– OR –
Climbing Mount Improbable – Richard Dawkins
Hero With a Thousand Names – Joseph Campbell
(although I enjoyed the longer books too)
(Jung is really good to read when you hit 40 or so… whenever you feel like you’re entering your midlife crisis)
Boo, if you like Kauffman, you might enjoy Endless Forms Most Beautiful (Sean Carroll), The Self-Made Tapestry (Philip Ball), On Growth and Form (D. W. Thompson) and anything by Ilya Prigogine.
In no particular order, and subject to revision based on the time of day and the ambient humidity:
Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan
Desolation Angels, Jack Kerouac
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
The Well at the World’s End, William Morris
A Voyage to Arcturus, Stephen Lindsay
The Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake
See, I knew I’d forget some faves. Your list jogged some other memories…
Gormenghast Trilogy–how could I forget? When it comes to midcentury dystopic visionaries I tended to prefer Huxley to Orwell. Oddly my favorite Wolfe was a minor one: The Painted Word. I read it quite young and it taught me everything (I thought) I needed to know about what was then pretty contemporary art and art theory.
Interesting list–not all my cuppa, but nonetheless…
Booman, I sympathize. You got me thinking about my own top 10 list, and it’s pretty much impossible to limit the books I think are great into 10. But I tried to make a start at my Real History blog tonight. Hop over and check out a little write-up of #1 on my list… The Devil in the White City.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Steaming to Bamboola by Christopher Buckley
Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O’Toole
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milos Kundera
Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
White Palace by Glenn Savant
The Deptford Triology by Robertson Davies
The Robber Bride by Magaret Atwood
Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon by Joe Quineen
The Once and Future King by ? T. H. White
In no particular order:
And that is only scratching the surface of the books I truly dig.