Best Books Ever Written......EVER

[Carl Ne the Shoeman]

Best books you've ever read? Fiction and nonfiction.

Of course numero uno is the Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey along with most of his other works (I haven't read the last one he wrote).

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. Seven books long, great story line, characters, etc.

The Compleat Werewolf by Anthony Boucher was pretty good. The story had a kind of serious plot, but there was so much odd humor.

The ridiculously long Wheel of Time series. I seriously forgot whole parts of my life in the ten thousand some pages I read. Can't wait to finish it (though i think i skipped number 10).

I'll post more later. Whats your favorites and why?

[Griffin NoName]

Lord of the Rings back before it became what it's become. When books were books and films were black and white.

[beagle]

Hmm. This list would change quite rapidly, but these are ones that have endured for decades:

Robert Graves - "I Claudius" and "Claudius the God"
Combination of Roman history and thriller.

Winston Churchill - "The Second World War"
History by one of the protagonists. (Learnt the lesson of WW1 and left out the code-breaking this time).

Crawford and Gelsinger - "Programming the 80386"
This has been paying my mortgage for twenty years now.

Orwell - "Animal Farm", "1984", "Keep the Aspidistra Flying"
'Nuff said.

H.G. Wells - "The War of the Worlds"
Classic science fiction (and I used to live near where the aliens first landed).

Thomas Hardy - "Jude the Obscure", "Far from the Madding Crowd"
Beautifully executed bucolic pessimism.

Jacob Bronowski - "The Ascent of Man"
Atheist's view of world technological history.

John Steinbeck - "East of Eden", "Of Mice and Men", "The Grapes of Wrath"
The American Dickens.

John Mortimer - "Paradise Postponed"
English post war social history as a sort of soap opera.

Kenneth Grahame - "The Wind in the Willows"
English social history as a sort of fairy story.

Anthony Burgess - "Earthly Powers"
20th Century history by someone who just happened to be in all the right places.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - "The Return of Sherlock Holmes" etc
The apotheosis of humanitarian scientific optimism, before the World Wars did for it.

[The Black Spot]

Catch 22. The greatest "am I the only one around here who's not mad" book.

The Third Policeman. Surreal and utterly hilarious until you finish it. Then realisation sets in, and you have to read it again in a wholly different light.

[goat starer]

Someone Beat me to Catch 22 but I would add....

Slaughterhouse 5 - Vonnegut

The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov (Shoeman would like this one I suspect)


and to let my Sci Fi side out.....

The Player of Games - Iain M Banks

Mona Lisa Overdrive - William Gibson

[Bluenose]

I would add

Science Fiction (NOT to be confused with fantasy)

"Startide Rising" by David Brin

"Footfall" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

"Raft" by Steven Baxter



Non-iction

"Wonderful Life" by Steven Jay Gould

"Gödel, Escher and Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter


There are thousands more, and my faves change from moment to moment, but these will do for now...


Sibling Bluenose

[Sibling Lambicus the Toluous]

Looks like there's a number of people here who have the same sort of tastes in books as I do.

Non-Fiction:

- Right up there would be the "aha!" books by Martin Gardner.  He had an amazing knack for making math both comprehensible and interesting.

- "Full House" by Steven Jay Gould

- "Last Chance to See..." by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine (I think?)... his story about trying to buy condoms in China without speaking Chinese is hilarious.

Fiction:

- "The Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

- "Neuromancer" by William Gibson

- anything HHGTG by Douglas Adams (of course)

- actually, ANYTHING by Douglas Adams

[ivor]

Some great scifi in there.  I want a Motie coffee maker.

"Ringworld" - Larry Niven.

[Bluenose]

Just thought of another couple of absolutely wonderful books:

"The Integral Trees" & "The Smoke Ring" by Larry Niven. 

Have read and re-read these two quite a few times.  Might just go and get them off the shelf and give them another go...

Sibling Bluenose

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

The short story, "If This Goes On ..." by Robert Heinlein. Was my introduction to semantics and the meaning of words (which lead to many other things, among them, my current moniker)

Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Anticipated neural links, a sort of internet among other things.

Connections by James Burke.

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. (see a trend? <heh>)

The Flinx and Pip series by Alan Dean Foster.

Of course, Discworld.  All of it.

Anything by Doug Adams. (miss his style.  too bad he didn't finish the Dirk Gently series ...)

The robot stories by Iaasic Asimov.  In fact, nearly anything by I. Asimov.

This list is only valid for this week only.  Next week:  a completely different list (but no warranty there won't be duplicates from this week ... )

[Outis the Unready]

Anything by PKD, William Gibson and/or Roger Zelazny.

(and there, slowly, coming up from behind, is that Ricvhard Morgan? It might be....he's sooooo close...)
I know where I can get a double autographed copy of Deus Irae for $750,000  anyone got $749,950 to spare?

Non Fiction? Hmmmm. I don't know, depends on the mood. "What's the Matter with Kansas" stirred me.

[DaveL]

J.D Salinger 'Catcher in the Rye' (I don't know why, but this book has so many layers - there's a bit of Holden Caufield in all of us)

Alan Paton 'Too late the Phalarope' (tragic apatheid story)

JRR Tolkein 'The Silmarilion' (far better than LOR's!)

[Aggie]

J.D Salinger 'Catcher in the Rye' (I don't know why, but this book has so many layers - there's a bit of Holden Caufield in all of us)

I don't know what it is about this book.  The plot is nonexistant, the style of narration is annoying, the protagonist is an idiot*, yet I keep picking it up.  It's a strange monkey, this one. I think it helps that I never had to experience a highschool english teacher trying to use it to teach analysis and symbolism, or whatever else they use to ruin books these days.
*_{OK, I'm being overly dramatic with all these, but you get the point.}

I realized that I really can't add much to the list...  most really good books I read don't hold up when I read them again, so the ......EVER disqualifies most of them.

OH!  I do know two that never get old: 
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. 
I can read them repeatedly every year. 

[The Meromorph]

It's almost silly to even try and limit it to a typeable list...

All Robert Heinlein.
All Spider Robinson.
All James Hogan.
All Suzette Haden Elgin.
All J.R.R.Tolkien.
All John D. Mcdonald.
All Stephen Donaldson.
"Courtship Rite" Donald Kingsbury
"The Moon Godess and the Son" Donald Kingsbury.
All Dick Francis.
The Ringworld Series - Larry Niven.
The Heechee series - Frederick Pohl.
The Motie Series - Larry Niven,Jerry Pournelle.
All Orson Scott Card.
All Sherry S. Tepper.
All Richard Dawkins.

I've limited this list to books and series I've read at least ten times each, and are still getting better each time I re-read them... 

That's why Pratchett isn't on the list, for example, I've only read his books three or four times, so far...

[Aggie]

Hold up... I forgot about Hunter! 
Most Hunter S. Thompson, but Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas really is a must read, even if you didn't care for the movie version.

Probably Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and The Beach by Alex Garland would be right up there, but I don't know about best EVER.  The Beach was more likely a time/place thing, but it's so good I ABSOLUTELY REFUSE TO EVER WATCH THE MOVIE.

[The Black Spot]

The Ginger Man  by JP Donleavy.

The hero(?) is a drunken, cheating waster, but you can't help but be on his side.

[Swatopluk]

Rudyard Kipling: Stalky & Co (get a complete edition, many are abridged)
The school story to end all school stories!
Honestly, he would have deserved the Nobel Prize for this alone, in my opinion.
Kim is also worth reading.

To go a bit further into the past:
The Elder Edda
The Epos of Gilgamesh (may we find the missing parts some day!)
Homer: Ilias&Odyssey

[Bruder Cuzzen]

DaveL,
             I thought of you a sibling a year ago, now that you rank Silmarillion above LOTR i'm convinced of this.I think it would make a great 100-200 episodal series.
 
I'm rather surprised at the  number of books/authors  listed to this date have been favourites of mine as well.
With this in mind I highly reccomend the "Shrike" series which includes Hyperion,Endymion and Hyperion"s end.

The Riverworld series was fabulous although the last tweenty pages out of 5,000 or so was a disappointment.

[Griffin NoName]

Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson  Aaaaaaargh!!

All of Charles Dickens