Your top 10 favorite books

[Avatar]

Welcome to the Watch Bokus.

I loved Blood Music.

--A

[Lord Mhoram]

This is exceedingly difficult.

Rabbit at Rest, John Updike
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
King Lear, Shakespeare
I, Claudius, Robert Graves
The Favourite Game, Leonard Cohen
The Complete Dramatic Works, Samuel Beckett (cheating, I know)
Creation, Gore Vidal
The Great Book of Amber, Roger Zelazny
A Game of Thrones, George Martin
Lord Foul's Bane, Stephen Donaldson

I definitely left some out.

[Bokus]

Welcome to the Watch Bokus.

I loved Blood Music.

--A

Thanks!

I've read other books by Bear, but nothing was ever quite as good as Blood Music.

[Avatar]

Songs of Earth and Power is probably my favourite. (Well, that's the name of the single volume with both books...The Serpent Mage and The Infinity Concerto IIRC.)

--A

[The Dreaming]

1) A Canticle for Leibawitz - Walter M. Miller
2) The Claudius books - Robert Graves
3) The Gap Cycle - SRD
4) The 2nd Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
5) Potter and such
6) Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlenn
7) Speaker for the Dead - Orson Scott Carde
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Phillip K. Dick
9) Gateway - Frederich Pohl
10) Lolita - Nabakonov
11) How can I have forgotten! The Sandman - Neil Gaiman. In fact, I think it might stand as one of the greatest works of literature of the 20th century.

A little premature, but I just finished The Subtle Knife by Pullman, and There were a couple of parts that actually made me weep with joy. (those are the best kinds of tears, and they are wonderful) I anticipate I will end up loving the series as much as any of these. I'm also sure I'm forgetting a few of my favorites.

[matrixman]

11) How can I have forgotten! The Sandman - Neil Gaiman. In fact, I think it might stand as one of the greatest works of literature of the 20th century.

No argument here. I've read only a few of the Sandman stories, but they were extraordinary.

If comic books/graphic novels (whatever one wishes to call them) can be included, then I would add Watchmen and V For Vendetta to my list.

Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings / Jorge Luis Borges

Borges is awesome! He's probably my favorite Latin-American author. I had to read some of his stuff in Spanish in college, and I really enjoyed it. (Borges is another guy whose stuff would be labeled "fantasy" if he were an American writing in English. Okay, getting down off my soapbox again now....)

Finally read your reply, ali. Better late than never. Yes, Borges is very awesome. And you make a good point about the "fantasy" label. Borges falls under magic realism, correct? Labels, labels. Bah!

Of course, what makes Borges even cooler - and by extension SRD - is that in The Illearth War, the quote from the book on the table that Covenant was reading actually came from a Borges story, The Circular Ruins. What an apt story, too -- very fitting with the themes in the Chronicles.

[Vader]

My taste is changing, so it's hard to come up with an ultimative top ten. But the books that have fascinated me over the last decades and still haven't lost their magic for me are (in no particular order):

• Flann O'Brien - At Swim Two Birds
• Flann O'Brien - The Dalkey Archive
• Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
• Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum (Dan Brown should read this to see how to set up a real historical conspiracy theory - and of course how to write an epic novel)
• Monty Python's Flying Circus - All the words
Steven R. Donaldson - The Illearth War (actually all TC books)
• JRR Tolkien - LoTR
• Terry Pratchett - Witches Abroad (actually all Disc World books)
• Paul Auster - Moon Palace
• William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
• Gary Larson - Farside series (:biggrin:)

Non-fiction wise I adore these books:
• Friedrich Schiller - Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man
• Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit

[aliantha]

Finally read your reply, ali. Better late than never. Yes, Borges is very awesome. And you make a good point about the "fantasy" label. Borges falls under magic realism, correct? Labels, labels. Bah!

Of course, what makes Borges even cooler - and by extension SRD - is that in The Illearth War, the quote from the book on the table that Covenant was reading actually came from a Borges story, The Circular Ruins. What an apt story, too -- very fitting with the themes in the Chronicles.

And I just read *your* reply, MM. I am a little behind, too, it seems.

Yup, Borges' stuff is considered magic realism. And no, I didn't know that Covenant was reading Borges in IEW! Now I'm going to have to check IEW to find that quote!

[matrixman]

Heh heh...no worries, ali.

The Borges quote is right on the first page of The Illearth War.

[andy h]

Difficult to nail down ten books, probably because if I like a writer I tend to like all their stuff. So my top ten authors are:

1) John Irving
2) Joseph Wambaugh
3) JRR Tolkien
4) SRD
5) Niven & Pournelle
6) Ted Dekker
7) William Diehl
Ken Kesey
9) Michael Crichton
10) Frank Peretti

[jacob Raver, sinTempter]

- Jurassic Park, Crichton
- LOTR, Tolkien
- LFB, SRD
- Dune, Herbert
- Andromeda Strain, Crichton
- Ender's Game, Card
- Speaker for the Dead, Card
- Sphere, Crichton
- WL, SRD
- A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge

[Blackhawk]

1. Chronicles of Thomas Covenant 1&2 Donaldson
2. The Dark Tower 1-4 King
3. The Talisman King/Straub
4. Harry Potter series
5. the Chronicles of Pern 20+ books ...McCaffrey
6. Jurassic Park & Lost World Crichton
7. Lost Dogs three. Saddest book i have ever read.. I was 8
8. the Uplift war series by David Brinn
9. Star Wars 100+ books in the expansion
10. S.E Hintons Tex,Outsiders,that was then this is now, Rumblefish.

It was much easier to list my favorite series of books

[Loredoctor]

Anyone who recommends the Uplift war in a list knows what they are talking about. Nice to see.