Books: Your top-25 books

[Philly85*]

top 25, really

 

[Hippasus]

I just did a long list of non-fiction books on another thread, so I will restrict this list to fiction:

You are more of a fiction than a non-fiction fan, are you not? That's my impression from your reviews but I'm not really sure.

 

[Say Hey Kid]

1 Orwell, George Nineteen Eighty-Four
2 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
3 Vonnegut, Kurt Slaughterhouse Five
4 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
5 Brave New World Aldous Huxley
6 Catch-22 Joseph Heller
7 Lee, Harper To Kill a Mockingbird
8 Golding, William Lord of the Flies
9 Steinbeck, John East of Eden
10 (tie) Hemingway, Ernest A Farewell to Arms
Salinger, J.P. The Catcher in the Rye
Bradbury, Ray Farenheit 451

 

[Eisen]

How could I forget A Confederacy of Dunces?

 

[aufheben]

1. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
2. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
3. The Stranger by Albert Camus
4. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
7. The Master and Magarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
8. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
9. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
10. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

No order 2-10.

 

[Sombastate]

Glad i'm not the only fan of Nikolai Gogol. What a talent.

 

[aufheben]

Glad i'm not the only fan of Nikolai Gogol. What a talent.

Hilarious book.

 

[Marshal Rochambeau]

1. Gottlob Frege: Basic Laws of Arithmetic: derived using concept-script (2 vols. bound as one)
2. Gottlob Frege, edited by Terrell Ward Bynum: Conceptual Notation: and related articles
3. Various authors, edited by Hans Sluga: The Philosophy of Frege (4 vols.)
4. Gottlob Frege, edited by Michael Beaney: The Frege Reader
5. Gottlob Frege: Logical Investigations
6. Gottlob Frege: "The foundations of arithmetic: a logical-mathematical investigation into the concept of number"
7. Erich H. Reck, Steve Awodey, Gottlob Frege, Rudolf Carnap: Frege's Lectures on Logic: Carnap's student notes, 1910-1914
8. Michael Beaney: Frege: making sense
9. Richard Dedekind: Essays on the Theory of Numbers (not finished yet)
10. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
11. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
12. Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals: a polemic
13. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy: out of the spirit of music
14. Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a book for all and none
15. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Antichrist
16. J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit: or there and back again
17. Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by R. J. Hollingdale: Essays and Aphorisms
18. Arthur Schopenhauer: "On the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason"
19. Morris Kline: Mathematics: the loss of certainty
20. J.N. Crossley, et al.: What is Mathematical Logic?
21. Willard Van Orman Quine: From a Logical Point of View: nine logico-philosophical essays
22. Max Weber: "The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism"
23. Colin Ward: Anarchism: a very short introduction
24. Andrew Dobson: Green Political Thought

What makes you put Frege consistently at the top? I'm curious because his work seems interesting.

 

[Hippasus]

What makes you put Frege consistently at the top? I'm curious because his work seems interesting.

I put Frege at the top because his work, while narrow in scope or area of interest, is very detail-oriented and reflective in its thinking and methodology. Yet, perhaps in part for these very reasons, his work continues to have lasting significance in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, and mathematical logic. In a lot of ways he inaugurated these fields. Part of his methodology that I find fascinating is his own innovation of a logical formalism, which he saw as in the spirit of Leibniz as being both a universal language of truth, as well as a means of reasoning or inferring. His formal statements are two-dimensional and separated by horizontal lines. They clearly separate the truth-conditions (antecedent conditions) from the consequent, whose truth-value is to be judged. This allows each statement to be more clearly seen as related to earlier steps in the reasonings of proofs, as well as how proofs may overlap in their explication in a formal system. His formal statements also separate the judgement-stroke from the content-stroke (horizontal). Reading some of his works, one may feel engaged in philosophy, mathematics, and history at the same time. Frege writes clearly both as a philosopher and as a mathematician, goes about as far as anyone in asking and attempting to answer deep questions, and has practically seemingly created interesting fields of study. (The issue of Russell's paradox is part of the reason for the urgency / historical character of some of Frege's work.)

 

[Spring in Fialta]

Can't believe I forgot to add The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig. The passage describing the main character's cruel imprisonment during World War II and how it drove him to madness is superb.

 

[Oscar Acosta]

Let's see if I can pull this off the top of my head not being around my books, I'll forget a few no doubt.

1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
2. Child of God - Cormac McCarthy
3. Outer Dark - Cormac McCarthy
4. The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Alex Haley
5. Kingdom of Fear - Hunter S. Thompson
6. 11/22/63 - Stephen King
7. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
8. The Rum Diary - Hunter S. Thompson
9. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
10. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
11. Hell's Angels - Hunter S. Thompson
12. In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway
13. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
14. All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doer
15. Suttree - Cormac McCarthy
16. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
17. And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks - Jack Kerouac
18. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
19. No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
20. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand (Yes I do like it, as a story I'm not some capitalist jerk so spare me the lecture)
21. Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
22. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Conner
23. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
24. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
25. In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje

 

[aufheben]

Hello literati friends and bibliophiles! Inspired by the resurrection of the top-25 albums thread by Necropolis, let's revisit our GOAT books (and get some recommendations in the process!)



It's been a couple years since this thread, and in the interim, I - and I'm sure many of you who participated before - have read many more books. My list has seen a pretty significant overhaul.

And before it's asked, yeah - non-fiction counts.

1. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
2. Blindness - Jose Saramago
3. The War of the End of the World - Mario Vargas Llosa
4. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
6. The Power & the Glory - Graham Greene
7. Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
8. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
9. Let the Great World Spin - Colum McCann
10. The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
11. Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
12. The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño
13. Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
14. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
15. The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - Siddaratha Mukherjee
16. The Humans - Matt Haig
17. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
18. HHhH - Laurent Binet
19. The Tin Drum - Günter Grass
20. Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer
21. Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimananda Ngozi Adichie
22. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
23. Just Kids - Patti Smith
24. Solaris - Stanislaw Lem
25. Nausea - J.P. Sartre

I just did a long list of non-fiction books on another thread, so I will restrict this list to fiction:

1. In Search of Lost Time (all seven volumes counted as one), Marcel Proust
2. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
3. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
4. The Dubliners, James Joyce
5. A Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert
6. The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass
7. The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
8. A Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. The Master and Commander series (20 or 21 books, depending on how one is counting), Patrick O’Brian
10. Three Day Road, Joseph Boyden
11. Ulysses, James Joyce
12. Journey to the End of the Night, Louis Ferdinand Celine
13. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
14. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
15. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Doestoyevski
16. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
17. Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
18. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
19. The Once and Future King, T. H. White
20. The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
21. The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
22. Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. The Enigma of Arrival, V. S. Naipaul
24. The Stranger, Albert Camus
25. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

26 The Life of Pi, Yann Martel
27. The Humans, Matt Haig
28. Not Wanted on the Voyage, Timothy Findley
29. Ravelstein, Saul Bellow
30. Smilla's Sense of Snow, Peter Hoeg



Trinity College Library, Dublin:

Hard to think of 25, at least in some kind of order.

Here are 25 books that come to my mind:

1. ATLAS SHRUGGED
2. THE FOUNTAINHEAD
3. MASTER AND MARGARITA
4. SONG OF FIRE AND ICE (series)
5. THE IDIOT
6. THE MAGUS
7. INVISIBLE BRIDGE
8. ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE
9. HARRY POTTER (series)
10. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
11. DAVINCI'S CODE
12. ANGELS AND DEMONS
13. LAMB
14. THE KITE RUNNER
15. THE ROAD
16. BAUDOLINO
17. THE SHADOW OF THE WIND
18. THE ANGEL'S GAME
19. THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON
20. THE GHOST
21. TIN DRUM
22. TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE
23. COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO
24. OLD MAN AND THE SEA
25. OBLOMOV

1. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
2. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
4. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
5. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
6. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
7. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
8. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
9. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
10. Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

It's really tough to narrow this down to just 25. I have 36 marked as 5* on Goodreads and a bunch rated 4* that I can't tell why I didn't give 5*. Here's the best I can come up with.

1) 1984 by George Orwell
2) The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
3) The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
4) The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
5) On the Beach by Nevil Shute
6) The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
7) The Plague by Albert Camus
8) Norwegian Wood by Haruki Marakumi
9) Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
10) Night Watch by Sir Terry Pratchett
11) The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
12) The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
13) The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
14) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
15) Lord of the Flies by William Golding
16) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
17) A Grief Observed by CS Lewis
18) Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
19) The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller
20) Generation A by Douglas Coupland
21) The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
22) The Inheritors by William Golding
23) High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
24) The Man in The High Castle by Philip K Dick
25) Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

I thought fans of the book my find this illustration I just finished of Behemoth interesting.

 

[Miamipuck]

Let's see if I can pull this off the top of my head not being around my books, I'll forget a few no doubt.

1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
2. Child of God - Cormac McCarthy
3. Outer Dark - Cormac McCarthy
4. The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Alex Haley
5. Kingdom of Fear - Hunter S. Thompson
6. 11/22/63 - Stephen King
7. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
8. The Rum Diary - Hunter S. Thompson
9. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
10. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
11. Hell's Angels - Hunter S. Thompson
12. In Our Time - Ernest Hemingway
13. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
14. All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doer
15. Suttree - Cormac McCarthy
16. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
17. And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks - Jack Kerouac
18. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
19. No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
20. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand (Yes I do like it, as a story I'm not some capitalist jerk so spare me the lecture)
21. Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
22. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Conner
23. For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
24. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
25. In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje

That is probably the best book I have ever read. It's a masterpiece into the mind of evil. It didn't have a single redeeming character. I know they have tried to make it into a movie and couldn't.

I am surprised it's on a list because of all the arcane words, most dense language I have ever read, and the lack of redeeming characters, even though it was written in such rich detail and has some quotes that are just off the charts awesome.

The Judge, should go down as one of the greatest villains ever written. If they can ever figure out how to write a workable script, I can't imagine how chilling it would be to see him come to life on the big screen.

 

[sully1410]

Can someone please explain to me what was so great about Catcher in the Rye? I remember it being God Awful.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

That is probably the best book I have ever read. It's a masterpiece into the mind of evil. It didn't have a single redeeming character. I know they have tried to make it into a movie and couldn't.

I am surprised it's on a list because of all the arcane words, most dense language I have ever read, and the lack of redeeming characters, even though it was written in such rich detail and has some quotes that are just off the charts awesome.

The Judge, should go down as one of the greatest villains ever written. If they can ever figure out how to write a workable script, I can't imagine how chilling it would be to see him come to life on the big screen.

I'd consider The Kid and certainly Tobin to be redeemable characters in the context of the book. And I'm kind of glad it hasn't been made into a movie, although it's not out of the realm of possibilities that it will (Scott Rudin owns the rights to the book). The thing is, the casting of The Judge would be extremely difficult. This is just my opinion, but I feel to truly catch the essence of the character, you'd have to hire an absolutely talented nobody to play him and he couldn't play in another movie ever again while disappearing from the Earth. It'd have to be his only credit ever and then he would have to live in complete anonymity.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

I read Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller for the first time recently. What a pleasurable read. Absolutely hilarious. And I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but Lolita is the epitome of intellectual ************ when it comes to literature. The story is great and certainly courageous and I understand Humbert Humbert is written as a talented scholar, but this book should say: Lolita, written by Vladimir Nabokov and his Thesaurus. The sheer number of seldom used words throughout the story is such a turn-off for me.

 

[member 51464]

Hopefully this doesn't make me seem like an intellectual bunch of asterisks, but I don't recall the vocabulary being a challenge whatsoever. The first time I read it was in one sitting many years ago, so maybe I have forgotten aspects of it. But I watched it sitting in a cafe sans dictionary or thesaurus, so it can't have been that bad.

 

[Say Hey Kid]

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1984 by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Diary Of A Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

 

[Spring in Fialta]

Hopefully this doesn't make me seem like an intellectual bunch of asterisks, but I don't recall the vocabulary being a challenge whatsoever. The first time I read it was in one sitting many years ago, so maybe I have forgotten aspects of it. But I watched it sitting in a cafe sans dictionary or thesaurus, so it can't have been that bad.

I wouldn't call it a challenge (although I did head for the dictionary quite a few times) it's just that a lot of the vocabulary he uses makes you go, " why? ". I often felt a more common word would have done the job to perfection and again, the only plausible explanation I can see for this is that the vocabulary is meant to fit Humbert Humbert's background but other then that, I think the vocabulary of the book tends to harm the flow of the story. In my opinion, at least.

 

[aufheben]

Hopefully this doesn't make me seem like an intellectual bunch of asterisks, but I don't recall the vocabulary being a challenge whatsoever. The first time I read it was in one sitting many years ago, so maybe I have forgotten aspects of it. But I watched it sitting in a cafe sans dictionary or thesaurus, so it can't have been that bad.

Lolita is one of the funniest books I've ever read.

 

[Eisen]

I wouldn't call it a challenge (although I did head for the dictionary quite a few times) it's just that a lot of the vocabulary he uses makes you go, " why? ". I often felt a more common word would have done the job to perfection and again, the only plausible explanation I can see for this is that the vocabulary is meant to fit Humbert Humbert's background but other then that, I think the vocabulary of the book tends to harm the flow of the story. In my opinion, at least.

You have to capture the spirit of the original. You can't just write a simple version of it. Ultimately, the words he uses not only have to further the story, but carry similar connotations. The book is what it is. And it's fiction, not non fiction. It doesn't need to be able to explain.

 

[member 51464]

What do you mean capture the spirit of the original? Original what?

 

[Hippasus]

What do you mean capture the spirit of the original? Original what?

I think he or she means Nabokov's novel, which was written in Russian. I haven't read the book at all.

 

[member 51464]

I think he or she means Nabakov's novel, which was written in Russian. I haven't read the book at all.

Incorrect. Lolita was originally written in English. Nabakov wrote the Russian translation himself, and it was published a few years after the English version.

 

[Eisen]

Incorrect. Lolita was originally written in English. Nabakov wrote the Russian translation himself, and it was published a few years after the English version.

Fair enough. I didn't know.