Favorite books!

[Hearts_and_Rainbows]

Post your favorite books here! Any book at all! I just need suggestions on what to read into, with summertime coming along.

 

[Goldiegirl]

Lord of the Rings by Tolkien

 

[Nuala]

My favorite book would have to be Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, or The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice.

 

[Kinsao]

I'm into reading short stories at the moment, since I don't have so much spare time, and it's not so easy to lose the 'thread' in a short story.
Some of my favourite short story collections are:
'Black Venus' by Angela Carter
'Twenty-one stories' by Graham Greene
The collected fictions of Jorge Luis Borges

 

[Jygitsu]

I suggest you read the beginning of Lord of the ring - Hobbit

 

[a51ts4]

Anything from Chuck Palahniuk, Kurt Vonnegut, Dean Koontz.

 

[Hearts_and_Rainbows]

Guys, I have already read the Lord of the Rings series, including the hobbit. I think I'd want to read another book,
like Vampire Lestat! Thanx for the suggestion!

 

[Mycernius]

One of my favs is Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. One of my favourite authors is James Herbert. The best book I have ever read is Imajica by Clive Barker. Out of curiosity what genre do you like?

 

[Sarapva]

I think the best book I have ever read is "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte. All the Bronte sisters books are good to read - I also like "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Bronte.

 

[Goldiegirl]

You should consider re-reading The Lord of the Rings every once in a while. I have found that I understood the book differently at various stages of my life. If you have just read it, ofcourse wait a bit...I read it about once a year or two. I read many books twice just to make sure that I didn't miss anything, especially as I like to read before going to sleep. The last book I read was The Third Chimpanzee, interesting only if you want to read a scientific comparison of chimps/apes and humans. It was an eye opener, but boring...go for something fun in summer. Good-luck on your book hunt!

 

[yukio_michael]

I'm a long time poetry/lit major blah blah, dropout... please forgive my verboseness...

Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
C.S. Lewis - Till We Have Faces
George Orwell - 1984
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Yukio Mishima - The Sound of Waves
Yukio Mishima - Patriotism
Anne Sexton - Live or Die (poetry)
Sylvia Plath - Ariel (poetry) (non revised edition)
James Joyce - Ulysses (not for the faint of heart)
Virginia Wolf - The Waves (vastly influenced by the above book)
Marcel Proust - The Germantes Way
Oscar Wilde - Picture of Dorian Grey
Rick Moody - Demonology
Rick Moody - The Ice Storm
Shirley Jackson - We Have Always lived in The Castle
Shirley Jackson - The Lottery (and other short stories)
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho
Donna Tart - The Secret History
David Sedaris - Me Talk Pretty One Day
Kathy Acker - Empire of the Senseless
John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces
Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night
Antonin Artaud - Watch Fiends & Rack Screams (poetry)

...thats all for now I'm bored, not summer potboilers, or something to read on the beach... just literature.

ps. I just realised the age of the OP, so I'll add this,

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Le Petit Prince

 

[Goldiegirl]

Heart of Darkness...AHHH...I hated that book....get the cliff notes they are much better! (and I passed the exam)

 

[Kinsao]

^ lol, I loved Heart of Darkness!

Anything by Angela Carter is worth reading. The Magic Toyshop is a good 'introduction' to her work.

 

[Duo]

Ah...summertime reading can be quite fun.... I think you will enjoy

animal farm by George Orwell and if you haven't already read them I suggest you try Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huck Fin by Mark Twain...these are good fun books with important messages behind and I think will help you grow in your appreciation of literature, nevermind the complicated useless fictions like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, these three books are a must read for any young teen who likes reading

 

[Hearts_and_Rainbows]

Thank you guys! I plan on reading 1984 by George Orwell.

I think my favorite genres would have to be sci-fi/fantasy or drama

 

[Mycernius]

Thank you guys! I plan on reading 1984 by George Orwell.
I think my favorite genres would have to be sci-fi/fantasy or drama

Good luck with that one. I read it when I was 13, recommended to me by my English teacher, and didn't paricularly like it. Strangely enough I loved Animal Farm. Sometimes you find authors like that. you like one book they have written and can't stand another. I have the same trouble with The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I just cannot get into that book, but have read Les Mieserable three times.

 

[yukio_michael]

I think you would really like "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" by Shirley Jackson too... it's a pretty short read, and it's got a very old-mystical theme to it... It's an excelent book.

 

[made of stone]

Some really great suggestions here from everybody!

I tip my hat especially to yukio_michael for 'Dorian Grey' - one of my favourite ever books

I'm trying to think of books that i've enjoyed reading from the age of the OP. I never tire of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis, even now at the ripe old age of 31.

I also started reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of books (satirical fantasy) at about that age and still love them (though there's the odd one that's not as good as the others, and they may appeal to British readers most).

One book I didn't read until my twenties, which I wish I'd read much, much earlier is Demian by Hermann Hesse - that man was a genius (should really be a capital 'g' there!) imho.

 

[yukio_michael]

My mother was an English teacher, so there was always literature around, so I got an early start--- I have to think about what I was reading when I was younger. The earliest book I remember reading was Carl Sagan's Cosmos, & of course I read the Hobbit & the Lord of the Rings, (I wouldn't read the Silmarillion until much much later), these were favourites of my parents... I also read "Bored of the rings", which was a pretty good parody by National Lampoon, before National Lampoon became an outlet for cheap thrills teen-sex comedies...

I remember reading Thomas Mann, but other than that the books around the house were Steven King books, and plenty of them... and I generally stayed away from them because frankly, just the covers scared me! I do regret never having tackled "The Stand".

Once I got into highschool, I started reading a lot of Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex, Electra, that sort of thing... Works by Ezra Pound, TS Elliott, & e.e. cummings (joke w/ the non caps there)... There are so many many great books out there, that it's hard to narrow them down....

I'll add here the majority of the work by Edna St. Vincent Millay, a poet whom I feel was an outlier in her class, she was, it seems completely untainted by a lack of quality in her work until she passed away... She suffered no madness like Sexton, whose poetry grew worse, or Plath whose poetry rose to such staggering heights that the only place to go was off the cliff she drove herself up...

The poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, a Russian poet who suffered unimaginable hardships, is full of the type of writing that comes to mind when we think of the word "humanity"... It is without question some of the finest writing in poetry, not exclusive of simply being some of the finest Russian writing, which as well, it is.

 

[GodEmperorLeto]

Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
George Orwell - 1984
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
James Joyce - Ulysses (not for the faint of heart)
Virginia Wolf - The Waves (vastly influenced by the above book)
Oscar Wilde - Picture of Dorian Grey
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho
Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Le Petit Prince

Niiiiiiiiiice selection. I've read all these (including Le Petit Prince in the original Francais, back when my French was still functional). I've got to read those Mishima ones, though.

Heart of Darkness...AHHH...I hated that book....get the cliff notes they are much better!

Ye Gods, no! That book was awesome. At least suggest she rent Apocalypse Now, which is Coppola's "Vietnamization" of the movie (to steal a word from Richard Nixon).
MY LIST
I've read all of these, so they are good, in my opinion. Sorted by genre. Does not include anything previously mentioned (I think).
NOIR
Dashell Hammett -- The Maltese Falcon
Raymond Chandler -- Trouble is My Business, The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, Farewell My Lovely. Chandler is the king of 1930s noir stories, and is a fantastic example of American mystery writing in the early 20th century, especially when compared to Agatha Christie.
James Ellroy -- The Black Dahlia (the novel was better than the movie), The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz.
PULP FICTION (Mostly sword & sorcery)
Robert E. Howard -- The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, The Bloody Crown of Conan, The Conquering Sword of Conan, Kull: Exile of Atlantis. Howard is to Tolkien as Chandler is to Christie. Read Howard's original short stories, not the chopped-up pastiche-work that de Camp mangled.
H.P. Lovecraft -- The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Dreams of Terror and Death: The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror H.P. Lovecraft is the opposite of Edgar Allen Poe. He's more wierd than terrifying, but he's got some interesting stuff. He most likely inspired Stephen King to some extent.
Clark Ashton Smith -- The Collected Fantasies Of Clark Ashton Smith Volume 1: The End Of The Story and Volume 2: The Door To Saturn, The Return Of The Sorcerer: The Best Of Clark Ashton Smith
Fritz Lieber -- Swords Against Deviltry and Swords Against Death
Michael Moorcock -- The Corum Cycle, The Runestaff Cycle, and the million-and-one books about Elric of Melnibone. Moorcock hated Tolkien and loved Robert E. Howard.
CLASSICS
Xenophon -- Anabasis (aka The Ten Thousand or The Persian Expedition). Awesome adventure story that is the best kind--a true one.
Aristophanes -- The Clouds, The Wasps, The Birds, The Lysistrata, The Knights, The Acharnians, The Frogs Some of his best plays. If you can't read Attic Greek, try to find a translation that isn't censored. It's best if all of the sewer-mouth profanity is left intact, although Penguin Publishing has a nasty habit of translating these plays so that they are more "G" rated.
Homer -- The Iliad and The Odyssey These go without saying.
Lucian of Samosata -- A True Story It isn't true at all. It could be considered the worlds first science fiction novel. Good luck finding a translation, they exist, but hard to find. It's hilarious, though.
LITERATURE
Ernest Hemingway -- Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises
James Joyce -- The Dubliners
William Faulkner -- The Sound and the Fury, Absolom, Absolom!
Kurt Vonnegut -- Slaughterhouse-Five, Mother Night, Breakfast of Champions, Welcome to Monkey House
Anthony Burgess -- A Clockwork Orange Don't get the one with the 21st chapter omitted. Make sure it has all 21.
Joseph Heller -- Catch-22
Chuck Palhaniuk -- Fight Club, Choke
Aldous Huxley -- A Brave New World
George Orwell -- Animal Farm
Ray Bradbury -- The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451
John Kennedy Toole -- Confederacy of Dunces
Albert Camus -- L'Etranger, The Plague (This one's awesome)
Emile Zola -- Germinal
Yukio Mishima -- Spring Snow, Running Horses, Temple of the Dawn, Decay of an Angel
Yasunari Kawabata -- Snow Country
Italo Calvino -- Invisible Cities
Umberto Eco -- Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum
Miguel Cervantes -- Don Quixote I strongly recommend everyone read this at least once before they die.
Neal Stephenson -- Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle
Bram Stoker -- Dracula
Mary Shelley -- Frankenstein, The Last Man
Robert Louis Stephenson -- Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped
H.G. Wells -- The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, War of the Worlds, The Time Machine
Jules Verne -- Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon
Alexandre Dumas -- Les Trois Mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers and its two sequels), Le Comte de Monte-Cristo
Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables, Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame)
Fyodor Dostoevsky -- Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, The Possessed
Boris Pasternak -- Dr. Zhivago
Vladimir Nabokov -- The Gift, Lolita
Leo Tolstoy -- Anna Karenina, War and Peace
J.D. Salinger -- A Catcher in the Rye
Upton Sinclair -- The Jungle
F. Scott Fitzgerald -- The Great Gatsby
John Steinbeck -- The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl
It should go without saying that you should read Shakespeare. Also look at the poetry of Wordsworth, Browning, Yates, Keats, Percy Shelly, Lord Byron and the plays of Christopher Marlowe (a contemporary of Shakespeare) like Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta.
SCIENCE FICTION
Isaac Asimov -- Robots, Empire, and Foundation novels
Arthur C. Clarke -- Rendezvous with Rama, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010
Robert A. Heinlein -- Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Time Enough For Love
Frank Herbert -- The Dune Chronicles (Avoid Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's crappy pastiches)
Greg Bear -- Eon
Orson Scott Card -- Ender's Game
S.M. Stirling -- Island in the Sea of Time , Against the Tide of Years, On the Oceans of Eternity
FANTASY
Tad Williams -- Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy (I almost put it in the Literature list, it's that good, and that packed with symbolism and other literary goodies)
Poul Anderson -- Three Hearts and Three Lions
Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman -- The obligatory Dragonlance Chronicles and Dragonlance Legends, The Deathgate Cycle
George R. R. Martin -- The Song of Ice and Fire series
R. Scott Bakker -- The Prince of Nothing series
Thomas Harlan -- The Oath of Empire series
That's about all I'm posting for now. If this doesn't keep any of you occupied for, like, a decade... well... it kept me occupied since I was 12.

 

[Goldiegirl]

I hated the movie Apocolypse Now even more so than the book. The Heart of Darkness for me was just too hard to follow. I read the book and understood very little. I bought the cliff notes on the book and was able to pass my Lit exam. Sorry!

I would also say a good book to read at least once is Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. I thought the book was interesting on how someone who wasn't from Earth but came here would view us and what their take on human culture, religion and humanity was.

 

[leonmarino]

George Orwell - 1984

Thank you guys! I plan on reading 1984 by George Orwell.

1984 is my favo too. It is the best mix of romance, suspence, politics.. It has everything in it really. The scary thing is that many things sound really topical while the book is written in 1949!!

 

[yukio_michael]

1984 is my favo too. It is the best mix of romance, suspence, politics.. It has everything in it really. The scary thing is that many things sound really topical while the book is written in 1949!!

Have you ever noticed the similarities between Orwell's "Newspeak", and Nihongo: the tendency to use fewer words rather than more expressive ones, (such as the overuse of words like oishii, kakkoii, umai, tadaima, okaeri, ittarasshai, etc etc etc).... the rapidity of speech, the tendency for speech not to speak simply in favour of "big brother", but to completely ignore debate whatsoever...

I'm sure there is some debate going on in Japan, but I don't think this is a tendency of the average population. Language is often compared directly to culture, that you can not understand a culture until you understand the language, and it's interesting how Japanese is used (commonly, outside of academic circles) and how it may or may not have some effect not just on how people speak, but how people think as well.

When your first and only reaction to something cute is kawaii~ ne!, there seems to be a limitation in more expressive terms.

 

[GodEmperorLeto]

Have you ever noticed the similarities between Orwell's "Newspeak", and Nihongo: the tendency to use fewer words rather than more expressive ones, (such as the overuse of words like oishii, kakkoii, umai, tadaima, okaeri, ittarasshai, etc etc etc)....
When your first and only reaction to something cute is kawaii~ ne!, there seems to be a limitation in more expressive terms.

This is definitely something Japanese (and Korean) students I encounter are always stupefied by. English has so many words for the same thing, but each word has subtle differences and nuances.

For example, the word "angry" can also be "mad," "furious," "irate," "enraged," "wrathful."

Part of this is because English has imported a plethora of words from French/Latin and still retains a lot of its original Germanic roots. Part of this, though, is because of our literature and writing styles, which prizes a lack of repetition. Many students' are exasperated by their essay-writing, because they'd be content to say the same word fifty times in a paragraph, whereas English-speaking editors insist they get a thesaurus and mix things up.

 

[leonmarino]

Well yeah I can't disagree on the fact that Japanese and English are different languages, the main difference being -in my opinion- that Japanese is very much context-based. The famous example being the word "Hai", which can mean "yes" but also "I hear you", and even "excuse me" depending on the tone and situation. I think that because of this, the Japanese need less words to express themselves.

It is interesting to think about how languages influences people's way of thinking and vice versa. I'm pretty sure there is some co-evolution going on.