Books you can't live without
POSTED BY: BadgersHat
UPDATED: Thursday, May 12, 2005 14:58
VIEWED: 31206
PAGE 9 of 11
Quote:
Originally posted by zoid:
Should read, "...Ringworld denizens". Sorry. I always just thought of the place as The Ring.
So did I &, I expect, everyone else, until he wrote the Smoke Ring novels.
Quote:
have you read Niven's "Destiny Road"? I thought that was eminently readable and novel. Kinda Firefly-like, in that the human settlers just get dropped off in a place, and then the supplies run out and they're left to their own resources. Culture devolves to match the strains of the environment, et cetera.
No, but I have it (around here (somewhere)). I'm looking forward to the difference between the society he creates & that of "Legacy of Heorot". The latter was Jerry Pournelle's concept, & is influenced by his philosophy that a society has the morality it can afford.
Keep the Shiny Side Up
Wutzon: SRV, "the Sky Is Crying"
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Yay! One of the best games ever -- difficult too. My but aren't we a well read bunch!
Some of my favorite books are those that I have read while travelling and so are associated with the memories of those times and places and the intense attention that I placed upon the book, because it and the moment were so precious (I put a + sign by them). Severely limiting myself:
Non Fiction:
A good dictionary
The Elements of Style - W. Strunk Jr. & E. B. White, 1979, 3rd ed. If you write, you must have this or its like.
+ A Distant Mirror; the Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara Tuchman, 1978
+ The Dream at the End of the World; Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier - Michelle Green, 1992
Man and His Symbols - Carl Jung, 1964
The Tao of Physics - Fritjof Capra, 1991, 3rd ed.
The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art & Architecture - Gyorgy Doczi, 1985
Chaos - James Gleick, 1987
(And yes, I did like Goedel, Escher, Bach!)
+ Shelter - a neato, big book published by the folks at Whole Earth Catalogue. Don't own it now, but it was so cool to look through; a compedium of architectures around the earth.
Religion and Philosophy:
Well, that's difficult so I'll limit myself harshly (I study mythology).
The Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
+ A Witches Bible Compleat - Janet & Stewart Farrar, 1981
The Prologemena, Themis, & Epilegomena - a Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion - Jane Ellen Harrison, 1903-1921
The Eddas (haven't finished them yet; think Beowulf)
Poetry:
All the Night Wings - Loren Eiseley
+ Anything by Gary Snyder
+ Modern Greek Poetry - ed. & trans. by Kimon Friar, pub. 1993
Prose and other Fiction:
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll (odd, no date on my old edition; probably the first book that I remember reading and will do so again every few years - best out loud!)
Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco. Hell, one of the best books *ever*.
Anything by Neal Stephenson. Yum, yum, yum.
Most of + Herman Hesse, + Lawrence Durrell, Paul Bowles, H. P. Lovecraft, Lois McMaster Bujold, Bruce Sterling, Ray Bradbury, Robert Holdstock, Spider Robinson, Gene Wolfe (!!!), John Fowles, Tanith Lee, and all time favorite... Charles de Lint (*nice* people too, he and his wife).
+ A Movable Feast - Hemingway (short book, but I read it 5 times on a **long** bus ride once, and it held up every time).
+ Desert Solitaire; A Season in the Wilderness - Edward Abbey, 1968. That book has been everywhere with me.
And but of course: Euripides and Homer.
But I ramble, agh, this is an impossible task.
--Indigo
Art is Long and Time is fleeting -- Longfellow
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I've actually been avoiding this thread, because I know that once I start listing my favourite books I'll never stop. Still, am in a mood to procrastinate right now, so here goes.
SF/fantasy:
The Lions of al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula Le Guin
Ash - Mary Gentle
Mythago Wood - Robert Holdstock
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell
Collected Sandman - Neil Gaiman et al
Use of Weapons - Iain M Banks
Pavane - Keith Roberts
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Gap Series - Stephen Donaldson
A Song of Ice and Fire (thus far) - George RR Martin
The Broken Crown - Michelle West
Grass - Sheri S Tepper
Dragon Star trilogy - Melanie Rawn
The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
Other fiction:
A Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett
The Diary of a Madman and other stories - Nikolai Gogol
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
The Crimson Petal and the White - Michael Faber
The Castle of Crossed Destinies - Italo Calvino
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Fingersmith - Sarah Waters
The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Random (auto)biographical-ness:
The Travels - Ibn Battuta
The Baburnama
Six Records of a Floating Life - Shen Fu
Wild Swans - Jung Chang
History:
The Annals - Tacitus
The Twelve Caesars - Suetonius
White Mughals - William Dalrymple
Captives: Britons, Empire and the World - Linda Colley
Enlightenment - Roy Porter
Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Colour - Philip Ball
Moorish Spain - Richard Fletcher
The Incas - Terence N. D'Altroy
The Legacy of Muslim Spain - Salma Khadra Jayyusi (ed)
Orientalism - Edward Said
God's Caliph: Religious Authority in the first centuries of Islam - Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds
Poetry/drama/saga:
Anything by Euripides, especially Medea and Bacchae
Aeneid - Virgil
Gulistan (The Rose Garden) - Sa'di
Sonnets to Orpheus - Rainer Maria Rilke
The Conference of the Birds - Farid al-Din Attar
Yeats
The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Basho
Njal's saga
The Duchess of Malfi - John Webster
Various Shakespeare, esp. Othello
Misc:
The Symposium - Plato
Hans Wehr's Arabic-English Dictionary (4th ed)
...enough already? Anyone curious about any of these books, just ask 
/ pure intentions, juxtaposed /
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YT:
Ahhh! Two days without electricity in an 18 degree (hi temp) ice storm! Midwest livin' at its finest!
Heorot differs from Destiny in that the Beowulf/Heorot settlers are few and the tech they bring with them is prodigious. In Destiny, the settlers are prodigious, but the planet lacks the necessary natural resources to support a technical -- or even industrial -- society. Lots of neat cultural insights, more than Man-Versus-Critters (although I did love the dragons).
Respectfully,
zoid
_________________________________________________
"Burn the land (for wamth) and boil the sea (over the burning land, 'cause the microwave ain't runnin'), you can't take the sky from me." The Ballad of Serenity
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never can resist these threads
So, for some of my favourites.
Sci-fi:
Downbelow Station, Rimrunners, Heavy Time, Hellburner all by CJ Cherryh. Really enjoyed her fantasy Morgaine trilogy too.
The Uplift Wars series by David Brin
Dune
Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin, and loved her fantasy Earthsea series too
House of the Wolf series by MK Wren
Ender's Game and Xenocide, Orson Scott Card
Grass and Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper
The Gandalaran Cycle (Glass of Dyskornis, Search for Ka, Bronze of Eddarta, Steel of Raithskar and The River Wall) by Randall Garrett
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Farenheit 451
Fantasy:
The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle
Dragonslayer, Knight of the Demon Queen, Dragonstar (and I'm forgetting one in this series) by Barbara Hambley
The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings for defining the genre
Greenwich, Over sea under Stone, The Grey King (and again forgetting a couple of titles) by Susan Cooper, which introduced me to fantasy at the tender age of 10
Bridge of Birds - never fails to cheer me up
Other:
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Prince of Tides
The Great Gatsby
Turtle Moon, Susan Howard
An Instant in the Wind by Andre Brink
Before Adam
Firestarter by Stephen King
Any poetry by Roy Campbell, but particularly Zulu Girl and Horses of the Camargue
...and there are plenty more, but I'll leave it at that for now.
I have a slight flaw in my character
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When the arsonist set my house on fire, I didn’t stop to pick up anything. Not even books. Me and my flatmate just ran out into the snow in our pyjamas and a weird assortment of whatever warm clothes were to hand.
Weirdly, it wasn’t that scarey at the time, but, wow, I get some nightmares now.
However, assuming that a very slow emergency was happening, which gave me time to look through some books and choose some of the best ones, I would pick:
1. something or everything by Antonia Forest – a true unrecognised genius
2. at least one book by Charles Ritchie – probably the one about his childhood – Canada’s best diary-writer
3. The Three Muskateers – I still want to be d’Artagnan
4. Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides by Kevin Macneil - perfect
5. No Great Mischief by Alistair Macleod – see above
I liked a lot of the lists above… glad people mentioned Little Women. Also nice to see Jack Vance on a list – a friend gave me Tales of the Dying Earth last year with the recommendation that it they were the best SF novels he’d ever read. It’s my aim to finish them this year – I got to the book where he has to start that journey all over again (trying not to spoil it here) and I just couldn’t take it. There are some recommendations I’ll be checking out… plus, The Face on the Milk Carton – I haven’t seen that for years!
Final book list: ones that I have just read recently, so can’t be put on the first list, but which I am currently recommending:
1. Madame by Antoni Libera – oooh, Polish
2. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber – it is too short. Really, Just start, and you’ll see what I mean.
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I must admit, even though I'm an avid reader, I'm not that much of a re-reader, plus there's loads of great books out there I haven't read yet but then I'd never know how great they were if they disappeared off the planet.
Books that meant a lot when I read them for the first time:
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - an endless succession of brilliant ideas, jokes and thoughts. This is undoubtably the unfashionable end of the Milky Way.
The Catcher in the Rye - I read this at just the right age but haven't re-read it since. I almost don't want to since I have grown up but Holden hasn't.
The Sherlock Holmes stories - I now know the twists of these plots like the back of my hand but the pace of the writing and the evocation of the era raises above other mystery stories.
I'd also really miss all the books of Terry Pratchett, Dick Francis, Tolkien and my compendiums of Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes and Dilbert but I don't think there's any "one" book I just couldn't live without.
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oOoOoh! Books, yay!
If i had to pick one and only one it would be:
"The Light Bearer" by Donna Gillespie.
Absolutely my all time favorite. Wonderfully, epic, violent, and romantic. Quote from back of book "She was a warrior, a priestess, and a threat to the powers of ancient Rome." Highly, HIGHLY recommend this novel.
If i had a box to carry books in:
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (like an adult Harry Potter- very good, very funny)
Merry Gentry series/ Anita Blake series by Laurell K Hamilton (sexy, smutty, fantasy fun)
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Jayne Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde (Fun, witty and whimsical series about a literary detective that can jump into books and interact with the characters. The first book is called "The Eyre Affair" and Thursday jumps into Jane Eyre to stop an assination plot and ends up changing the ending of the book. Very cute series.)
Those are all for now. That box would be pretty damn heavy.
www.whispergraphics.net
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All right! I was hoping this one would turn up again...
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux...So very pretty!
Bag Of Bones by Stephen King...You may not be a King fan, but you don't have to be to love this book. So good!
American Tabloid by James Ellroy...I was going to put The Black Dahlia, but that book was like a kindergarten primer compared to this one.
MacBeth/Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare...I won't try to include all of his stuff, so here's my two favorites.
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby...If you've seen the movie, you don't have the whole story (Not a dig on the movie, I love that movie, but this book!)
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving...Read this book and try to not think of Autumn...go ahead, try!
Watchers by Dean R. Koontz...hailed by some critics as the most accomplished poopular novel of the 80s...you could do a lot worse than reading Lightning as well.
The Tick: Omnibus #1 by Ben Edlund...Yeah, I know he writes for the Jossverse, and that alone should give him the tip, but The Tick was just so mind numbingly...well, stupid, and probably one of the funniest things I've ever read.
Bring Me The Head of Prince Charming by Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley...I choked laughing out loud at this book. A little hard to find now, though, and I've never read any of the others in this series.
A Night In The Lonesome October by Gahan Wilson and Roger Zelazny...Jack the Ripper a good guy? Animal familiars telling the stories of some of the victorian eras greatest monsters and detectives...Also, hard to find.
There's a few to start...
Kaylee: "What's so damn important about being proper? It don't mean nothing out here in the black."
Simon: "It means more out here. It's all I have..."
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Scrolling through the Thread...
Most folk seemed to have seem to have hit upon the major titles...
But what of the Novels that have paved the way for Firefly???
Andre Norton: The Solar Queen Series.
C.J. Cherryh: Downbelow Station and Chanur Series.
Poul Anderson: The Polesotechnic League Series.
John Clute: Appleseed.
Interstellar Traders and Freelancers abound- jobs and mayhem everywhere- Have'nt read them? Check them out.
Just cannot wait for the Movie!!!!
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