NationStates Jolt Archive

I'm just curious what kind books everyone likes... please leave the book name and the author... :D (By the way I love "The Fellowship of the Ring" by J.R.R Tolkien! :cool: )

It's really hard to pick a favorite book. It really depends on what mood your in.

I really like Tolkien, Douglas Adams, and Rowling for fairly modern British authors.

The prose of Dylan Thomas, especially "A Child's Christmas in Wales", and of course Dickens.

In American authors my favorites are Poe and Vonnegut.

oohhh. Tough.

My tops ones:

1984 - George Orwell
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbary
the whole Hitchhiker Series by Douglas Adams
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut

Animal Farm, George Orwell
Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Falkenberg's Legion, Jerry Pournelle
Without Remorse, Tom Clancy
Hunt For Red October, Tom Clancy
The Bear and the Dragon, Tom Clancy

It's really hard to pick a favorite book. It really depends on what mood your in.

I really like Tolkien, Douglas Adams, and Rowling for fairly modern British authors.

The prose of Dylan Thomas, especially "A Child's Christmas in Wales", and of course Dickens.

In American authors my favorites are Poe and Vonnegut.Yes! I can't beleive that I forgot about Douglas Adams! I listened to his books on CD and they are brilliant! :D

I'm just amazed that no one has said the bible yet.

I'm just amazed that no one has said the bible yet.

It's an important and interesting book, but it's not one that most people read for entertainment. And besides, NS is not a place that is very dense with Christians, if you haven't noticed.

I can never identiy favorites. I have books I currently enjoy. For instance I am currently reading works by Dostoevsky. I have read Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov Brothers, Demons, Notes from Underground, and am now reading The Idiot.

The translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are terrific.

I guess my favorites of those are Crime and Punishment and Demons.

I'm just amazed that no one has said the bible yet.
as a book, it sucks. Too long, too many characters to keep track of. Impronouncable names, too many fanatics around it, too much ambiguity, no clear message about anything. Hell, its not even that great of a holy book.

1984 and Animal Farm- George Orwell
Lord of the Rings, The Sametarian, The Hobbit- JRR Tolkien
Jennifer Government- Max Barry (Nationstates is based on this, BTW is a very good book seriously)
Enders Game-(forgot author)

Brian Jacques, JRR Tolkien, JK Rowling, "Lemony Snicket", CS Lewis, Frank E Peretti, Jerry B Jenkins,....and it just keeps goin'.
I reaaly cannot list all of my favourite books so I am listing the authors.
:D

Hell, its not even that great of a holy book.

case in point.

I'll stop going off-topic now.

It's an important and interesting book, but it's not one that most people read for entertainment. And besides, NS is not a place that is very dense with Christians, if you haven't noticed.

You could have fooled me, what with all the creationist Vs evolution threads ect.

I mean I know it's a preachy book, I'm a sinner, you're a sinner, everyone's a sinner (except for Jesus I guess).;)

1984, Dune, The Hobbit, and The Good Soldier Svejk

I'm just amazed that no one has said the bible yet.
I would have said that, but the Bible is not 1 book it is a grouping of 46 books.
Add this collection to my list

How about Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything"? Interesting read of the history of science.

How about Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything"? Interesting read of the history of science.

Haven't read that yet but loved A Walk in the Woods

How about Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything"? Interesting read of the history of science. That sounds like a good book. I need to get that from the library one day. :cool: (I'm cheap. Lol!)

As a kid I liked A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin. As an adult I'd have to say Catch 22 by Josef Heller. Tolkien, Adams & Vonnegut are all excellent authors too.

Well i loved The Soulforged by Margeret Weiss
Also you can't beat the Raven (Poe)
And the silmarillion was great albeit a bit slow... (Tolkien)

I'm currently reading Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. So far it's just as great and mindblowing as The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown's this strange kind of author who researches the details on everything he writes about... great books. My next read will be Deception Point; another Dan Brown, and then the other book of his that I've got (I can't recall the name).

Perhaps then I'll get around to reading another Iain M. Banks book. He's a great Sci-Fi author. So far I've only read The Player of Games, but the book was so good it easily shot to one of my all-time favourites. The guy writes it all so well. If anyone wants a Sci-Fi book to read... I recomment reading that. I'm told the one to read after that Consider Phloebas, which, although written before The Player of Games, is widely considered best read after it.

Also, Nineteen Eighty Four is a wonderful book, and I recommend reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World afterwards. Me and my dad have this thing going about how the former is 'If we'd lost the War', and the latter is 'But we won the war'.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest/Ken Kesey
M*A*S*H/Richard Hooker
Stranger In A Strange Land/Robert Heinlein
Doghouse Roses/Steve Earle

As a kid I liked A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin.

If you liked that as a kid try her Left Hand of Darkness. You will like it as an adult.

I'm currently reading Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. So far it's just as great and mindblowing as The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown's this strange kind of author who researches the details on everything he writes about...

Yes, but unfortunately he got many of those details wrong.

Voyage of the Beagle was a wonderful book. The writing was just incredible.

I also enjoyed all of the books in Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence, particularly Ring.

That sounds like a good book. I need to get that from the library one day. :cool: (I'm cheap. Lol!)
I am cheap too! :p

Yes, but unfortunately he got many of those details wrong.

Well I've not checked anything from Angels and Demons yet, I like to leave it 'til I've finished the book, lest I discover something that I should learn later on in the book, but The Da Vinci Code got me really interested in the whole thing, so I checked out the art references he makes, symbology that the Robert Langdon character talks about, and the whole Holy Grail thing, and it checked out fine. I particular enjoyed finding myself looking at a picture of The Last Supper and looking to see if there really was no chalice there, and counting the hands compared to the number of people. Everyone has their opinions though so I don't want to hijack this guy's book thread with ours.

If you liked that as a kid try her Left Hand of Darkness. You will like it as an adult.

I actually studied that one in year 11 at high school. I don't usually read much sci fi, but I thought Left Hand was excellent.

Well I've not checked anything from Angels and Demons yet, I like to leave it 'til I've finished the book, lest I discover something that I should learn later on in the book, but The Da Vinci Code got me really interested in the whole thing, so I checked out the art references he makes, symbology that the Robert Langdon character talks about, and the whole Holy Grail thing, and it checked out fine. I particular enjoyed finding myself looking at a picture of The Last Supper and looking to see if there really was no chalice there, and counting the hands compared to the number of people. Everyone has their opinions though so I don't want to hijack this guy's book thread with ours.


There are many articles and web sites pointing out the numerous factual errors in The Da Vinci Code.

Dismantling The Da Vinci Code
By Sandra Miesel
http://www.crisismagazine.com/september2003/feature1.htm

...So error-laden is The Da Vinci Code that the educated reader actually applauds those rare occasions where Brown stumbles (despite himself) into the truth. A few examples of his “impeccable” research: He claims that the motions of the planet Venus trace a pentacle (the so-called Ishtar pentagram) symbolizing the goddess. But it isn’t a perfect figure and has nothing to do with the length of the Olympiad. The ancient Olympic games were celebrated in honor of Zeus Olympias, not Aphrodite, and occurred every four years.

Brown’s contention that the five linked rings of the modern Olympic Games are a secret tribute to the goddess is also wrong—each set of games was supposed to add a ring to the design but the organizers stopped at five. And his efforts to read goddess propaganda into art, literature, and even Disney cartoons are simply ridiculous.

No datum is too dubious for inclusion, and reality falls quickly by the wayside. For instance, the Opus Dei bishop encourages his albino assassin by telling him that Noah was also an albino (a notion drawn from the non-canonical 1 Enoch 106:2). Yet albinism somehow fails to interfere with the man’s eyesight as it physiologically would.

But a far more important example is Brown’s treatment of Gothic architecture as a style full of goddess-worshipping symbols and coded messages to confound the uninitiated. Building on Barbara Walker’s claim that “like a pagan temple, the Gothic cathedral represented the body of the Goddess,” The Templar Revelation asserts: “Sexual symbolism is found in the great Gothic cathedrals which were masterminded by the Knights Templar...both of which represent intimate female anatomy: the arch, which draws the worshipper into the body of Mother Church, evokes the vulva.” In The Da Vinci Code, these sentiments are transformed into a character’s description of “a cathedral’s long hollow nave as a secret tribute to a woman’s womb...complete with receding labial ridges and a nice little cinquefoil clitoris above the doorway.”

These remarks cannot be brushed aside as opinions of the villain; Langdon, the book’s hero, refers to his own lectures about goddess-symbolism at Chartres.

These bizarre interpretations betray no acquaintance with the actual development or construction of Gothic architecture, and correcting the countless errors becomes a tiresome exercise: The Templars had nothing to do with the cathedrals of their time, which were commissioned by bishops and their canons throughout Europe. They were unlettered men with no arcane knowledge of “sacred geometry” passed down from the pyramid builders. They did not wield tools themselves on their own projects, nor did they found masons’ guilds to build for others. Not all their churches were round, nor was roundness a defiant insult to the Church. Rather than being a tribute to the divine feminine, their round churches honored the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Actually looking at Gothic churches and their predecessors deflates the idea of female symbolism. Large medieval churches typically had three front doors on the west plus triple entrances to their transepts on the north and south. (What part of a woman’s anatomy does a transept represent? Or the kink in Chartres’s main aisle?) Romanesque churches—including ones that predate the founding of the Templars—have similar bands of decoration arching over their entrances. Both Gothic and Romanesque churches have the long, rectangular nave inherited from Late Antique basilicas, ultimately derived from Roman public buildings. Neither Brown nor his sources consider what symbolism medieval churchmen such as Suger of St.-Denis or William Durandus read in church design. It certainly wasn’t goddess-worship....
Also,

The Truth Behind the Da Vinci Code
http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=50581

Breaking the Da Vinci Code
http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/newsletter/2003/nov7.html

Code Hot, Critics Hotter
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/114463p-103285c.html

There's an unranked pantheon for me:

Steppenwolf and Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The First Circle by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn


Also, I love:
Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

As a kid I liked A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin. As an adult I'd have to say Catch 22 by Josef Heller. Tolkien, Adams & Vonnegut are all excellent authors too.

Yes yes!

As a kid my favorite book in the world was A Wizard of Earthsea, I have read it more times than I can count.

Is anyone here a fan of Korzybski? I have a friend who idolizes him.

The Lord of the Rings-J.R.R. Tolkien. I normally don't like fantasy, but the way Tolkien writes is so different from most. He wrote LOTR as if it was a history, as if these places and characters really existed and he makes you believe they did, even if only for a moment.

The Diary Of Anne Frank-I read it when i was 14, the same age Anne was when she and her family moved into the attic. It's sad, but also inspiring, her courage and idealism was amzing, it was hardly ever shaken, even in the face of all that suffering.

The Prophet-Kahlil Gibran. I just think it's beautiful. It's so poetic and lyrical. It's also very philosophical and it makes you think.

The Ruba'iyat Of Omar Khayyam. For those who don't know, Omar Khayyam was a Persian poet who wrote in the Ruba'iya style, four line stanzas. He was one of the most skilled and most famous in that style. All the poems are about enjoying life and living in the moment, because we don't really know how long we have. It teaches you to appreciate life.

Honorable Mentions:
Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven-Mitch Albom. Both are about life, love, death, and the lessons we all must learn.They are both uplifting books, even though they feature sad events.

Love in the Time of Cholera-Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His prose is so beautiful and he is incredibly descriptive, you feel like you are in the place he is describing. The story is moving in its simplicity and its grace.

What is Art?-Leo Tolstoy

The Republic-Plato

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky translated the issue of Anna Karenina i am reading too.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky translated the issue of Anna Karenina i am reading too.

I look forward to reading their version. They also translated The Collected Stories of Nikolai Gogol.

It's good, i'm enjoying it.

Alas Babylon - Author I don't remember. In the end i was wishing i was Randy and i could live a simple plain life like his, working to survivie, and surviving to live, although its too bad all the lifes that were lost from the H-bombs. A must read.

House of Leaves (Mark Danielewski),

Hamlet (William Shakespeare),

Dune (Frank Herbert),

The Odyssey (Homer),

A Separate Peace (John Knowles),

The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne),

American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis),

and, from my childhood, Remember Me and The Midnight Club (Christopher Pike),

and Dogzilla (Dav Pilkey).

The Unabridged Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe.
He is truly my favorite writter.

-All time-
Wheel of Time - Jordan, Robert
Ender's Game - Card, Orson Scott
Dr. Seuss
-Current-
Joust & Alta - Mercedies Lackey
Dune - Frank Herbert
Camuloud/A dream of Eagles (he changed the name of the series halfway through) - Jack Whyte [rated R for very brief yet explicit sex-scenes]

"Raising the Stones", "The Gate to Women's Country" and "The True Game", by Sherri S Tepper.

All time favorite: All of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber.
Something a bit lighter: Douglass Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
Shakespeare (essentially a genre unto himself): "Hamlet."
Modern drama: Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" or Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" (It may be rife with misogyny, but it's really well-done, and when it comes to art my appreciation goes beyond the idea it represents.)

Non-fiction (sort of): Plato's Republic and Gorgias are both very good.

More non-fiction: Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

(As you can see, it's hard to pick a "favorite.")

Mine would have to be Swan Song by RobertMcCammon, The Stand by Stephen King and the Deathlands serries by James Axler.

The Hitchhiker series is without a doubt one of the best book series's around. I also loved the Star Wars books by Timothy Zahn. Angle Mass, also by Zahn, was a damn good read. Ender's game was awesome too, as was America: the book. One of my recent favorites is a book called Nuklear Age, by Brian Clevinger. Think Hitchhiker's, only with super heroes instead of sci-fi.

"The House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski
"Le Petit Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

You all need to check out the NLT Bible, it is written a bit more poetically in modern english rather than ancient english from 1611. It definitely flows better and is more fun to read because of the familiarity of the words and phrasing. Anyways, thats my pick.

You all need to check out the NLT Bible, it is written a bit more poetically in modern english rather than ancient english from 1611. It definitely flows better and is more fun to read because of the familiarity of the words and phrasing. Anyways, thats my pick.

On the contrary... although other translations may be easier to read... no other translation touches the KJV for pure poetry.

I also like The Handmaids Tale by Margeret Atwood which is far scarier than anything Stephen King ever wrote. I like C.J. Cherryh's sci-fi but not her fantasy. I especially like her Cyteen Trilogy. When I was younger I read a lot of S.E. Hinton and Andre Norton. As far as classics go I really liked Tess D'Ubervilles and both Anna Karenina and Dr. Zhivago.

Of All Time:
The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was the first Sherlock Holmes book I ever read, and I loved it. My father and I spent hours picking apart the book.

Currently:
The Grapes of Wrath. I loved the way the book was written, even if the plot was a little on the boring side.

Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
Papillon (forgot the author)
Jack London - The call of the wild
Victor Hugo - The miserables

John Man - Alpha beta
Stephen Levy - Crypto
Bruce Schneier - Secrets & Lies

All Quiet on the Western Front
and the Lord of the Rings

"The Brothers Karamozov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

There is no greater work of literature.

Whats so Great About America - Dinesh D'Souza

How to Win Friends & Influence People - Dale Carnegie

and for a fiction book,

The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion (Jane Austen)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)

Also thoroughly enjoyed 1984 - although it was terribly disheartening

Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo

Ooh! I've read that twice (at least)! It's fabulous!!

The Acid House
by Irvine Welsh!

I will have to pick the second most read book in the world, that being

Lord of the Rings.

I even bought the one book version of it, because thats how JRR Tolkien wanted it, but caved to publishers requests to bring it into 3 books.

I've wanted to read more douglas adams, though I think I'll wait until the movie is out to, Disney is making it, so I'm betting the book will be better. The series was pretty funny too. And Dr. Who wasn't that bad either, Mr Adams being a writer or something for the series.

I believe (too) The Count of Monte Cristo is the greatest thing ever written. In my opinion it is closely followed by Don Quixote and Crime and Punishment.

1. The Count of Monte Cristo
2. Don Quixote
3. Crime and Punishment

A couple that come to mind:

Ignorance - Milan Kundera
Memory and Dream - Charles de Lint
Possession: A Romance - AS Byatt

"The House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski
"Le Petit Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

En francais?

Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (My favourite by miles!)
Things Fall Appart - Chinua Achebe

Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy

I tried to post before, but it didn't show up.... Weird :p

The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peak. Like nothing else I've read (which is saying something ;) ) Whoever made that appalling TV movie of it should meet this guy :mp5: Seriously :mad:
Anything by Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory is so good I can't say anything else but READ IT! And I wanna live in The Culture :D




Mine would have to be Swan Song by RobertMcCammonDefinitely one of mine. So creepy yet real. The societal stuff was so believable. I actually had nightmares triggered by that book when I was pregnant - I was carrying my newborn child along a road when I saw a nuclear bomb destroy my capital city. I then had to decide whether to let my baby die slowly from radiation poisoning and mutation, or kill it quickly and mercifully then and there. :eek: :( I woke up with the sweats frequently. I don't think any other book has so thoroughly creeped me out. I started reading horror when I was a kid and moved on to Stephen King when I was about 11 or so, so I'm not an easy scare. :cool: :D

I'm just amazed that no one has said the bible yet.


Good one

The DaVinci code >Dan Brown< is the last thing i read and i really enjoyed it.. i wouldnt say favourite but it was really good

I don't like Browns books. Was it just me, or does he have an agenda against certain things (cough: religion).

Michael Asher - Firebird
Tom Clany - Bear and the Dragon, Cardinal of the Kremlin.
Conn Iggulden - Emperor Series

I don't like Browns books. Was it just me, or does he have an agenda against certain things (cough: religion).



Suprisingly he is Christian and very religous.. interesting, huh

anything by chuck palhuniuk, irvine welsh,

tom robbins, "half asleep in frog pajamas" its written entirely in second person.

laurell k hamilton for sci fi fantasy

non fiction: thorstein veblen, "theory of the leisure class" hilarious

"The Web Of Life," by Fritjof Capra, which I've read cover-to-cover at least three times.

Pebble in the Sky - Isaac Asimov (Damn good book)
The End of Eternity - Isaac Asimov (This Book can cause head aches if you spend to much time thinking about the premise)
Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire - Isaac Asimov (IE the Robot Series)
Foundation, Foundation and Empire, 2nd Foundation, Foundation's Edge, Foundation and Earth - Isaac Asimov (IE The Foundation Series)

So now that I'm done with the A's... Oh wait my other favorite author..

The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Valley of the Horses, The Mammoth Hunters, The Plains of Passage, The Shelters of Stone, - Jean M Auel

The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Valley of the Horses, The Mammoth Hunters, The Plains of Passage, The Shelters of Stone, - Jean M Auel

The Clan of the Cave Bear and The Valley of the Horses were both good, I thought (but haven't read them since middle school/high school!), but the rest seemed to degenerate into erotica.

Not that there's a problem with erotica, but I thought it got quite repetitive after awhile.

The Clan of the Cave Bear ...

has anyone seen the movie of it? I haven't, but I bought the dvd for my mother for like $5 at walmart once.

The Clan of the Cave Bear and The Valley of the Horses were both good, I thought (but haven't read them since middle school/high school!), but the rest seemed to degenerate into erotica.

Not that there's a problem with erotica, but I thought it got quite repetitive after awhile.Apart from Ayla inventing damn near everything (which got really tedious) the low grade soft porn got to me after a while. I agree about the first two, though. Quite good. After that they were pretty dull.

The movie was appalling.

The Wealth Of Nations - Adam Smith; The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx; The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money - John Meynard Keynes; Beyond A Boundary - CLR James; Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt.

Hmm, I have a lot of favorite books...

The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Belgariad by David Eddings
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
Pretty much anything written by Terry Goodkind
Pretty much anything that takes place in the Star Wars, Mechwarrior or Magic: The Gathering universes

Yeah, I'm a geek. :rolleyes:

CAPTAIN CORELLI'S MANDOLIN!!! By Louis de Bernieres.

The Nights Dawn Trilogy, by Peter F Hamilton. Some of the finest SF ever written.


Of course, LOTR and all the usual stuff is good, but I just preferred the Nights Dawn.

Sunset Song

i dont have a favorite. i read too much, ifear

My favorite book is a tough question. I'll give two books which I love. Depending on my mood one takes precedence over the other.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti
Fictiones by Jorge Luis Borges

I was beginning to wonder whether anybody on here read anything other than sci-fi and fantasy but Tom Clancy's name finally showed up.

The thread would have been better served if we were to list our favorite authors, sometimes there are too many titles to list or for that matter remember.

For fun:
Steven King
Dean Koontz
Tom Clancy
etc.

For information, anything historical, currently I am reading:

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of the Third Reich
by Willian L. Shirer

I do not believe that those of you who mention you only read the bible, read only the bible, it's to easy for you to say that, and I think you are lying by omission...a sin.

Lately, I'm kinda partial to the works of Francis Schaeffer. The most important are The God Who is There, Escape From Reason, and He is There, and He is Not Silent.

I'm also a fan or Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series and Tolkein's works.

CORELLI'S MANDOLIN!!! By Louis de Bernieres.

That's a damn good book. Did you see the news that de Bernieres lost his current manuscript-in-progress?

Anyway, I'm going go Lolita and Cosmicomics.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

The Ellimist Chronicles by K.A. Applegate

I am a big fan of Modesitt Jr's Fantacy novels especialy the Recluce books also I am a huge fan of simon Greens Deathstalker books and I really like George Martin's song of Ice and fire series Enders game is also a big favorite also

The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

I don't have a lot of fav books, just authors.

Orson Scott Card
Iaasc Asimov
Stephen Pressfield
Terry Pratchett
Daniel Silva
Franklin W. Dixon
J. R. R. Tolkien
Frank McCourt
Frank Herbert
Karl Marx
God (through others)

I disagree with the people who say the Bible isn't a good book. If you don't look at the sections meant to be chronology/records, but instead read the stories, you get a sense of a nation that lasted for thousands of years. Do a little background study and you realize that not only are almost all these stories are incredibly old, almost all of them were passed verbally for all those years. So many of the stories we read or see today are based on the Bible in one way or another. David and Goliath, Soloman and Bathsheba, Jesus and his life and times, you see the same themes all over the movies and literature,

I am way too addicted to have a favorite. Here are a few favorites:

Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375724834/103-7618706-7982239)

Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385493002/qid=1110353734/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-7618706-7982239)

Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0446672351/ref=pd_sim_b_1/103-7618706-7982239?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez,One Hundred Years of Solitude (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060929790/qid=1110353886/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/103-7618706-7982239)

Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140144560/qid=1110353965/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-7618706-7982239)

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156004801/qid=1110354071/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-7618706-7982239)

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671746723/qid=1110354127/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-7618706-7982239) , Last Chance to See (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345371984/qid=1110354178/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-7618706-7982239), Hitchiker's Guide series

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684853159/qid=1110354293/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-7618706-7982239?v=glance&s=books), Feersum Endjinn (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553374591/qid=1110354293/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/103-7618706-7982239?v=glance&s=books), etc ...

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sysiphus: And Other Essays (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679733736/qid=1110354550/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-7618706-7982239)

Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553380966/qid=1110354627/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_5/103-7618706-7982239?v=glance&s=books) (or anything else he's written)

Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465068146/qid=1110354478/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/103-7618706-7982239)

Ender's Game
Dune
Wheel of Time
The Three Musketeers
Dracula

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle - My favourite movie when I was growing up, and my favourite book now.

A Wizard of Earthsea trilogy by Ursula K. LeGuin - Another childhood fav carried over into early adulthood. The copies I have are older than me.

Anything by Edgar Allen Poe.

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card - There's a movie coming out next year, if you didn't know. Apparently Jake Lloyd (Anikin from Star Wars: Episode 1) is playing Ender.

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

Anything by H.G. Wells as well. The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds.

Just a few of my favourites, and not a single non-fiction among them. Go figure.

Its too difficult to pick just one, but I can narrow my choices down to the following 3 series of books in order of prefference:

1. Dune
2. Ender's Game
3. Harry Potter

My favourite authors would probably be... King, Adams and Puzo... The Godfather is my favourite book... but special mentions must go to Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Wambaugh...

I do not, however, enjoy reading Dan Brown. There are two fundamental things wrong with his writing:

a) he can't get his facts straight, and
b) he can't write