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Thought this would make for a good topic, since I’m a dedicated bibliophile.  What’s your list of books that everyone must read?  I think that these books need to carry a message and some sense of scope and entertainment.  Otherwise, we’d be left with a list of nothing but Finnegan’s Wake.  No offense Joyce fans, although it’s my understanding that IBM’s Deep Blue recently became the first to ever actually finish a James Joyce novel.  Without further adieu, here’s my list, in no particular order:

The Civil War:  A Narrative--Shelby Foote
In Cold Blood--Truman Capote
Catch 22--Joseph Heller
The Lord of the Rings--J.R.R. Tolkein
The Illiad--Homer
Slaughterhouse Five--Kurt Vonegut
Dune--Frank Herbert
Ubik--Phillip K. Dick
As I Lay Dying--Wiiliam Faulker
A History of Britain, Volume I--Simon Schama
Fight Club--Chuck Palahniuk
A Clockwork Orange--Anthony Burgess
The Handmaid’s Tale--Margaret Atwood
Fast Food Nation--Eric Schlosser
The Great Gatsby--F. Scott Fitzgerald
All Quiet on the Western Front--Erich Maria Remarque
Night--Elie Wiesel
The Right Stuff--Tom Wolfe
The Inferno--Dante
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich--William L. Shirer
Stalin--Edvard Radzinsky
Schindler’s List--Thomas Kineally
Cosmos--Carl Sagan
Mao--Jung Chang
A Brief History of Time--Stephen Hawking
1984--George Orwell
Brave New World--Aldous Huxley
The Screwtape Letters--C.S. Lewis
The Road to Wellville--T. Coraghessan Boyle
Rubicon:  The Last Years of the Roman Republic--Tom Holland
1066:  The Year of Conquest--David Howarth
The Rape of Nanking--Iris Chang
John Adams--David McCullough

If you want to know more than you could ever have hoped :
Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser
The American Way of Death Revisited (Vintage) - Jessica Mitford

Dlphntat - 29 August 2006 11:35 PM

If you want to know more than you could ever have hoped :
Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser
The American Way of Death Revisited (Vintage) - Jessica Mitford

Fast Food Nation is just a great book.  If you liked it, Don’t Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock is also a great read.  He’s the guy who did the documentary Supersize Me.

Damn I’ve only read three of those books.

I didn’t see any of the following books on your list.

David Copperfield by Edmund Wells (It’s more thorough than the Dickens)
Rarnaby Budge by Charles Dikkens.  The well-known Dutch author.
The Amazing Adventures of Captain Gladys Stoutpamphlet and her Intrepid Spaniel Stig Amongst the Giant Pygmies of Beckles vol. 8
Thirty Days in the Samarkind Desert with the Duchess of Kent by A. E. J. Eliott, O.B.E.

Now those are true classics.

Fast Food Nation is on my to do list.  Books are one of those things I vaguely remember making time for.

I try to read a modern book then read one of the classics I should have read in high school and college.  I’m trying to get through The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and it’s a rough book.  So freaking depressing.

I just finished The Ruins and Defiance.  Both are really good and well worth picking up.

Stefan - 01 September 2006 09:29 AM

I try to read a modern book then read one of the classics I should have read in high school and college.  I’m trying to get through The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and it’s a rough book.  So freaking depressing.

I just finished The Ruins and Defiance.  Both are really good and well worth picking up.

Try reading Ulysses by James Joyce.  Or anything by Joyce.  It’s a Darwinian struggle to finish anything by him.  I know that certain slack-jawed individuals think he’s great, but his stuff is doggerel to me. 

Hawthorne and Melville are also terminal bores. 

I probably should have included some Dickens on the list as well.  I probably would have went with Great Expectations.

Are you sure didn’t mean Great Expectations by Edmund Wells?

Stefan - 01 September 2006 10:50 AM

Are you sure didn’t mean Great Expectations by Edmund Wells?

I’ve never read anything by Edmund Wells.  Actually, he’s not very popular.  :)

Kerouac’s On The Road
after that, you need to read the two volume Collected Letters

The Complete Poems of T.S. Eliot-- If you can get through the poetry, there’s an incredible yet unfufilled spiritual journey that takes place here.

The Great Gatsby-- powerful and easy to get through

The Sun Also Rises-- probably my favorite Hemingway novel. 

Frankenstein’s Monster-- if you can forget all of the added baggage from every other Frankenstiein story, this is an incredible story about man’s attempt to be god and the ramifications.

Any Michael Moorcock-- from his sword & sorcery stuff to his headier Jerry Cornelius stories, anything by Moorcock is revolutionary.  Elric should be on everyone’s list.

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods-- his novels have been hit or miss but this is a wonderful look at the melting pot that is America.

Holy crap Kerouac sucks.  On the Road is the biggest bore.  In fact, I hate all the beat poets.  I respect what they did but reading their crap should be a crime.  It’s like minimalism.  I can appreciate the concept but don’t ask me to like the art.

The Sun Also Rises is a great book.  Highly recommend that one.  I recommend anything from Neil Gaiman especially Good Omens.  Lots of fun to read.

I guess I’ll go home now.

I like the Beats.  I think they’re to their generation what Hemingway and Fitzgerald were to the lost generation.  They were the voice of the disenchanted.  For Kerouac, it’s the language and the lyric-like quantity to his work that I appreciate.  There stuff is really the last American writing of the 20th century that I can handle.  But I’ll say that they should have stuck to the small period around when On The Road and Howl and maybe Naked Lunch were published.  Beyond that, the stuff isn’t all that great.  With the exception of Dharma Bums.  I enjoy the freedom in that book.

Good Omens is great.  Can’t believe I’d forgotten that since I think American Gods comes the closest.  His novels have been more misses for me than hit but I haven’t read Anansi Boys yet.  Any of his short story collections are huge recommendations.  I can’t wait for the new one in a couple of months.

And not quite at this level, Greg Rucka’s novels are highly entertaining.  The last two Queen and Country novels have taken the world he’s established in the comics and just gone in-depth on them, revealing aspects of the comics that should have been totally obvious.

In a bit more fantasy element, Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy is a great read.

Since my son as born a couple of years ago, I’ve had a problem finding time to read novels.  I miss them.

I have a big leather-bound copy of The Iliad and the Odyssey that i swear I am going to finish some day.

Have to back the vote for Moorcock. I tend to judge a book by how well the writing hooks me. Sentence structure, concept. Tolkien doesn’t do it for me, reading LOTR is almost a chore, but Moorcock is a pleasure, every time and he’s dealing much more complex ideas. Shakespeare is less work than Tolkien for the most part. The BIBLE is less work half the time. Which isn’t to say Tolkien doesn’t deliver, but after twenty pages I just want to quit and read Douglas Adams.*

*This excludes the Hobbit. I can still read the Hobbit in an afternoon.

Eric, didn’t you mention a while ago that before the last Elric comic, you hadn’t read any Moorcock?  I take it you’ve gone and read them in the couple of years since #1 of Making of a Sorcerer came out? 

The comparison to Tolkien is a good one but I can still get lost in parts of LOTR.  But Moorcock is much clearer and succinct thatn Tolkien could ever hope to be.  Moorcock doesn’t get flowery like too many fantasy writers tend to do.

Although never officially released as a book during his lifetime, “Hour of the Dragon” by Robert E. Howard is entertaining. So is “Shadow Castle” by Marian Cockrell. It’s a great fantasy story that was written for kids, but if you enjoy castles, goblins, dragons, etc. I highly recommend it. “Peter Pan” is also a favorite. Most books by Christopher Moore are also high on my list of entertaining books.

The classics “Dracula” or “Frankenstein” are more than just horror, but a good social commentary. “Fevre Dream” by George R.R. Martin and “Vampire$” by John Steakly are great for good ol’ vampire stories though.