What is your favourite book?
How dare you make me choose . . . Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy, the ultimate edition (technically one book right?)
something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike one single book :]
Maybe not the best book I’ve ever read, but favourite for sure goes to Kafka on the Shore. Had me hooked the entire way through, and it’s a book I’ve thought of for years after reading it initially.
If I can pick another, Siddhartha is an all-time favourite too.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson. It’s a book about math monks. It has a lot of interesting ideas about philosophy and the nature of the universe and so on. It’s the sort of book that has surprisingly a lot of heart for what you’d assume based on the above.
I love Neal Stephenson, and that might be my favorite as well
The Stinky Cheese man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy planning a 4th read soon.
The Doland Bathelme short story anthology, Sixty Stories. He has such a way with the short story. It’s hard to describe, but there’s some real masterpieces in there like “The School,” “The Great Hug,” and “The Death of Edward Lear.”
It’s a really tough choice. I think “Night Watch” by Terry Pratchett (GNU STP) wins by a hair.
The longer I live, the more value I find in (re-) reading the Discworld series. Both in discovering an additional gem of a joke, and finding some internal value I hold dear was from Discworld all along. They’re the kind of books I imagine myself reading to my future children.
Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman. Just superb, modern style, Alice in Wonderland almost.
Kim (1901) by Rudyard Kipling is the story of a boy coming of age in colonial India. Kipling grew up in India himself, and the sheer richness of the many cultures that Kim experiences as he travels across India and up into the lower Himalayas with a Tibetan llama is mind-blowing. Meanwhile Kim is drawn into the “Great Game” of spying between the European powers. It’s a deeply moving and beautiful book. Best of all, you can download it for free in all the major ebook formats!
Cannery Row by Steinbeck
Steinbeck’s style is incredibly immersive. It has the perfect balance of illustrative/poetic/flowery descriptions and cerebral/analytical language. I love the characters and their antics, and how relatably they’re written. I can identify with their feelings and motives even though I’m the furthest thing from a bunch of 1930’s Californians.
My mom bought it for me to take on my high school band trip to San Francisco (which involved a long flight and some long bus rides). I think I remember more about the book than I do the trip :)
Steinbeck is just so special. Having grown up in California I appreciate his depictions of Monterey/Salinas, but his writing is just something else. Currently reading Travels with Charley for the first time and loving seeing the rest of the country through his eyes!
I totally agree regarding Steinbeck’s immersive style! I’ve only read ‘Beyond Eden’ so far, but I really liked the immersion (neither being American nor a person from the 19th century…)
The one I think about most often is Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. Specifically the Priest’s tale and the Scholar’s tale.
I always come back to the art of war by sun tzu. It’s a dense, readable book that’s filled with advice you can consider outside of a war context.
Lately I’ve been really enjoying the hell mode series. Seeing the MC go from being the weakest character in the world to protecting entire countries through the power of bravery, treating others well, ingenuity, and hard work is the exact sort of story that appeals to me.
Tao Te Ching Specifically the DC Lau translation https://terebess.hu/english/tao/lau.html
I love the poetry focused version by Ursula K. Le Guin:
I wanted a Book of the Way accessible to a present-day, unwise, unpowerful, and perhaps unmale reader, not seeking esoteric secrets, but listening for a voice that speaks to the soul. I would like that reader to see why people have loved the book for twenty-five hundred years.
Ooh! I’m gonna put that on my list. I have an old Prentice Hall one from 1963.
By which translator/reteller?
“Translated, with introductory essays, comments and notes by Wing-Tsit Chan”
Thanks!
The Witch’s Handbook by Malcom Bird
It’s a children’s book, I’ve loved it my whole life haha
I guess I didn’t really think about it. But Cars and Trucks and Things That Go (And other Richard Scary books) make up about 60% of my sense of humor. So, yes - those are favorites.
Along side McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
I would say that VALIS is up there by PKD. I’m into that sort of crazy rabbit hole type of thing. I also read his Exegesis and several other novels and shorts, but I think I’m not done with him - I think I need to read Flow My Tears… The Interface thing on Reddit by mother horse eyes was really great and in the same vein.
Recent good science fiction: I really adored the Southern Reach trilogy which has some deep inscrutable undertones to it. There’s also a book called Shades of Grey that I very much enjoyed and I hope it gets some follow up. Station Eleven was good, part of a book club I was in. I very much like and respect Michel Holloubeq’s speculative fiction novels but he’s not for everyone. The whole 3 Body Problem thing was amazing but a bit outside of what I usually read.
I also was surprised to get obsessed with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Min Kamp sextet. I thought the last novel of the series was a genius piece of work, but I can’t remember if it was book 2 or 3 that I really didn’t enjoy.
I also like classics and I fucking adored War and Peace by Tolstoy. Someone mentioned Steinbeck in this thread and East of Eden is stunning. I also really really enjoyed Tortilla Flat. Is Bolano considered a classic? He should be. Some “classic” outliers that you may not have heard of: Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side. The War of the End of the World by Llosa. Oh, also anything by Hermann Hesse is going to be great.
Both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s the Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde are fantastic.
The Name of the Rose by Eco is a wonderful mystery set in a medieval monastery.
William Gibson is a solid go-to for sci-fi.
I’m much in love with the strange ridiculousness of Samuel Beckett’s stuff too.
Nonfiction: Arctic Dreams by Lopez is stunning. Anything by John Muir. Nature/environment/ecology stuff which I like.
The Other Side is one of my favorites.
Do you like the Strugatskies?
I am unfamiliar! Tell me more!
Brothers Boris and Arkady. The second most important Soviet-era Eastern Bloc sci-fi writers, after Lem.
Lem wrote Solaris, the Strugatskys wrote Roadside Picnic (adapted as Stalker).
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve read Lem and love his work. Will totally check out their work. I think I’ll start with Roadside Picnic as Stalker is easily one of my favorite movies ever. I just saw Hard to be a God and loved it! You just made that connection for me, so I’ll definitely dig into their books. I really love all of Tartovsky’s stuff too and I even got to see Nostalghia in the theater about a decade ago. I’m American but I love that era of Soviet cinema.
