What is your favorite book?

Growing up, I read "Encyclopedia Brown" series and John Grisham crime novels. I also went through a Steinbeck and Dickens phase.

Through college, I mostly read textbooks, haha.

My favorite books nowadays are actually cookbooks, particularly likening those byWilliams-Sonoma, Martha Stewart and Southern Living :lol:.

Real books? I'm particularly fond of Moby Dick. Sure, the chapters of whale anatomy were a bit if a drag, but I love the life on the sea that the book so vividly described.

 

I'm reading a book series called Ame Nochi Hare that would have to go on my favorites list Nyu~ Also Dinotopia would have to be the second favorite Nyu~

 

Currently it's A song of ice and fire, but my all time favorite is "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee.

 

Tough question for a Brit. lit. person:

1. Kite Runner

2. Wuthering Heights

3. The Complete Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Stories

4. The Complete Collection of William Shakespeare

5. The Complete Works of William Blake

6. Sibley's Field Guide to Birds of North America

7. The Luck of Barry Lyndon

I can't decide...I really can't decide the list keeps growing...I'm branching off into genres...help.

 

Watership Down definitely! Also American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and nearly anything by Gerald Durrell.

 

The spook's apprentice or wardstone chronicles or whatever it's called is the only series of books I'll ever make time to read even if it's for kids and I don't usually read stuff but I dunno I started reading it when I was like 10 or something. Their's also a movie coming out for it like next year I think.

 

Oh man, way too many great books out there. Here are two short lists of great (relatively recent) reads:

Nonfiction:
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion
Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace
Hold Everything Dear, by John Berger
Citizenship Papers, by Wendell Berry

Fiction:
Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
Elizabeth Costello, by JM Coetzee
Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges
The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury

None of these are specifically related to any lgbtq issues that I recall. If you're looking for that, I don't have much to recommend. Last year, I read Call Me by Your Name, by Andre Aciman, and it was a superb (if occasionally frustrating) read.

 

1. Beyond the Shadows
2. Edge of Shadows
3. Way of Shadows

If manga counts, Hellsing for 1st.

 

the cat who..book series by Lillian Jackson Braun

 

The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. Have all the books and read them several times

 

A Street Cat Named Bob! Best book ever, and based on a true story
And of course: A Song of Ice and Fire

 

My personal favorites and i still have copies in good condition even after 12 years

The invisible man by H.G. Wells
The jungle book by Rudyard Kipling

 

Omg I've read the invisible man. I hated it though :'(

 

Haha i know how you feel.

I hated it too after reading it twice

 

Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Every page has something important to say, it's a masterpiece!

Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an amazing exploration of the idea of values and quality, still extremely relevant today more than 40 years after it was first published.

 

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins or 1984 by George Orwell.

 

Highway Cats by Janet lisle and East by Edith Pattou

 

This is where I get I get stuck. So many good books out there. That genres help. Then for me there are works that need. You see if I pick Beowulf then I have got to pick Grendel by J. Gardner as a companion piece, so tied are they in my mind.

GW has picked two books which have more to do philosophy than fiction and the only reason we include Thoreau and Emerson in the cannon of American literature is due the paupacy things to pick from at the time, this is not to say they aren't important or good, just not lierature; and AlamoCity went to the culinary arts. I even had to select my favorite field guide.

I suprised and I'm not at Moby Dick being here twice, surely "the great American novel", but it's like the paintings of Francis Bacon, my favorite contemporary painter, if I were fortunate to own one I'd loan it to a museum. If I hung it in my house I'd have nightmares.

Stephen King and Charles Dickens are hacks, but they know how to create charaters and write stories the keep us coming back for more.

My list has always been fluid, but if I had to face life with only one book it would be the Works of Sheakespeare, Oxford Univ. Press. Virtually, everything that has been and will be written is there.

I'll also admit to having certain biases. There are only three classic America writer's worth reading Poe, Gertude Stein, and Fitzgerald. The British, and by extention the Scots, Irish, and Welsh, captured most of the same themes ealier and more entertainingly. Yes, Brit Lit gets to keep T. S. Eliot. I'll admit to having a soft spot for Southern writers over Yankees: Faulkner, Lee, Capote, Williams, Conroy. For the examination of society Wolf and Fowelles has inherited Thackery's crown.

For me the question ultimately quickly become writing my own personal cannon of the great works. I like popular fiction as well Grishom, Rita Mae Brown (love Sister Jane remindes me of my horse trainer), Cornwell, Preston and Douglas (creators of Agent Aloysius Pendergast), and Robert Parker (Spenser series).

Can't stop at one...it's my passion as people are wont to say.

I also like Eloise and Allen Say for picture books...I cant stop...help.