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Thread: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

  1. #61
    Mon chou Choo vaticanplum's Avatar
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    Quote Originally Posted by Falls City Beer View Post
    Holy Crap! I said Ada by Nabokov without even looking at yer list. Whoa.
    Great, great book. I also almost said Bleak House instead of Great Expectations.

    I have tried to read Portrait of an Artist so many times. I canNOT get through it.

    Also, as a side note pertaining to many other people's lists, I loathe Tim Robbins. I think Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is the only book I've ever read which made me furious at the end that I had wasted my time with it. Maybe we should have a thread of authors that people think they should like but don't, like the classic songs thread.
    There is no such thing as a pitching prospect.


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  3. #62
    Member pedro's Avatar
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    Quote Originally Posted by vaticanplum View Post
    Great, great book. I also almost said Bleak House instead of Great Expectations.

    I have tried to read Portrait of an Artist so many times. I canNOT get through it.

    Also, as a side note pertaining to many other people's lists, I loathe Tim Robbins. I think Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is the only book I've ever read which made me furious at the end that I had wasted my time with it. Maybe we should have a thread of authors that people think they should like but don't, like the classic songs thread.

    I'll field that as I think I'm the only one who mentioned him. Yeah, I can understand not liking his books. I didn't like the last couple ones at all. I'm also not sure that I'd like it as much now as I did when I originally read all those books back in high school. I thought it was hot **** then though and so did pretty much everyone my age who was even vaguely counter culture and read.
    School's out. What did you expect?

  4. #63
    Mon chou Choo vaticanplum's Avatar
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    Quote Originally Posted by pedro View Post
    I'll field that as I think I'm the only one who mentioned him. Yeah, I can understand not liking his books. I didn't like the last couple ones at all. I'm also not sure that I'd like it as much now as I did when I originally read all those books back in high school. I thought it was hot **** then though and so did pretty much everyone my age who was even vaguely counter culture and read.
    That's why it upsets me that I don't like him. I feel that way about a lot of beat writers, I guess.

    Also, Pedro, thanks for being classy and not pointing out my name issue. I always mix them up
    There is no such thing as a pitching prospect.

  5. #64
    Baseball card addict MrCinatit's Avatar
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    I'm going to cheat, in more ways than one:

    2001/2010 - Arthur C. Clarke
    Cosmos/Contact/A Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan
    Ball Four - Jim Bouton
    Les Miserbales - Victor Hugo
    1984/Animal Farm - George Orwell
    The complete works of H.G. Wells
    Gulliver's Travels - Jonathen Swift
    The Beatle's Anthology
    Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
    American Hero - Larry Beinhart
    Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
    Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
    Slaughterhouse Five - Kirt Vonnegut

  6. #65
    Man Pills Falls City Beer's Avatar
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    Quote Originally Posted by vaticanplum View Post
    Great, great book. I also almost said Bleak House instead of Great Expectations.

    I have tried to read Portrait of an Artist so many times. I canNOT get through it.

    Also, as a side note pertaining to many other people's lists, I loathe Tim Robbins. I think Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is the only book I've ever read which made me furious at the end that I had wasted my time with it. Maybe we should have a thread of authors that people think they should like but don't, like the classic songs thread.
    Give Portrait one more shot. Really. What's so disarming about Joyce is that in contrast to his almost overwhelming anti-sentimentalism there exist moments of such heartbreakingly affective directness. In other words, whatever is "felt" is earned, unlike in the works of so many other writers.

    And Lolita, while absolutely brilliant in its own right, is no match for Ada. I agree.
    “And when finally they sense that some position cannot be sustained, they do not re-examine their ideas. Instead, they simply change the subject.” Jamie Galbraith

  7. #66
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    1. Flaubert - Sentimental Education
    2. Waugh - Brideshead revisited
    3. Joyce - Ulysses
    4. Beckett - Molloy
    5. Calvino - Invisible cities
    6. Dostoyevski - Brothers Karamazov
    7. WG Sebald - Emigrants
    8. WG Sebald - Rings of Saturn
    9. Joan Didion - Play it as it lays
    10. Nabakov - Pale fire
    11. Thackeray - Vanity Fair
    12. Fernando Pessoa - Book of disquiet
    13. Andre Breton & Philippe Soupault - the Magnetic fields
    14. J.G. Ballard - Crash
    15. Raymond Queneau - Witch Grass
    16. John Cheever - the Wapshot Chronicle
    17. Bocaccio - The Decameron
    18. Plutarch's Lives
    19. Eliot - Middlemarch
    20. Fitzgerald - great gatsby

  8. #67
    Member pedro's Avatar
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    Quote Originally Posted by vaticanplum View Post
    That's why it upsets me that I don't like him. I feel that way about a lot of beat writers, I guess.

    Also, Pedro, thanks for being classy and not pointing out my name issue. I always mix them up

    That's me. Always classy

    If I'm going to toss a name in of a famous & popular writer who I just don't enjoy it'd have to be Hemingway.
    School's out. What did you expect?

  9. #68
    Man Pills Falls City Beer's Avatar
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    Quote Originally Posted by pedro View Post
    That's me. Always classy

    If I'm going to toss a name in of a famous & popular writer who I just don't enjoy it'd have to be Hemingway.
    Hemingway went downhill...fast.
    “And when finally they sense that some position cannot be sustained, they do not re-examine their ideas. Instead, they simply change the subject.” Jamie Galbraith

  10. #69
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    Quote Originally Posted by nycredsfan View Post
    Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Chabon
    White Noise by DeLillo
    The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami
    New York Trilogy by Auster
    Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon
    Pastoralia by Saunders
    Collected Fictions by Borges (this is probably cheating)
    The Loser by Bernhard
    Frog by Dixon
    Cloud Atlas by Mitchell
    Motherless Brooklyn by Lethem
    Great list - I forgot about white noise, or it would be on my list and Borges is the best, but I thought I had to restrict myself to novels. Oh well.

  11. #70
    MarsArmyGirl RosieRed's Avatar
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    Quote Originally Posted by vaticanplum View Post
    I have tried to read Portrait of an Artist so many times. I canNOT get through it.
    I can't either. I've owned a copy for at least 12 years, have picked it up and started it at least 8 times.

    There's another classic fiction book, I'm drawing a blank, that I've tried to read a number of times ... it has a ton of footnotes ... man. That's going to drive me crazy. But anyway, I'm not a huge fan of footnotes as it turns out, especially in fiction books.

    Some of my favorite non-fiction/memoirs:
    The Orchid Thief -- Susan Orlean
    Lovely Bones/Lucky: A Memoir -- Alice Sebold (I know the former is "fiction," but close enough, IMO)
    South -- Ernest Shackleton
    Paula -- Isabel Allende
    Stolen Lives -- Malika Oufkir
    Guns, Germs & Steel -- Jared Diamond
    Into the Wild and Into Thin Air -- Jon Kraukauer
    At Home in The World -- Joyce Maynard (not sure why, but I just really liked this book when I read it)
    In the Heart of the Sea -- Nathaniel Philbrick

    I read so many travel/adventure/disaster books, I could have a favorite list of just that genre.

    Some fiction might have made my list had I remembered them earlier:
    A Tree Grows in Brooklyn -- Betty Smith
    Bastard Out of Carolina -- Dorothy Allison
    Summerland -- Michael Chabon (this is probably my favorite of his, actually, I don't know why I spaced on it earlier)

  12. #71
    Member Gainesville Red's Avatar
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    I'll never be able to narrow it down to eleven. We'll see how it goes.

    No particular rank.

    -The Right Stuff. Tom Wolfe

    - A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway

    - Dharma Bums and On the Road. Kerouac

    - The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck (Maybe #1)
    -Jarhead. Anthony Swofford

    - All The President's Men. Bernstein, Woodward

    - The Rum Diary. Hunter Thompson

    - Fight Club. Chuck Palahniuk

    - Moneyball. Michael Lewis

    - Helter Skelter. Buglliosi

    - The Natural. Bernard Malamuc

    - Hell's Angels. Hunter Thompson (Another maybe #1)

    - Strip Tease. Carl Hiaasen

    - All The King's Men. Robert Penn Warren

    - Thank You For Smoking. Christopher Buckley

    - Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse Five. Maybe Slapstick. Vonnegut.

    - Fear and Loathing either in Las Vegas or on the Campaign Trail '72. Hard to choose

    - Hiroshima. John Hersey. (maybe #1)

    - Big Sur. Kerouac

    - The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe

    - Stormy Weather or Tourist Season. Carl Hiaasen.

    - The Jordan Rules. Sam Smith

    - Game of Shadows. Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. It's intresting and they almost went to prison for it.

    - The First Third. Neal Cassady

    - Clemente by David Maraniss.

    - 1984. George Orwell.

    - The Boys of Summer. Roger Kahn.

    - Either of the Summer of ' books by David Halberstam as well as The Fifties.

    - The Jungle. Upton Sinclair.

    - How Disney Devours the World. Carl Hiaasen

    - Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Wolfe. (Maybe #1)

    - Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway

    -all of the other Carl Hiaasen books. Read anything you can from Carl Hiaasen


    I had a felling there would be more than 11. I can't and won't cut it down. If anything there should probably be more of them. I'm sure I've forgotten plenty that I should have ranked.
    Last edited by Gainesville Red; 02-28-2007 at 01:03 AM. Reason: I forgot Old Man and the Sea.

  13. #72
    Mod Law zombie-a-go-go's Avatar
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    1. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
    2. Weetzie Bat - Francesca Lia Block
    3. The Trial - Franz Kafka
    4. American Gods - Neil Gaiman
    5. The Stand - Stephen King
    6. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
    7. The Great and Secret Show - Clive Barker
    8. No Exit - Jean-Paul Sartre
    9. Neuromancer - William Gibson
    10. The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe
    11. Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook v3.5 (it sees the most use, so...)
    "It's easier to give up. I'm not a very vocal player. I lead by example. I take the attitude that I've got to go out and do it. Because of who I am, I've got to give everything I've got to come back."
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  14. #73
    Baseball card addict MrCinatit's Avatar
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    Quote Originally Posted by Gainesville Red View Post
    - The Natural. Bernard Malamuc
    Excellent call. I read the book after seeing the movie several times - what amazed me was how the movie was almost exactly like the book, page per page - until the last two pages. While I love the movie, the different endings make them two totally different stories.

  15. #74
    Be the ball Roy Tucker's Avatar
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    Quote Originally Posted by vaticanplum View Post
    ... and no poetry or plays except for Shakespeare (I can't cut him out).
    When I started my list, I automatically started with Shakespeare. Best writer ever, bar none.

    But after some semantic soul searching, I couldn't really say his plays are my favorite *books*. So I took them off. To thine own self be true, I supose.
    She used to wake me up with coffee ever morning

  16. #75
    La Dolce Vita
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    Re: Your all time Top 11 favorite books

    Quote Originally Posted by vaticanplum View Post
    I could probably pass with sweetshop's list

    I love this thread...it is reminding me of books I've always wanted to read but haven't. Keep em coming.


    teach tolerance.


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