Reading All Time Favorites

[starry night]

I loved reading the recent thread on "What are you reading NOW??". But now I'd like to know your All Time Favorite recommendations!

As for me: My fiction favorites are "A Town Like Alice" by Nevil Shute; "The Daughter of Time" by Josephine Tey.

Non-fiction: Although they are both actually considered historical novels, "In Cold Blood" Truman Capote is incredibly gripping, as is Pulitzer Prize winner "The Killer Angels" by Shaara. "Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandries" by Neil DeGrasse Tyson is thrilling.

And my new all-time favorites come from re-reading literature from childhood. Read them so long ago, "Oh, sure I remember that", but forgot the feeling that comes with them. But reading "Winnie the Pooh" and "House at Pooh Corner" Milne was such a treat. For the adult reader there is so much wit and irony that a child wouldn't see. And the closing scenes of both books are winsome and heart-wrenching!

Tell me, what else should I be reading

 

[DangerMouse]

Wow, I'm surprised that a non-Australian has read "A Town Like Alice". We lived there for a few years and it was interesting to re-read it as a resident and identify places suggested by the book. BTW did you ever see the movie? Have to say I do think the book is good and the movie was great as well.

Probably the best fiction book I have ever read is Moloka'i by Alan Brennert. He told the story so well, and the characters really sucked me in.

I have tried to read a lot of the classics that were shoved down our throats at school, but have to say I didn't enjoy most of them and can't really even see why they are classics.

 

[WhoDaresWins]

I currently read mostly non-fiction these days. My favorite works of fiction are period pieces that take you to another place and time but have a universal appeal that makes the characters contemporary in any age: Anything by Jane Austen and the Brontes(Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre), War and Peace and Anna Karenina(Tolstoy), Vanity Fair(Thackeray), Of Human Bondage(Maugham), East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath(Steinbeck), The Sound and the Fury(Faulkner), The Yearling(Rawlings) and many more of the classics.

 

[Moemg]

My reading has changed so much over the years . It tends to mimic my life at the time . If my life is turmoil I'm reading about dysfunctional families . If life is smooth I may be reading mysteries or chick lit . So to pick out a favorite would be impossible . I have hundreds of favorites . Tracy Belden and Nancy Drew as a child . War & Remembrance later on , Deep end of the ocean years ago ,The Glass Castle a year ago and all of Stephen King's before he got too weird . Mauve Benchy , Michael Connelly , John Grisham , Sue Grafton , etc., etc., etc,. My favorites probably way outweigh my non favorites.

 

[WhoDaresWins]

Moe, if you get in the mood for dysfunctional families, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is a classic...the first line is even something like "Happy families are all alike but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way" or something to that effect. It is hard for me to believe that Tolstoy could write Anna then become such a crazy hard headed religious zealot in his old age.

 

[Midpack]

I guess I don't have much imagination as I only enjoy fiction in the form of movies and stage plays. By choice I haven't read any fiction in about 35 years, since I had to in college. So the books that have had the most profound impact on me wouldn't be most people's cup of tea. It's a long list, but here's a highly condensed version in no particular order:

• The Four Pillars of Investing - Bernstein
• Your Money or Your Life - Dominguez & Robin
• The Millionaire Next Door - Stanley/Danko
• Walden - Thoreau
• How to Retire Happy, Wild & Free - Zelinski
• Free to Choose - Friedman
• Body for Life - Phillips
• dozens of books on dogs, sailing & foodie stuff (personal interests)

I'll be interested in seeing other replies as well, thanks for starting the thread and good reading.

 

[crazy connie]

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck has lots of lessons for me, I first read it about age 9 and reread for the 4th time last year.
The Millionaire Next Door is almost always on a table and picked up for a few pages ever week.
I love garage sales and Salvation Army Store to buy my reading material. It used to annoy me when I forgot to take reading material to travel and bought at the airport and finished before reaching my destination. There went 7 to 9 bucks down the drain!
For light reading I grab a cookbook or two and enjoy mental gymnastics of new cooking ideas which I incorporate at the appropriate occasion.

 

[traineeinvestor]

Fiction

As a child: Swallows and Amazons series - Arthur Ransome
As a teenager: Robert Heinlen (Stranger in a Strange Land etc), Frank Herbert (Dune) and Agatha Christie
As an adult: no particular favourites, but I did enjoy Kate Mosse's Labyrinth and Sepulchre

Non-Fiction

The Millionaire Next Door - Stanley & Danko (the section on economic out patient care for adult children is hugely valuable)
The Origin of Wealth - Eric Bienhocker (a bit heavy, but the best rationalisation of instability in economic systems I have read)
Ari - Peter Evans (not sure why, but of all the biographies I have read, this is the one I keep coming back to)
The Four Pillars of Investing - William Bernstein
Against the Gods - Peter Bernstein

I'm still waiting for someone to start a thread on the worst books they have read.

 

[Moemg]

.
I love garage sales and Salvation Army Store to buy my reading material. It used to annoy me when I forgot to take reading material to travel and bought at the airport and finished before reaching my destination. There went 7 to 9 bucks down the drain!

I usually go to the library but when I buy books I resell them on Amazon and recoup some money .

 

[Lsbcal]

I read very few books over and most of my books come from the library. But I actually own this in paperback and have reread it: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre. The first and best book in a trilogy. If you read this then you might want to also watch the PBS series starring Alec Guiness from 1980 by that name (you can get it at Netflix and I've just requested it again ). This TV miniseries was very true to the book.

 

[Katsmeow]

Starry Night....I love the Daughter of Time. It is one of my absolute favorites.

I also really like the Millionaire Next Door.

From my childhood I loved Girl of the Limberlost a book that I heard of from my grandmother who read it when it first came out.

I really love reading and over the years have had many favorites and different genres I've enjoyed.

The past several years I've gone more sci fi and urban fantasy. There are so many. I really really love the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMasters Bujold. I also like a lot of David Weber, particularly the Honor Harrington series.

 

[kumquat]

Fiction:
Anything by Steinbeck
Slaughterhouse Five
The Sotweed Factor (John Barth)
One Flew Over the Cukcoo's Nest

Non-Fiction:
A Brief History of Time

 

[vicente solano]

I have to admit that I never re-read anything and I can only mention authors, and I have many favourites: Grisham, Block, Sandford, Pelecanos, McBain, Wambaugh, Susan Isaacs, Connelly,.... Any one of them, among other authors has written something I have liked a lot. And the opposite...

 

[Kroeran]

anything by floridian John D. MacDonald

the Travis McGee stuff is easy reading

the other stuff is heavier, but not much

 

[deserat]

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck has lots of lessons for me, I first read it about age 9 and reread for the 4th time last year.
The Millionaire Next Door is almost always on a table and picked up for a few pages ever week.
I love garage sales and Salvation Army Store to buy my reading material. It used to annoy me when I forgot to take reading material to travel and bought at the airport and finished before reaching my destination. There went 7 to 9 bucks down the drain!
For light reading I grab a cookbook or two and enjoy mental gymnastics of new cooking ideas which I incorporate at the appropriate occasion.

Oh Pearl S Buck is amazing and The Good Earth is great. It was dedicated to her father....there was another book, which was more autobiographical in nature and was dedicated to her mother. It talked about her and her family's life as missionaries in China.

There are so many good books - 'Killer Angels' is awesome, Richard Morgan's first Sci-Fi book (don't remember the title), Sue Grafton, John Le Carre, P.G. Wodehouse, Jane Austen, oh my gosh, I can't remember all of the authors...the author of Cadfael series.

And then of course, The Millionaire Next Door, Your Money or Your life, You Don't Need a Million to Retire, Work Less, Live More....

 

[Kroeran]

if you want something truely bizarre, books written by Robert Monroe, the radio & TV entrepreneur and engineer who in the 1950s started having out of body experiences and who established a research institute to document these experiences and teach.

YouTube - #1-7 Robert Monroe Institute

 

[brewer12345]

Almost anything written by Terry Pratchett. His books are hilarious, literate, clever and approachable, albeit with some Britishisms.

Another author I have followed is Walter J. Williams.

For literature, I think my all-time favorite is The Good Soldier Svejk, by Hasek.

 

[Martha]

For me, there is nothing like the childhood favorites when your imagination is still running so wild. The Winnie the Poo stories. Wind in the Willows. Boxcar Children. Bobbsey Twins. Nancy Drew. The black stallion novels. Wrinkle in Time. Call of the Wild. Many Asimov novels, especially the Foundation series. Heinlein novels, starting with the juveniles (my favorite was Tunnel in the Sky). My introduction to serious novels came when I was 12 and read Les Misérables and War and Peace. But nothing kept my attention like sci fi. Slaughterhouse Five is probably my all time favorite. Others include Ender's Game, Ringworld, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Dune, and on an on. At some point I dropped sci fi until recently and now am finding new good authors. My favorite recent sci fi novel is Snow Crash, recommended by someone here.

As I sit and try to remember some other novels come to mind not in the scifi category. Catch-22 really stands out and I still quote from that book in all sorts of situations. The White Hotel also was significant, but it probably was the circumstances when I read it.

Otherwise, for a number of years I have devoured mystery novels and spy novels. Few are great but many are good. Some of my favorite authors in mystery are Lawrence Block, John Dunning, Carol O'Connell, James Lee Burke, Tony Hillerman. For spy fiction the lead has to be John Le Carre. Other authors I like are Ken Follet, Frederick Forsyth, and more recently, Dan Silva. Not a lot of good post cold war spy fiction.

 

[haha]

Fiction:
One Flew Over the Cukcoo's Nest

One of my favorites which I am reading right now is Kesey's other great novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. An excellent book, and absolutely faithful to our Pacific Coastal logging life before the Spotted Owl.

Ha

 

[Kroeran]

other iconoclastic non-fiction

Die Broke

The Joy of Not Working: 21st Century Edition-A Book for the Retired, Unemployed, and Overworked

The Gospel of Jesus: According to the Jesus Seminar

Take Your Money and Run!: Revised Edition

Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience

Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compasionate Conservatism Who Gives, Who Doesn't, and Why It Matters

You Can Negotiate Anything

Superfreakonomics

Philosophy For Dummies

 

[RonBoyd]

I agree about Kesey's "Great Notion"; Much better than "Cuckoo's Nest."

There is so much to choose from -- Alan Watts, Terry Southern, Joseph Campbell, Sun Tse, Sri Ramakrishnu, "In Cold Blood," "Helter Skelter," Aristotle, Plato, Saint Augustine, The Vedas, the Books that didn't make it into the Bible, ...

One of the more mind-expanding books I ever read is "Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture" by Chris Knight.

 

[Johanna]

One book I enjoyed recently was The Children's Book by A S Byatt, because of my love for the classic children's literature that was written in the early 20th Century - works by Kipling, E. Nesbit, Kenneth Grahame and others. The book centers on a woman who writes children's novels and her circle of friends, artists, socialists and their families and children as the new century develops and the world changes. It's loosely based on the life of Edith Nesbit, but not in any of the details, it's more a woman "like" E. Nesbit. Their children head into the slaughter of WW I, though some survive to make a new start. One of her themes is how the children of writers and artists sometimes become sadly neglected in favor of the art. It's true that some of the children of the great children's writers - Grahame's son and others came to sad ends. I will always love the works they gave us though, The Wind in the Willows, The Railway Children, The Bastable stories, Kim, Puck of Pooks Hill, so many others.

 

[flipstress]

So many books, so little time! Here is a short list of my fiction faves:

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
Bridge of Birds by Gary Hughart
The Moon is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein

I read all the above as an adult, in the last 10 years or so, except Bridge of Birds which I read about 20 years ago.

When I was a teenager, I liked to read the "racy" stuff like Valley of the Dolls, The Carpetbaggers, The Godfather, plus thin paperback hokey romances.

From my youth, I liked Catcher in the Rye and Catch-22, and several Mark Twain books (Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Prince and the Pauper, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)--maybe I'll re-read them sometime.

Happy Reading, and Happy New Year to everyone!

 

[RonBoyd]

For the Phillip Marlowe fans:

Why Marlowe is still the chief of detectives

‘But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.’ Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

Chandler wrote that ‘P Marlowe has as much social conscience as a horse. He has a personal conscience, which is an entirely different matter’

Chandler’s conclusion about the hero detective in his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ might sound a touch corny to modern ears, but it rings true down the years: ‘If there were enough like him, the world would be a safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.’

 

[jefipius]

For literature, I think my all-time favorite is The Good Soldier Svejk, by Hasek.

I guess that explains your avatar!