Your favourite book!

So - we had the "anime" thread and the "CD in your stereo" thread, but I think we've never had a thread about what we read or like to read.

What are you reading right now?
What's your favourite book or books ever?
What's the latest thing you read?

I'll start

My current reading is "Brave New World" - by Aldous Huxley
My latest book read before that was "Diary" - by Chuck Palahniuk

My favourite books ever are "Lolita", by Vladimir Nabokov, "Morphine", by Mikhail Bulgákov, "Tiempo Transcurrido (Time Gone By)" - by Juan Villoro and "Less than Zero", by Bret Easton Ellis

How about yourselves?

Let's discuss.

 

I really enjoyed Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, but I'm starting to really enjoy The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steve Kent.

 

How could I forget Catcher in the Rye?

One of my favourite books ever, as well.
And my ex never gave it back, dammit...

Gonna have to get a new one - it just HAS to be in everybody's library.

 

pffft, who reads.

Joking aside, once I quit being a lazy ass I'm going to read The Three Kingdoms. I've had it for 6+ months. The last memorable thing I remember reading was The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Kinda confusing, if I do say so myself.

The Three Kingdoms: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/7119005901/qid=1122878367/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_sbs_1/002-3676874-6689625?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

 

The complete works of Scott Adams.

 

mause!

 

'Brave New World' is excellent. the forward the author attached after the 60's is very interesting

if you like Huxley, check out George Orwell. read '1984' and tell me its not happening today.
big brother is indeed watching.

im a whore for detective stories, so Walter Mosley and Raymond Chandler are a couple of my favorite authors. 'The big sleep" and 'the long goodbye' have just as much insight into the pop culture of the 20's as it dose in todays.

the only sci fi writers i ever got into were Philip K Dick and William Gibson. 'neuro-mancer' is an absolute classic. i mean come on, envisioning the internet almost a decade prior!?
'Do androids dream of electric sheep' (ok... blade runner) is my favorite by Dick. how he blurs the line on "being human" is fascinating.

Ken Kesey's 'One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest' is another one of my top 10. How he gets christ imagery into a book about an asylum is beyond me.

one of the best newer books ive read was 'Guns, germs, and Steel' by Jared Diamond. insanely interesting. i read it in less than a day. really makes you ditch the whole anglo saxon superiority complex.

ok i gotta shut up now.

 

ooohh OHHHH... 'Enders Game' by Orson Scott Card is annother on of my favorite books. great strait-up un bastardized sci fi.

ok im done.

 

Farenheit 451, Great Gatsby, and Neanderthal by John Darnton.

 

Neuromancer has to be one of my favorites, even though it took two times reading it to actually understand the damn book.

 

Neuromancer is the one that starts "The sky was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel" , right? I always wanted to read that one, but have never found it - anywhere. But Jorge Luis Borges did envision the Internet or something similar in 1949. He called it the "Aleph".

I need to get "Guns, Germs and Steel" - thanks for the recommendation.

 

I had to special order a copy of Neuromancer. Good luck finding it.

Edit: There's a signed copy of the original version up on eBay now. It's only 600 pounds .

 

In the past 6 months I've read.... 7 books. None of them were novels, more like "inspiritational" and "self-help" books. I was in this class last semester in college that had me read 2 of them and since then I've gotten hooked on those types of books, and they have pretty much changed me inside and out. They also made me read more books than I ever have before. Out of those seven, my favorite one is "Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire" by Deepak Chopra. Another favorite book that I really enjoyed was "The Hobbit".

I'm currently rereading the Deepak book I listed, as well as "The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and The Self" by Jean Shinoda Bolen, and "Masters of Doom" by David Kushner.

 

maybe i shoul buy, and read Tao Of Jeet Kune Do, since i still have JKD in my blood

 

My favorite author is Haruki Murakami, and I'm currently reading his "Kafka on the Shore".

I also like current Russian writers like Pelevin and Kurkov.

 

Last book I read was Harry potter and the Half blood prince. Yes, I am a sad Shite - I even went to the shop where I work at midnight to pick it up!

Favourites are probably Orwells 1984 or animal Farm.

 

Wow, it's eerie how many people mentioned some of my favorite authors and books here! I think my favorite author of all ever has to be William Gibson - I started with Neuromancer at age 13, and like Taemos, I didn't quite understand everything until I read it the next year. Now my increasingly worn-out copy gets read at least once a year. If you like Neuromancer and want more Gibson, the 'Bridge trilogy', as it's called, is very excellent reading, comprised of the books Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties. Also excellent is his latest, Pattern Recognition. I was so excited for the release of that book in 2003 that I actually bought a review copy off of eBay three months before the book was supposed to hit stores. I just found a hardcover copy of Mona Lisa Overdrive (part of the 'Sprawl trilogy' along with Neuromancer and Count Zero) at a thrift store the other day, and I'll start on that when I finish my current book.

For those of you trying to find Neuromancer (What? You don't have it already? Why the hell not??), Amazon has some good prices for used copies of the trade paperback as well as one of the earlier releases (I think it's hardcover, but I'm not sure).

Philip K. Dick also holds a high spot in my list, with Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? and The Man In The High Castle (what a head trip!). Native Oregonian Chuck Palahniuk is also a favorite, with Fight Club (100x better than the aready awesome movie) getting read almost as often as Neuromancer in my library. Lullaby and Choke are also awesome, in Palahniuk's fucked-up funny way.

The horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft have been favorites of mine since high school, with The Call Of Cthulhu, The Colour Out Of Space, and The Shadow Out Of Time being some of my favorites, though it would be hard to pick just one.

Other favorites that I couldn't even BEGIN to rank are 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Godfather and The Family by Mario Puzo, the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming, Dracula by Brahm Stoker, anything by Terry Brooks, Masters Of Doom by David Kushner, and Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas by the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

It's funny you should mention Murakami, citcelaid, as a friend introduced me to his writings a few months back. I've read through After The Quake and part of South Of The Border, West Of The Sun, and I'm actually right now in the middle of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - a very strange story, to be sure, but a strangely compelling one.

So other than being in the middle of Wind-Up Bird, right now I'm also working my way through Kara No Kyoukai by Nasu Kinoko - very, very slowly.

Special BOOs go out to Dan Brown and Tom Clancy - the former for just being a shitty writer who somehow duped an ignorant public into putting his books on bestseller lists, and the latter for being the most heavy-handed and boring person I've ever read. I'm sure there are some people who would enjoy a 5 page dissertation on a Sidewinder missile's exact flight nuances (for example), but I'm not one of them.

Wow, that was long. And here I thought I had lost interest in reading in college.

 

Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich by David Kenyon Webster, is the book I'm currently enjoying

 

Im not really reading anything right now.....though my favourite book is Catch 22. It is just plain brilliant.

 

I really like the Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera.