Your favorite(s) book(s)?

Blaze

Blaze

Let it Burn
Joined
Sep 30, 2008
Messages
5,796
Age
34
Location
Canada
Black Thorn
So, I'm in dire need of some new books to read! So what better way to find something to read than to ask the whole board about their favorite book or book series, and why they like it so much! So off we go!
 
My all time lifelong favorite books have to be Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars series, beginning with "A princess of Mars," "The Gods Of Mars," and "The Warlord Of Mars," the trilogy that has set the standard for everything in the fantasy/heroic fiction/si fi genre for the last century, from Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers to Star Wars and Avatar. I highly recimmend them, but with the warning that the dialog is over a century old, rather stilted, and takes some adjusting to. It is, however, well worth the effort.

Recently, I have been reading Larry Correia's Monster Hunter International series. It's Buffy with guns, written by a man whose background and fields of expertise includes training SWAT teams and watching classic horror movies. The Monster Hunters would fit perfectly into the Buffyverse, and if you can enjoy stories where the heroes do their slaying with mean ol' firearms, you should give them a try. "Monster Hunters International" is the first in the series, followed by "Monster Hunter Vendetta," and "Monster Hunter Alpha."
 
My favourite book in the world is The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay; an amazingly powerful story that pretty much changed my life. I read it at least once a year and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Other favourites/recs would be Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Pact by Jodi Picoult, The Hunger Games Trilogy and The Harry Potter Series.
 
Not sure if its my favorite, but I think more people need to know about The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss. Great fantasy trilogy with 2/3 of the books out as of now. It starts with Name of the Wind. Highly recommended if you like fantasy!
 
Well, I'm just going back into reading literature, so here are some of my favourites that I've read:

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
Perfume by Patrick Süskind
The Outsider by Albert Camus
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick
 
Blaze
Blaze
The Outsider is one of my all time favorite
My all-time favorite are Bram Stoker's Dracula and Dacre Stoker & Ian Holt's Dracula the Un-dead. Funny fact is that the second novel was written according to Bram's original ideas of a sequel, papers that had been passed down to his great grand-nephew. Since it "corrects" some inconsistencies from the original book, Dracula the Un-dead has been criticized a lot. But I love the way it's written more as a novel than a collection of letters and diaries (which made Dracula a bit hard to read at time due to the many POVs).

My other favorite is the Luxe serie by Anna Godbersen (including The Luxe, Rumors, Envy and Splendor).Kind of a Gossip Girl vibe, set in Manhattan at the beginning of the 20th century. More of a girly choice, but I absolutely love them!
 
Anna Karenina might be the best book I've read (though I don't like Anna funnily enough), I also enjoy pretty much anything by Jules Verne and Thomas Hardy though they are widely different authors 🙂
 
1984 by George Orwell, Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (if you read it as a comedy), just about anything by Stephen King (maybe start with Salem's Lot, It, 11/22/63 or Misery), Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, Watership Down by Richard Adams, the 2001 books by Arthur C. Clarke, Making History by Stephen Fry, Dracula by Bram Stoker and The Magus by John Fowles.

I keep intending to read some classics by people like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen and the Brontes but it never seems to happen.
 
My favorite book is probably Jurassic Park. I love Michael Crichton's novels. I think Timeline and Sphere were also really awesome. Currently, I'm reading Crichton's The Great Train Robbery. So far, I really like it.
So, if you want to read a science-fiction novel rather than a star-warsy book with monsters in a galaxy far, far away with flying saucers, Michael Crichton's your guy.
 
The Rainbow (D. H. Lawrence)
The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
A Separate Peace (John Knowles)
To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
Secrets & Wives (Sanjiv Bhattacharya)
Garcia (Blair Jackson)
Strange Things Happen (Stewart Copeland)
The Witches (Roald Dahl)
Basic Economics (Thomas Sowell)
God Is Not Great (Christopher Hitchens)
All Of A Kind Family (Sidney Taylor)
On Writing (Stephen King)
Carrie (Stephen King)
1984 (George Orwell)
Devil's Night (Zeev Chafets)

...And many more.
 
If you like Game of Thrones you should read the original books in George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. Plus Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Kelly Armstrong,Jasper Fforde, Terry Pratchett, Sue Townsend, Robert Rankin, Val McDermid are other authors I enjoy 🙂
 
fredthe3rd said:
What did you read next [MENTION=8404]Blaze[/MENTION]?
Click to expand...

As suggested, I read The Outsider and re-read Dracula. I also finished the Hunger Games trilogy (surpassed any expectations I might have had, fantastic series!) and am now jumping in the Dragon Tattoo trilogy! I don't have as much time to read now with school though 🙁
 
I've got a whole load of favourite books, but I always recommend people The Anubis Gates as it doesn't seem to be one that a lot have heard of.

The synopsis itself is better to sum up how it goes. It's a bit mad.

Brendan Doyle is a twentieth-century English professor who travels back to 1810 London to attend a lecture given by English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This is a London filled with deformed clowns, organised beggar societies, insane homunculi and magic. When he is kidnapped by gypsies and consequently misses his return trip to 1983, the mild-mannered Doyle is forced to become a street-smart con man, escape artist, and swordsman in order to survive in the dark and treacherous London underworld. He defies bullets, black magic, murderous beggars, freezing waters, imprisonment in mutant-infested dungeons, poisoning, and even a plunge back to 1684. Coleridge himself and poet Lord Byron make appearances in the novel, which also features a poor tinkerer who creates genetic monsters and a werewolf that inhabits others' bodies when his latest becomes too hairy.
Click to expand...

Very much worth your time. It's a book that really stayed with me after finishing. 🙂
 
itssmiletime said:
The Outsider by Albert Camus
Click to expand...

How strange that I've never heard it called this. I read it in school (in French & English) and always referred to it as The Stranger (or of course L'Etranger in French).

So, some of my favorites follow. I like to read series and I am currently alternating between:
Stephanie Plum mysteries (by Janet Evanovich).
Sookie Stackhouse series (Charlaine Harris).
Kathy Reichs' Temperance Brennan mysteries (inspiration for the Bones tv series).
Dragonriders of Pern (long series though, don't know how long it will take me!).
Other favs:
Anything by Barbara Kingsolver (my favs are Animal Dreams and Flight Behavior).
I'm not a huge Stephen King fan (or rather, not a big horror fan) but I adore 11/22/63.
House of Spirits and Ines of My Soul by Isabel Allende (love all her stuff).
American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
Almost everything by Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.
Contact by Carl Sagan.
 
Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (think it's la nausee in french)

Robin Hobb's assassin trilogy, liveship traders trilogy and the fool trilogy are amazing

The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan (Partially Brandon Sanderson)

Mrs Dalloway/To the lighthouse by V. Woolf

Yellow Wallpaper

Far from the madding crowd...
 
Xin Rong said:
Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (think it's la nausee in french)

Robin Hobb's assassin trilogy, liveship traders trilogy and the fool trilogy are amazing

The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan (Partially Brandon Sanderson)

Mrs Dalloway/To the lighthouse by V. Woolf

Yellow Wallpaper

Far from the madding crowd...
Click to expand...

Those all seem interesting (I love fantasy), and happened to look them up and the Wheel of Time really caught my attention. Now, I saw that there is 14 volumes!?!?! The series must be huge? Is it worth getting into?
 
Have you read any of the books by Kelley Armstrong?

Do you read any of the fan fiction offerings? My latest is a bastardisation of a story I wrote that is at the publishers at the moment.
 
ILLYRIAN said:
Have you read any of the books by Kelley Armstrong?

Do you read any of the fan fiction offerings? My latest is a bastardisation of a story I wrote that is at the publishers at the moment.
Click to expand...

I have not, but I've head a lot of good things about it. Doesn't really seem like my genre of books, but I know Omens recently came out, she had a signing in my town and it was crazy, so many people there!

It's super cool that you're stuff is now at the publishers! Congrats!
 
"Bound For Glory" by Woody Guthrie

"Heart Of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad

"Book Of Shadows", "The Coven", and "Bloodwitch" by Cate Tiernan

"Carrie" by Stephen King

"The Grapes Of Wrath" by John Steinbeck

"The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom