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Message started by Mario86 on 07/16/13 at 04:24:35

Title: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Mario86 on 07/16/13 at 04:24:35

Let's go with your reading experiences now. I never read anything but I'll do with your posts, gentlemen, so feel free to show what are your favourite authors / books / etc.

I would have a top 10 based on the ~ 30 books I've read in my whole life (especially between 10 and 18 years old) but I'm not sure I'll have the courage to post it compared to what I'm expecting from all of you.

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by BPA on 07/16/13 at 04:35:48

As someone who studied English literature at university this should be a goldmine to me... but I don't have ten favourite books. In fact, I have grown so out of love with reading over the last few years that I probably couldn't muster the enthusiasm to make even a placeholder list. There's about ten books I've started over the last year and I haven't finished a single one of them. I should note this only pertains to novels; I like reading articles, journals, reviews, biographies, histories, even discourses (Houllebecq and Levy's Public Enemies is a lot of fun, though again I never finished it...) but novels leave me really cold.

Novels springing to mind now as 'favourites' would be The Secret History, American Psycho, The Master and Margarita... yeah fuck this is boring me already. If we can open up the floor to non-fiction, I might have a list to hand.

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Zarkov on 07/16/13 at 04:36:15

Hannah Montana Annuals 2001 through 2011. But yeah, il post mine later. Or tommorow. Or next week, depending on my laziness levels.

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Mario86 on 07/16/13 at 04:48:06

Ben, your post makes me wanna start another interesting discussion: is it a shame to love movies directly inspired from books without having read them (and not having even the intention to do it actually for some reasons) ?

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by thewebinator on 07/16/13 at 08:20:58

All time favorite book: 1984. Orwell builds the perfect world throughout the story, and the tension that Winston faces on almost every page grips you from start to finish. I read it first in 7th or 8th grade and have since completed it many many other times.

I can't really go with a list of ten since 1984 stands so far above anything else, but I guess the closest honorable mentions would be the Lord of the Rings series. (yes, I read the books before watching the movies).

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by SMKChamp on 07/16/13 at 10:22:15

1)How the Grinch Stole Christmas
2)Cat in the Hat
3)Oh, the Places You'll Go!
4)Green Eggs and Ham
5)The Lorax
6)Are You My Mother?
7)Where the Wild Things Are
8)The Very Hungry Caterpillar
9)Goodnight Moon
10)Hey Diddle Diddle

Some suggestions for others to read:

http://www.slj.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/SLJ_Fuse8_Top100_Picture.pdf

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Rhodechill on 07/16/13 at 12:20:05

Very very rough list (I'm probably forgetting a lot and I need to read more)

1. The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
2. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
4. The Wide Window (and other books in A Series of Unforunate Events) - Lemony Snicket
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. 1984 - George Orwell
7. The Giver - Lois Lowry
8. Journey to the Center of the Earth - Jules Verne
9. Complete Tales and Poems - Edgar Allen Poe
10. Oedipus the King - Sophocles

#9 doesn't really count and I haven't read them all, but I have enjoyed every short story and poem from Poe I've read in my entire life thoroughly.
Favorite poem: Annabel Lee
Favorite story: The Cask of Amontillado

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by AlexPenev on 07/16/13 at 18:58:13

ITT: school reading lists XD

From the fiction section I'll vote for Monte Cristo. Readily enjoyable and not pretentious, making it a safe recommendation for just about anyone. I may have posted this before, but here is a good list (http://www.reddit.com/r/raerth/comments/cpxkq/reddits_favourite_books/c0udvs9) of books for people our age/gender/culture. I've read 21 of the first 50.

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by blahpy on 07/16/13 at 23:31:10

173A332E0633383320560 wrote:

ITT: school reading lists XD

[smiley=lolk.gif]

Probably, the only books I have read (outside of my school reading lists when I was at school), was the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy" (Douglas Adams, not sure if I read the fifth one though).

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Mr.Nosey on 07/17/13 at 01:23:18

7361666D6A65706B763530040 wrote:

All time favorite book: 1984.

wat.
The most boring book during my time at school, even worse than shakespeare for me...

Basically all books I've read during school sucked, which is a shame. I think some people like yourself and Rhode really enjoy that type of reading material, but for me it's just lame. I've read quite a lot outside of school, mostly as a child. However I've just been given an ebook reader for my birthday which fortunately has lots of classics that I've actually wanted to read for some time, and they're free!

I just started reading Journey to the Centre of the Earth, which is completely of unscientific waffle and oddly written, but definitely going to continue reading it.

A vague list of the series of books that are my favourite (going to be quite child-orientated):
Harry Potter (duh)
P.G. Wodehouse (anything by him; J & W, Blandings, Psmith, Mike or anything else, I love it all)
Roman Mysteries
The Edge Chronicles
Some other notable mentions: Young James Bond, Alex Rider, Artemis Fowl, The Nome Trilogy, Mortal Engines Quartet.

I'll grab a list of 10 individual books (either series or standalone) later, but I've always been more of a series kinda guy.

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Glozboy on 07/17/13 at 01:43:21

The top 3 here are cemented in position. The other 7 aren't in any particular order.

1. Journey to the Centre of the Earth - Jules Verne
2. The Stand - Stephen King
3. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
4. Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler
5. Ulysses - James Joyce
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
7. It - Stephen King
8. Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh
9. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
10. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by thewebinator on 07/17/13 at 07:38:11

686C6E607C726D7071050 wrote:

I think some people like yourself and Rhode really enjoy that type of reading material, but for me it's just lame.

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by BPA on 07/17/13 at 10:19:54

7E535A476F5A515A493F0 wrote:

I may have posted this before, but here is a good list (http://www.reddit.com/r/raerth/comments/cpxkq/reddits_favourite_books/c0udvs9) of books for people our age/gender/culture. I've read 21 of the first 50.

Have you read Asimov's Guide to the Bible? It looks like the kind of thing that I could enjoy. The other personal standout from this list is Infinite Jest, which a good friend of mine has praised to the hilt. I enjoyed a piece Foster Wallace wrote about Roger Federer, so I should probably go about hunting down a copy.

Anyway, 5 fiction novels. I'll edit this post with 5 non-fiction another day.

Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master & Margarita. Bulgakov was a doctor-turned-author who dabbled in surrealism and a rather noir aesthetic to his writing. The story is tight and action-packed, and is rather funny in a biting kind of way.

Donna Tartt - The Secret History. Possibly one of the most obnoxiously ridiculous books ever, a heady cocktail of hedonism and whodunnit-ism that reaches levels so ludicrous you could rightly expect Inspector Clouseau's ginormous nose to reach out the (800 odd) pages and poke you in the eye at any given moment. I think the appeal of this book is that it is written, both in style and substance, like a 'grown up' Harry Potter, albeit a few years before that blockbuster was released. College kids dabbling in the black arts... if they make a film of this Radcliffe and Watson could easily reunite for it.

Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle. The writer that struck fear into the heart of little America, even if his early short stories sucked the big one (yeah yeah I know, the guy had to earn his crust). This tale is a nice mix of Kurt's usual sardonic wit and a sci-fi element that borders on the absurd and the totally believable. There's a cold war fear that permeates in this book in a way that oddly resonates with today. So it goes...

Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho. You can the take the Wall Street banker out of the 80s, but you can't take the 80s out of Ted Bundy. Bonus points for the music reviews. The film brilliantly points out the homogenity between Huey Lewis & The News and Robert Palmer songs.

Douglas Coupland - All Families Are Psychotic. All his books work along similar lines, but this is my favourite one of the bunch as it has the best characterisation, and it reigns in its more fantastical elements. Coupland is a one-note writer, but he's smart and has things to say, which is more than some.

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Mr.Nosey on 07/18/13 at 02:17:06

5D4F4843444B5E45581B1E2A0 wrote:

[quote author=686C6E607C726D7071050 link=1373977475/0#9 date=1374052998]I think some people like yourself and Rhode really enjoy that type of reading material, but for me it's just lame.

About 80-90% of the books I read during high school I found pretty useless, especially the painstaking analysis we had to go through when some of the books just weren't deep enough for it. So it's not a case of me just enjoying "the classics". It's just one example of a book I thoroughly enjoyed that happened to be on most school reading lists. [/quote]
Yeah that sounds perfectly reasonable, and this was roughly what I felt too (iirc there was a book I read once in school that I enjoyed at the time, but later reread and it had somehow lost it's appeal). I guess my choice of the word lame was a bit wrong, sounds like I'm criticising your reading taste (when actually it turned out that wasn't entirely the case), when actually I was referring to the fact that all the books weren't to my style, and that situation was lame for me. Just thought I'd clarify that :(

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by SMKChamp on 07/25/13 at 09:04:18

18353C21093C373C2F590 wrote:

A lot of those books are extremely dry reads, such as the Bible and Guns, Germs, and Steel. I've tried to read those two a dozen times and always had to stop because I forgot what was on the previous page.

I would recommend The Selfish Gene if you take it slow and The Art of War for any person in business or the military(duh).

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by TJazZ on 07/26/13 at 05:07:27

English:
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Obasan By Joy Kogawa
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

French:
Le Scaphandre et le Papillon by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Les Justes by Albert Camus
Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen
L’Arrache-cœur by Boris Vian
La Vie devant soi by Émile Ajar

No particular order.

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Chrono Krysster on 07/11/17 at 04:30:44

My TOP 10:

1) Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again
2) The America We Deserve
3) The Art of the Deal
4) Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again
5) Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education in Business and Life
6) The Art of the Comeback
7) Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges into Success
8) Surviving at the Top
9) Think Big and Kick Ass
10) Trump Tower

http://img110.xooimage.com/files/d/2/d/c880b97194569143a...fa963_hq-52a5b49.gif

I'll post my TOP 10 manga another day [smiley=ninja.gif] ::) ;D

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Saint Nicholas de la USA on 07/11/17 at 14:54:53

1. The Bible
2. The Bible
3. The Bible
4. The Bible
5. The Bible
6. The Bible
7. The Bible
8. The Bible
9. The Bible
10. The Bible

I don't read it that much, though-- I'm not much of a reading person anyhow. But there is one book in the world that is undeniably the greatest, most powerful book ever written. A book that every person on Earth should have a copy of. It is largely a history book, chronicling thousands of years of early human history, and there are probably more films made from it than any other book. I can't imagine anybody in my own community not owning a copy, except possibly my Muslim neighbors.

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Timothy on 07/13/17 at 09:50:07

Wrong thread Nick

http://www.mariokart64.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1484686474/0

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Etch on 07/13/17 at 16:21:03

dat bump? lol

Well timing is right, unless it was math/science in the sense of textbooks I rarely read novels growing up unless it was on the school reading list. The only one that I liked was Cannery Row, the forum here reminds me of Mack and the Boys.

I did stumble across a funny graphic novel recently about Babbage and Lovelace. If I had seen that as a kid, I would have definitely gone into computer science. It was more of a biography and such but went in great detail about the history of the era and relationships between important figures back in Victorian times.

My favorite question was how big must an Analytical Engine be to match the modern day counterpart? [smiley=roll.gif]

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Antistar on 07/14/17 at 15:18:47

4C6B616A6D6E63715D4A637074677B020 wrote:

1. The Bible
2. The Bible
3. The Bible
4. The Bible
5. The Bible
6. The Bible
7. The Bible
8. The Bible
9. The Bible
10. The Bible

I'm actually really surprised you didn't call it "The Holy Bible". Just saying. What's the difference?

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Saint Nicholas de la USA on 07/14/17 at 19:05:52

I know this might sound really silly to a lot of you, but when I was growing up, I assumed all video game heroes were Christian and worshipped Jesus. You know, Mario, Luigi, Link, Yoshi, Kirby, etc. (You do remember what Link's shield looked like in the original Legend of Zelda, right?)
When I first played Banjo-Kazooie I actually thought Banjo was wearing a cross around his neck, but it's actually a whistle. I also wondered if the baby Yoshis in Yoshi's Story were old enough to understand who Jesus was. I simply believed that one had to be Christian in order to be a hero. So I believed that all police officers, U.S. soldiers, etc.-- the "good guys" in society-- were Christian.

I actually used to wonder why nobody ever mentioned Jesus in video games. It wasn't until I was (at least) in high school, when I had access to the Internet, that I learned that Nintendo actively removed religious references when they released their games in America. I didn't figure out until much later that they probably did it to avoid offending non-Christian gamers. I always thought my Muslim neighbors were unique and that non-Christians (besides Jews) were very rare in America.

I must say I definitely had a WASP upbringing. I knew absolutely nothing about Catholic or Jewish traditions or dietary laws growing up. I was out of high school by the time I learned that Catholics couldn't eat meat on Friday or that Jews weren't able to eat pork, shellfish, etc. Naturally, Lent to me was just the 40 days between Mardi Gras and Easter. I didn't know you had to give up anything for Lent. I probably had Catholic, Muslim, or Jewish kids in my grade-school classes and didn't even know it. I just assumed everyone was a Protestant Christian, except for maybe a handful of Catholics, and that the vast majority of them went to church on Sundays, and possibly Wednesday evenings as well.

I always knew my family was a bit closed-minded and that I lived quite an insular life as a child (seriously, I didn't visit New Orleans or Mobile for the first time until I was a teenager, and those two cities are just an hour's drive away) but only in the past decade or so am I realizing just how insular you are when you grow up as a WASP in a small metropolitan area that you rarely travel outside of. I found it amusing when signs had Spanish on them, because I didn't think there would be very many people in America who spoke Spanish. And the first time I heard someone speaking another language in a mall department store, I was like, "Dad, do you hear those people over there speaking some foreign language?" because I thought it was so strange. Maybe we were more ethnically homogenous back in the '90s, but nowadays I don't find it unusual at all to see Spanish-speaking Mexicans in, say, Wal-mart.

Not surprisingly, I found The Truman Show to be very relatable when I watched it...

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Chrono Krysster on 07/14/17 at 19:51:28

12353F3433303D2F03143D2E2A39255C0 wrote:

I actually used to wonder why nobody ever mentioned Jesus in video games.

Did you know that Chrono Trigger retells the Bible? And the main character 'Crono' is seen as 'Jesus Christ' ::)

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-Sp62q2FAY[/media]

Watch it if you like video games and the Bible, you'll be amazed [smiley=evil.gif]

#ReligiousReferences

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Antistar on 07/15/17 at 00:44:37

41666C6760636E7C50476E7D796A760F0 wrote:

I actually used to wonder why nobody ever mentioned Jesus in video games.

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Chrono Krysster on 07/15/17 at 02:42:22

765A495254030D3B0 wrote:

[quote author=41666C6760636E7C50476E7D796A760F0 link=1373977475/0#21 date=1500087952]I actually used to wonder why nobody ever mentioned Jesus in video games.

I think video games were not really the good media to spread religious/political propaganda. This said, as it evolved to interactive movies for many of them, things have changed, but most of the developers do not want to support any specific belief, and some clearly announce it at the beginning of the games, just like the Assassin's Creed series for example. The historical context is very realistic and involves a lot of religious issues, but the team really wants us to know there is no specific orientation behind the story.

http://https://img4.hostingpics.net/pics/369515H6S3o48.jpg[/quote]

Absolutly and also because the controversy with video games and religion in game like "Muslim Massacre", and all the games banned with too much kind of sex, violence, religion, etc the real problem is that each ban is due to the philosophy of each country, and that's bullshit-- video games are video games, we already have enough things forbidden in real life.

6C4B414A4D4E43517D6A435054475B220 wrote:

I know this might sound really silly to a lot of you, but when I was growing up, I assumed all video game heroes were Christian and worshipped Jesus.

Don't worry you are not really a silly head, it never was a dream, 'cause you were just really close to the truth:

>> List of Christian video games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_video_games) with a lot of Bibles, Jesus, Antichrist, and yeah.. some raptures [smiley=roll.gif]

Title: Re: Your all-time top 10 books
Post by Chrono Krysster on 08/06/17 at 17:34:36

>> Is Donald Trump Tweeting the U.S. Into a War on North Korea? (https://theintercept.com/2017/08/06/donald-trump-north-korea-intercepted-podcast-john-feffer/)

Sorry not really a new book-- but this article is like a long book!

#FutureFictionBestseller?