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.

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) ?

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

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 of books for people our age/gender/culture. I've read 21 of the first 50.

Web wrote on 07/16/13 at 08:20:58:

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.

Nosey wrote on 07/17/13 at 01:23:18:

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.

Web wrote on 07/17/13 at 07:38:11:

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

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.

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.

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?

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...

Harvey Kartel wrote on 07/14/17 at 19:05:52:

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.