Best book you've ever read

[Alaskan Snowmonkey]

Confederacy of Dunces! I've read it four times and will read it again! Hilarious. Also, a Pulitzer Prize winner, for good reason. Ignatius is about the best literary character ever!

Honorable mention to: The World According to Garp - John Irving

 

[mrkiii]

What? Job by Robert Heinlein is not mentioned at all? It's the only book I know in which the Gillette Safety Razor actually plays a role

Besides that - I love the book and did so way before I started wet shaving, even before I knew what a safety razor was.

 

[oc_in_fw]

I was just wondering what you consider the best book you've ever read. I need to refill my queue.

Toss up between "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov"

on edit- Hell, I forgot about "Catch-22" and "1984" (with "Animal Farm" coming right up behind)

 

[hifigeezer]

The Caine Mutiny

+1, a story you won't forget.

Other top fiction: Catch-22

Most enlightening nonfiction:

The First World War by John Keegan, succinct but excellent;

A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin -- World War I and the Middle East

The Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson; the Civil War embodies all the key conflicts of American History, not just slavery.

Most work but worth it: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer; took forever to read this monster.

plus anything by Dave Barry!

 

[hifigeezer]

The release next month is only part 1 of 3.

I've seen scathing reviews of the new film in both The Wall Street Journal and my local paper. Ironic as Rand worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter.

 

[Walt Whitman]

• The Concise Yoga Vasistha
• Leaves of Grass
• Atlas Shrugged

top my list.

 

[Pescara]

The Old Man and The Sea, and Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy. Followed closely by "For Whom the Bell Tolls".

As The Old Man and the Sea is also my favorite work of fiction and FWtBT is right up there, I will have to read Tad Williams.

 

[AlanL]

Most work but worth it: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer; took forever to read this monster.

+1 Great nonfiction, a definite must.

But for me this book just flew. I found it gripping from beginning to finish.

 

[buyandhold2018]

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

By: Edwin Lefevre

 

[Axeman]

The Old Man and the Sea. Hands down the best book I have ever read.

 

[Masterkova]

Thus Spake Zarathustra
King Lear
Remembrance of Things Past
Dream of the Red Chamber (a.k.a., Story of the Stone)
Labyrinths (Borges)
Flowers of Evil (Baudelaire)

 

[Cerealx59]

Technically, a collection of books

This is true, but Ill clarify, what I believe to be the "spirit" of the post, and say that "The Holy Bible" is his and mine favorite 66 Books, presented in 1 volume.

I read a lot, and love many of the classics, and this is sure to be controversial, but no book (previously mentioned excluded), has ever struck me the way "The Shack" by William P. Young, struck me. I was in tears from beginning to end. Truly an emotional roller coaster like I have never experienced.

 

[proxymoron]

Lolita.

 

[molly]

Hmmm, might have to add a few books to the reading list.

Its a tossup for me between "The Plague" - Albert Camus, "Crime and Punishment" - Dostoevsky, "The Crimson Petal and the White" - Michel Faber

 

[ROBBI52A]

I was just wondering what you consider the best book you've ever read. I need to refill my queue.

In no order

The agony Nd estacy
The right stuff
Phillip Roth
Magic mountain
The natural
The plaque
The trial
Moby dick

 

[Bloomey]

The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

+ infinity, only other novel to give me a riveting read is the complete works of sherlock holmes

 

[Stevestan]

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. Answers the question "What is the meaning of life?" If you don't want to read the book, the answer is that there is no meaning to life. To think otherwise is taking life way too seriously.

 

[rupertbear]

The Old Man and The Boy by Robert Ruark for a fictionalized account of his upbringing.

For non-fiction, I like Salt, Longitude, and suchlike.

 

[Cynomys]

As a libertarian, I felt duty bound to read Atlas Shrugged. Although I might have agreed with her politics, I found the book to be poorly written and more than a tad dull. Of course, I'm just a backwoods redneck from podunk SC, but I hardly consider this book great literature.

Never read the Fountainhead by her, but if it's half as dull as Atlas Shrugged, it's a real loser.

Beerman

I read "Atlas Shrugged" many years ago between the time I graduated from high school and the time I started college. I took one week to read it at approx. 150 pages per day. It may be the only way to read it - that is, dedicate a week when you have nothing else to do. While I was reading the book, I played an album by the Peanut Butter Conspiracy over and over again. At the time I had no idea that the lyrics were about drugs.

But the best book I ever read was Thoreau's "Walden". I'm currently re-reading it.

 

[Not A Nice Person]

Three of my favorite, oft-revisted reads aren't technically novels, but collections of linked, interrelated short stories that read like novels:

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
Floating In My Mother's Palm by Ursula Hegi

It would be hard to pin things down to just ONE novel---My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult was amazing, but so was William Gibson's latest, Zero History (although my favorite by him remains Pattern Recognition.) Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, mentioned earlier, is fantastic as well.

Among the 20th century classics, I'm inordinately fond of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

In SF, the best thing I've read outside Gibson is Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, which begins with Altered Carbon. Just incredible---the writing, the story, the characters, the tech, the universe, all of it.

In non-fiction, my vote goes to Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade. It's about evolutionary biology and genomic analysis and simply brilliant.

NANP™