What are your favorite books?

What's your favorite book, author, genre and why?

Do you think literature will survive now that we 'Kindle' wireless reading device? I saw someone reading it on the subway the other day and it disturbed me. I love books and I think the Kindle will destroy the beautiful art of bookmaking and publishing even more than mass book productions by large publishing houses. But hey this is really a side issue.

Tell me about your books, if anyone bothers reading real hardcover anymore :bawl:

Ok lets get on with it

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I like real hardcovers. The smell and the touch... I'll NEVER give it up.

I'm a Dark Tower Junkie, of course...

I love Alice Walker's works. She's just so damn funny in her short stories. Got a book of Flannery's stuff, too. My old roommate got me a book of Tennessee Williams' plays. That man sets me on fire.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I love Williams. Night of the Igauna is one of my favorite plays. There is this poem written into the play where the old poet relative of one of the character's recites before dying:

How calmly does the olive branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer
With no betrayal of despair

Some time while light obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever
And from thence
A second history will commence

A chronicle no longer gold
A bargaining with mist and mold
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth, and then

And intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth's obscene corrupting love

And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer
With no betrayal of despair

Oh courage! Could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me


It sums up all the fears and anxieties of the main character Reverend Shannon who's basically having a nervous breakdown/mid-life crisis. Great play. Streetcar of course is a thing of legend. I have an entire collection of Flannery and haven't had the chance to read it, I think I will pack it with me this time around. Damn woman you really have a good collection of southern writers. The south is good for that, Faulkner, Flannery, Williams, Capote, Harper Lee. They have a poetic lyrical tongue...I wonder what about the south produces that?

What's Dark Tower? Tell me about that?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Love that poem so much.

It's the greatest epic novel series of the last half of the 20th century/early 21st century. It's based on the poem, "The Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." This gunslinger, Roland, is on a quest to find the Dark Tower. With a former heroin addict, legless black woman, 12 year old boy, and a billybumbler (think of a psychic weasel dog) from another world to aid him. I can't explain it in a way that tells you how great it is.

 

Ok I'm going to check abebooks and find it.

 

Isaac Asimov "debunked" this sometime back in the late sixties/ early seventies.
It's got to be portable, pick up where the reader last left it, able to be browsed backwards and forwards at will, annotated if required and require no power to run at all - in other words: a book.

Very very rarely do I get a hardback - for the price of one hardback I can buy 2 or 3 paperbacks and more importantly shelve 5 or 6.
With somewhere around 5-6,000 books in my collection hardback is usually reserved for ones that will never come out in paperback, technical books mainly.

 

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

These are my favorites in English.

I like books which have main characters fiction or real who struggle against insurmountable odds, and even if they fail, it is still proves their humanity and strength of spirit through the influence they have on others.

 

The ones that I have read and enjoyed! The rest that I've read aren't that good and I do not consider them "favorites".

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

i cant sit and read unless it is a technical book. i read two non-technical books when i was around 12. one was crime and punishment and the other was that book about hell, cant remember the name right now but it is the one everyone thinks of when they think abput hell.

the latter was just bizarre but the one by dostoyevsky was very good. the sad thing about crime and punishment was that it actually changed my view on the main issue. although one thing i could never come to terms with was killing the old woman. to me that was the weakest part of the point the author was making.

so i went and bought one more by the same author but it didnt have the same intensity though it was somewhat interesting i never finished it because upon doing some research i felt deceived by my favorite author, which he was at the time. and not that the deception was intentional, mind you, but it is just hard to explain.

so what i did, one day, was think to myself: i have billions of ideas in my head so i bought myself a pad and a pencil thinking that the words would flow from my brain down my arm and come out at the point of my finger to the pencil and spread out all over the paper like maple syrup.

the problem was i just sat there with pen to paper and the words never came out. i think that from my own perspective the more i read the more it changes me. meaning that i get further from my true self.

another factor is that i cant stop reading. no matter what i just read everything and it doesnt matter if it is the side of a cereal box and i could never figure out why. i must have read hundreds of technical books though. books on computers and engineering and law books. the reason is for the practicality and honesty in them and i never feel deceived or as though i am being sold a line.

at the end of the day every non technical book is just a 2.99 romance novel to me. now the weird thing about all this is that i can watch movies but to me the reason is because one sense is not being deprived. that is, i believe key to this post. the sensory deprivation of books whereas the words go from page to eyes to brain not cool for me. the funny thing is i respect authors it is just that i am not really interested in what they have to say (write).

 

Any book by Dean Koontz.
I also like Tom Clancy's novels as well.
I guess I'd have to say my favorite novel is Patriot Games.

 

Book read most often:
I know it's lame but - the Harry Potter series. Man I love those stories.

Book that's stayed with me:
I'd have to choose Atonement by Ian McEwan. It has its faults, but not many. It's a book that challenges the nature of memory and our perceptions of reality. Pretty deep stuff once you get past the tragic love story

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Oli: I know hardbacks take up space but the are more durable if you are building a library, I also love the workmanship on some of these books, beautiful leather bound books on occasion etc. They can be expensive too so I try and only buy a hardback after I have read a paperback and know for sure that I am going to keep the book, unless of course when building an authors collection then its always hardback

Diamond: I like books which have main characters fiction or real who struggle against insurmountable odds, and even if they fail, it is still proves their humanity and strength of spirit through the influence they have on others.

Like the protagonist in 'Things Fall Apart'. I'm attracted to stories where the struggle is internal, some psychological component battling their own neurosis, fears and anxieties or struggling to come to terms with some external invariable, like the character in Knut Hamsun's 'Hunger'.

John: he latter was just bizarre but the one by dostoyevsky was very good. the sad thing about crime and punishment was that it actually changed my view on the main issue. although one thing i could never come to terms with was killing the old woman. to me that was the weakest part of the point the author was making.

I've read that, its the kind of novel that stays with you. I don't understand why you think the killing of the old lady the weakest part, its what sets up the entire novel. The murder is meaningless its the idea that there would be long-term mental anguish and a moral battle that would be so painful that the character wouldn't be able to live with the crime, which he could have gotten away with if it were not for his unflinching conscience. Woody Allen made a film called 'Crimes and Misdemeanors' based on the novel but he removes the idea that long-term bad conscience is inevitable and has the main character 'getting over it' and living a good happy life. Its one of my favorite W. Allen films.

John: i think that from my own perspective the more i read the more it changes me. meaning that i get further from my true self.

That's interesting. Why do you think that is? Some writers never read when they are working because it impedes their inner voice.

 

i agree

 

I have never read McEwan. How would you describe his style? Atonement sounds like an interesting story.

Nothing lame about Harry Potter its an incredibly imaginative. I wonder though if the author would have another book in her.

 

I have paperbacks going back for more than 30 years - and I read them once every couple of years.
And they're cheaper to replace should they get damaged.
It's easier to slide one into a back pocket or a rucksack pocket when I leave the house, less heavy to carry, easier to read while I'm walking...
There isn't room for the equivalent number of hardbacks.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

(Besides, even if there were, it would mean spending money on shelving rather than books).

 

I have a Kindle 2. It's highly portable, and even weighs less than a hardcover though it's the same size. I can go back and forth in it, I can annotate (it's got a keyboard at the bottom that's easy to use) and I can even look up specific words if I don't know the meaning. It picks up exactly where you left off, on every book you are reading in your whole library. I can also make the text as large or as small as I need it to be, or flip on text-to-speech if I am having trouble reading. With the wireless on, I can read for 48 hours straight without a single charge. With the wireless turned off, I can read up to four weeks without a charge. I can charge it in a mere hour either plugged into a wall or computer for another four weeks.

I don't need a computer to use it, I can browse a bookstore of 250k + books at any given second and have it download wirelessly to my book within minutes... I can add bookmarks, carry up to 1500 books with me at any given time, and the pages look just like a page in a book. New Releases are no more than $10 when the hardcovers are $25-$35 these days and older books are often even less.

The only thing missing is the smell, which I do miss. But the Kindle is all the things you just asked for, and a whole lot of added extras. I can also copy a few MP3's (I prefer classical when I read) and listen to it as well without needing an extra device.

Since I got it on Mother's Day, I've read 3 books and am in the middle of two more. I haven't read this much in years...

Right now I am reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin and Always Looking Up by Michael J. Fox.

I did download three of my favourite books as soon as I got it;

Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

 

Oli: I have paperbacks going back for more than 30 years - and I read them once every couple of years.
And they're cheaper to replace should they get damaged.
It's easier to slide one into a back pocket or a rucksack pocket when I leave the house, less heavy to carry, easier to read while I'm walking...
There isn't room for the equivalent number of hardbacks.
(Besides, even if there were, it would mean spending money on shelving rather than books).


My books are stacked everywhere in NY, on the floor, catalogued in boxes etc.

Living abroad there is no incentive right now to do shelving. Don't you find though that paperbacks are too easily damaged, the spine tears and then there's the yellowing if the paper isn't acid free. I tend to look for first editions, signed, rare and collectibles, not for everything mind you just special purchases and those tend to be hardback. Also when I am building an authors body of work I prefer them to be hardback...I want them to live through the ages now that Kindle is taking over the world

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

I can totally imagine a world where books are a thing of the past, especially in the States, especially special printed books. When I first discovered Anna Kavan she was out of print so I made sure every book I found of hers was a hard copy. There are library editions that are in mint condition, really beautiful books that are being discarded, I purchase those too.

Liebling! Girl where you been? Missed ya.

 

I should bloody hope so at that price.
How's it do on out-of-print books?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Hell, a lot of my (technical) collection isn't even listed on Amazon, let alone available.

 

Mine also - shelves, floor, sofa, coffee table, fridge top...
But not yet catalogued: I start and then end up re-reading one I haven't looked at for a while instead of cataloguing it...

Part of the character I think.
Plus it's probably a hangover from being younger and spending pocket money on books - the cheaper the better.
And so many of the ones I want/ read aren't available in hardback (and besides, a hardback is so much heavier, therefore likelier to be dropped while reading in the bath).

 

SACRILEGE!

Soon book store owners, publishers and bookmakers can all go work in McDonalds.

Have you read The Lathe of Heaven by LeGuin?