Okay, prolly been done, but what the hey......let's do it again...

What are your favorite books, and/or prefence of reading material to peruse?

Mine:

Wheel of Time series

Dragonlance series

Sword of Truth series

Tiger and Del series

The Poetic Edda

Celtic poems and essays

and more.... (I practically have my own library in the office at home) :D

[ 04-27-2002, 12:57 AM: Message edited by: TAOWolf ]

I have to say The Wheel of Time Series. But the Dragonlance series brings back wonderful memories!!

I'd say some of my favorite books include:

Franny and Zooey- JD Salinger
Siddhartha- Herman Hesse
The Prophet- Khalil Gibran
Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte
several poems from Edwin Arlington Robinson
Gnosis- a poem by Christopher Cranch
Darkness- a poem by Lord Byron
and, many others I forgot to mention, I'm sure.

I don't care for fantasy books much. The genre tends to be really poorly written for some reason. The Silmarillion was a good book in that genre, though. The Vampire Lestat was also a good read.

1) Flashman series, by George MacDonald Fraser

2) Virtually anything written by the late Roger Zelazny

3) Virtually anything written by the late Bob Heinlein

4) Virtually anything written by the still-living Glen Cook

5) Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigen series.

The list could go on. Catch-22 , Up the Down Staircase , and John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series are high on my non-fantasy/sf list.

Most current fantasy, I think, is both puerile and rather poorly written, including Mr Jordan's massive money-making machine. It's unfortunate that classic fantasy, such as E. R. Eddison's, is virtually unknown, now.

Da gustabus non est disputandum.

Malthaussen

[ 04-27-2002, 01:47 AM: Message edited by: Malthaussen ]

<font color="lightgreen">Animorphs (KA Applegate), Secret Seven, Famous Five, Adventurous Four (all Enid Blyton), Lord of the Rings (if you dont know who thats by, youve been around less than me [img]tongue.gif[/img] ), Anything by Roald Dahl, Anything by Agatha Christie, and more that I cant think of off the top of my head... </font>

The Discworld series written by Terry Pratchett. The most original series of books I have ever read.

Good choice of Brontë, Katherine. Wuthering Heights is wonderful! [img]smile.gif[/img]
I tend to agree with you about fantasy - there's a difference between a well-written fantasy novel and truly great literature. I do read lots of fantasy though, as a means of relaxation. There are notable exceptions to the 'badly written' rules: I really enjoyed Robin Hobb's books, also Tad Williams' Otherland series. And of course Pratchett is fantastic!

But as for my favourite books apart from that - there are SO many of them! A short selection of things that left a big impression:

Anthony Burgess - Earthly Powers
A.S. Byatt - Possession; Angels & Insects; Babel Tower
Iain Banks - everything he's ever done, whether fiction or SF
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying Of Lot 49
Shakespeare, Marlowe - everything either of them has ever written
Milton's Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes and Lycidas
Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead
Samuel Beckett - Waiting For Godot
Nietzsche's complete oeuvre
Süskind - Das Parfum
Hesse - Demian
Oscar Wilde's complete oeuvre
Umberto Eco - The Name Of The Rose, Foucault's Pendulum
Vestdijk's De Kellner en de Levenden (had to include the only Dutch novel to touch me so profoundly - though I really should mention Komrij's Dit Helse Moeras and Dorrestein's Buitenstaanders as well then [img]tongue.gif[/img] )
Sartre's Huis Clos
De Beauvoir - probably called No One Is Immortal or somesuch in English...
oh - I shouldn't forget Will Self and especially Ian McEwan - great authors!!
As for poetry, oh my...

I adore Donne's work, also Yeats, Milton, Keats, Blake, Frost, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Edwin Morgan, Craig Raine, Shelley, George Herbert, Spenser, Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Wilde, so many many more.... my hands hurt now.... :D

Where, oh where to begin.
1) Anything written by Robert Heinlein (In particular Job:a Comedy of Justice and Number of the Beast)
2) Most anything written by Douglas Adams (Especially Dirk Gently and Long Dark Teatime of the Soul)
3) Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
4) Discworld series by Terry Pratchett
5) American Gods by Neil Gaiman (Can we see that these two are under appreciated??)
6) almost everything by Tolkien (Newbies beware I know what J.R.R. stands for. Do you? Frodo lives!)

The Lord of the Rings trilogy (of course)

The Deathgate cycle

and many single fantasy titles...whose names elude me.

very good choices, except..... number or the beast by heinlen IMOSVHO a 900 odd pages of complete drivel not worthy of the heinlan name where as JOB was mindblowing