I like mysteries, so I really like Lawrence Sanders (so much humor there) and John Sanford. I also like Patricia Cornwell novels as long as they are about Kay Scarpetta (her other books stink).
Steven King used to be good. IMHO, he peaked with The Stand. Now THAT is a book!!!
“My, my. Such a lot of guns around here and so few brains.”
~Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon”
Anything by John Irving, Somerset Maugham or Tom Robbins.
Candide and L’Ingenue - Voltaire
Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Pirsig
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters - Julian Barnes
I have deeply, profoundly, loved the following books. They are all on my bookshelves and have been read and re-read countless times. I recommend them highly. (This is just a short list of the very best, I have thousands of book and authors I love.)
Titan by John Varley.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Read “Sundials” in the new issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction. www.sff.net/people/rothman
“Catch-22” (surprise, surprise)
“Mother Night” (any Vonnegut, actually)
“Catcher in the Rye”
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera
The first full-length novel I ever read was “Papillon,” and I thought it was SUCH an adventure as a child.
Some really great books!
But I think my point got confused. I was primarily talking about non-fiction. Thinking about it afterward I realized that many might consider both of the books fiction and to me they aren’t.
This isn’t to say fiction books don’t sometimes have a profound affect of our lives. My wife became a Christian because I started reading her bedtime stories from Narnia. I read her two and she “got hooked”, by the time she read the rest of the series she made her own “leap of faith” to Christianity.
Here are a couple of other books that changed my life when they changed my mind.
Ten Philosophical Mistakes…Mortimer J. Adler
Decision Making and the Will of God…Gary Freisen
Truth in Religion…Mortimer J. Adler
Darwin on Trial…Phillip E. Johnson
The Dialogues…Plato
The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes…Mortimer J. Adler
Black Like Me…???
God in the Dock…C.S. Lewis
How to Win Friends and Influence People…Dale Carnegie
Brave New World…Aldous Huxley
Siddhartha…Herman Hesse
Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth…Norman Giesler (sp?)
Not all of these books made me do a complete turnaround, some just filled a missing gap.
If you are a reader, and I assume if you posted here or are reading this you are. I would recommend Mortimer J. Adler’s “How to Read a Book” Awesome! It tells you more about reading than any other book I know! Everything from synoptical reading of reference books for personal study to how to get the main points the book is making in just a cursory glance. (Helps me when titles and tables of contents aren’t helpful while I’m trying to decide to buy it in a bookstore and I only have a minute to browse)
If you have any Non-fiction books that changed your thinking it would help me and perhaps others.
I have an ancillary question. How many of you buy used books? I buy a lot myself and am always combing Salvation Army and Goodwill stores. I find a used book reads the same as a new one.
Thanks for the posts!
For my money, besides the wealth of older stuff you can usually find in them, used book stores just smell better.
Saint Eutychus
www.disneyshorts.org
Second-hand bookshops are my favourite waste of time. Especially ones offering 50% sales every other week, where the owner gives out his phone number and you can call him and ask him to open up specially.
Books…
Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
The Alan Clark Diaries - Alan Clark
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
253 - Geoff Ryman
From First To Last - Damon Runyon
On Broadway - Damon Runyon
Europa - Tim Parks
I never touched him, ref, honest!
Office girl–I love you.
Also, anything by John Irving.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek–Annie Dillard
Atlas Shrugged
Anything by Gary Jennings
Not so fast, you mucko!
Phaedrus, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” is fiction, isn’t it? So your OP does kinda lead one to think you’re asking for both fiction and non-fiction.
My List of Great Books of Fiction includes:
“Gone with the Wind” Margaret Mitchell
“Thorn Birds” Colleen McCollough
“Lonesome Dove” Larry McMurtry
“Outlander” series - Diana Gabaldon
“Pride and Prejudice” - Jane Austen
“All Creatures Great and Small” series - James Herriott
“Harry Potter” series - P.K. Rowling
“Little House on the Prairie” series - Laura Ingalls Wilder (technically NON fiction)
“Clan of the Cave Bear” series - Jean Auel
Well, heck. Why bother? I have hardly read any ‘classics’ and the few I did never made an impact on me.
The book series that changed me from liking Fantasy to loving Fantasy was The Belgariad by David Eddings, but in retrospect it’s not that great a series seminally. But it is what made me a voracious Fantasy fan. Still haven’t found that one author/book that I’d class as the best there ever was, or anything of that nature.
-PIGEONMAN-
Returning Soon!
The Legend Of PigeonMan - Watch this space…! Great things are afoot!
Godel, Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter - six & Oblio, good call. MU!
I’ve gotten wonderful insight from these two books by Raymond Smullyan - The Tao is Silent and 5000 BC. There is a third book of his like this, This Book Needs No Title, that I read once but is now out of print and I can’t find it anywhere.
Laugh at me if you want, but I love Miss Manners and have several of Judth Martin’s books. Great advice!
Ok, since three people have mentioned this now: You should really check out “The Mind’s I” by Hofstdter as well. It is a wonderful mind bender!
Always at the top of my list will be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig. I am delighted to see it mentioned so many times here. I even have a tatoo of the wrench/plant symbol on my right arm. This is how much the book changed me(and no, I don’t have a hundred tats, I have two)
In addition:
I have read everything by Camus and Sartre and have enjoyed every bit, especially The Stranger (Camus)and Nausea(Sartre).
The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas taught me the importance of patience, honor and karma.
A Clockwork Orange by Burgess demonstrated the importance of free will to me. I’d recommend this to some of our “new friends” here, but I just don’t think they could dig deeper than the sex and violence.
The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger. I’m not sure what exactly this book did to me. Perhaps just captured my angst perfectly and gave hope of something better.
Critique of Pure Reason by Kant. I read this at a time when I was really getting fed up with Aristotle’s endless, droning rhetoric. Kant was so clear and precise with his words, I remember reading him the same as when I got my first pair of glasses. Everything just came right into focus. Thank God for Kant.
And, of course, Atlas Shrugged by Rand. I guess I was lucky to have understood and appreciated Nietzsche’s concept of the Ubermensch before I read Atlas. This book has driven me towards being a better person all around.
“Teaching without words and work without doing are understood by very few.”
-Tao Te Ching
Sorry, just wanted to sneak one more in!
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu. Not often can a book guide you towards such peace and harmony as this one can.
Oh yes, and anything by Feynman. This man can explain the concepts of physics to anyone!
Umm, can I just send out a list of my whole collection… heheh!
Hmm… favorite books.
Well, as Demoncritus mentioned earlier…my favorite books would have to be Tao Te Ching and the Analects by Confucius (well his disciples okay).
Umm…what else Blaise Pascal’s Pensees
Catch 22-Joseph Heller
Oedipus Rex and Antigone-Sophocles
The Histories-Heroditus
History of the Pelyoponnsian War-Thucydides
The Letters-Pliny
The Bible
Crime and Punishment-Doestoyevsky (okay so I LOVE anything by Doestoyevsky)
The Death of Socrates-Plato
Paradise Lost-Milton
Pilgrim’s Progress-Bunyan
Walden Pond-Thoreau
Moby Dick, Billy Bud, Typee, Omoo-Herman Mellville
And anything by Thomas Harris
actually I have way to many favorite books to post here.
“To everthing there is a season.”-Ecclesiastes
Ah heck I couldn’t leave out Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Confession’s of Saint Augustine, Macbeth and Parables of Keirkegaard. Anything by C.S. Lewis.
Two of my ALL-TIME favorite books are 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell.
I’m a littl upset at all you people 
You mentioned alot of my favorites books before I could get here…(never mind the fact I could have posted earlier…)
Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books, of course.
Sharyn McCrumb’s Ballad Series – The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter and The Ballad of Frankie Silver particularly. If you like John Irving, try Sharyn McCrumb.
Charles Dickens, but only David Copperfield, Bleak House and Dombey and Son.
Catrandom
Some ones not mentioned yet:
The Man who mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sachs really made me aware that people think differently because they are wired differently and just explaining something may not make them change their minds.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens–still the best story of the redemption of a human being ever written (except of course the Bible)
The Book of Judges where Deborah the Judge leads an army into battle–God uses women, too!
The Book of Ruth–Love this one–you gotta appreciate the scheming that Ruth and Naomi do to get Boaz!
I Never Promised you a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenburg–she’s written some beautiful novels that really change your perception of other people. Of Such Small Differences was also great–about a man who was deaf-blind. Greenburg’s parents were deaf and she really captures that society.
Ditto to She’s Come Undone, The Phantom Tollbooth, Pride and Prejudice and add Emma to that list!
Great, now I feel like an idiot because I’m not as well-read as so many people here…give me a few more decades, okay?
The Secret Garden, because it was the first novel I ever read, when I was about six or so.
Cat’s Cradle and Sirens of Titan (and anything else by Vonnegut, really).
Sophie’s World. I think this is sort of obscure (it’s by a Norwegian guy), but I highly recommend it, especially if you’re into things that hurt to think about.
Catch-22 because it’s my favorite book.
1984
Probably some other stuff, too, but this is what comes to mind immediately.
~Kyla
“Anger is what makes America great.”
Catrandom - you mentioned one of my favorites, Sharyn McCrumb!!! The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter - there is a passage in there that made me cry my eyes out, nonstop, for 20 minutes after I read it - do you know the one I mean?
Kyla - you made some great choices. Take note of the titles mentioned and when you get to my age you’ll have a lot of good reading memories in the ol’ brain circuits.
Phaedrus - Jeez, thanks for making me feel like a Jerry Springer watchin’, mouth-breathin’, high school dropout! I didn’t know you meant non-fiction as in “I’m-majoring-in-Philiosphy-at-Yale” stuff. I’m afraid I’m confined to the Bible and Butler’s Lives of the Saints (non-fiction?) for heavy reading. I most definitely endorse “Codes of Love” by Mark A. Bryan, a self-help book for dealing with one’s loathsome family. It is the only self-help book I have read in the last 20 years that is of any use whatsoever, it is excellent if you need it. Also again, “Carla Emery’s Old-Fashioned Recipe Book” by Carla Emery, a huge tome with helpful information on every thing from de-horning a billy goat to making cheese and olive oil to raising peacocks.