The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Catcher in the Wry - Bob Uecker
A Game of Thrones - George RR Martin
The first two are pretty solid, the third could easily change from day to day.
Well, I’m not home, so I can’t sit down and scan the four sagging bookcases to refresh my memory. As others have said, this is the choice of this moment in time. And I’m going to cheat a bit…
- Dies the Fire series by Stirling
- Outlander series by Gabaldon
- Mercedes Thompson series by Patricia Briggs.
[ol]
[li]Crime and Punishment[/li][li]All Quiet on the Western Front[/li][li]East of Eden[/li][/ol]
Three is hard. And I assumed novels - if you include nonfiction, it gets harder. I don’t even know how to compare them.
Truer words were never spoken. Hmm. At this instant, I’ll say:
Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin - Brilliantly satirical sf novel.
Aztec by Gary Jennings - Sprawling, engrossing historical novel about the downfall of the Aztecs.
Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis - Wonderful explanation of the genius of the Framers, and how they related to each other.
I could easily list another two dozen books which I like nearly as much. And it hurts me not to list LOTR.
To say nothing of fans of this show: Homicide: Life on the Street - Wikipedia
…and I left out One Hundred Years of Solitude. This task is impossible.
Someone upthread, when I’d mentioned I’d been compiling a list of the choices here, asked if I could put it in the thread for future reference and summer reading. I’ve done that for all the choices up to post #65.
A few things to mention I’ll speak of here. The first fourteen books on the list have a number after them. That’s how many times they were chosen. If a book doesn’t have a number, it was selected only once. If a poster listed a series, or all the works, of a particular author, I haven’t included it on the list. Exceptions are The Lord of the Rings, the Bible, and the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy.
I haven’t listed authors, because some books came with just titles.
Nine or ten authors did have at least two different titles selected, but I think Robert Heinlein had the most, with four separate titles selected.
But the winner for most selections was LOTR.
I may have made some errors, sorry.
The Lord of the Rings 5
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress 3
The Stand 3
A Suitable Boy 2
All Quiet on the Western Front 2
Bleak House 2
Crime and Punishment 2
Gone With The Wind 2
Lolita 2
Lonesome Dove 2
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 2
The Caine Mutiny 2
The Great Gatsby 2
Watership Down 2
1984
100 Years of Solitude
A Beautiful Mind
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Fall of Moondust
A Game of Thrones
A Prayer for Owen Meany
A Soldier of the Great War
A Tale Of Two Cities
A Voyage for Madmen
Absalom, Absalom!
All Creatures Great and Small
And Then There Were None
Ariel
At Swim-Two-Birds
Aztec
Bridge of Birds
Captain Horatio Hornblower
Catch 22
Catcher In The Rye
Cat’s Cradle
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Cloud Atlas
Consciousness Explained
Critical Path
Double Star
Dracula
Dragonlance Chronicles Trilogy
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
East of Eden
English Passengers
Farmer Boy
Ficciones
Fight Club
Finnegans Wake
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Foucault’s Pendulum
Founding Brothers
From the Corner of His Eye
Gaudy Night
Grapes of Wrath
Have Space Suit, Will Travel
Heartbreak Hotel
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
House of Leaves
Howard’s End
I Know This Much Is True
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
In This House of Brede
Invisible Man
Jealousy
Johnathon Strange and Mr. Norrell
Kingdom Come
Les Misérables
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century
Little Women
Little, Big
Love, Loss and What I Wore
Midnight’s Children
Molloy
My Antonia
Needful Things
Night Watch
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Persuasion
Pop. 1280
Portnoy’s Complaint
Pride and Prejudice
Red and Black
Replay
Shogun
Sometimes a Great Notion
Song of Solomon
Starship Troopers
The Bluest Eye
The Brothers K
The Brothers Karamazov
The Carpet Makers
The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Wry
The Confidence-Man
The Crimson Petal and the White
The Dollmaker
The English Passengers
The Fire Rose
The First Evil
The Fountainhead
The Haunting of Hill House
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Hobbit
The Holy Bible
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
The Maltese Falcon
The Mote in God’s Eye
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
The Pearl
The Power of One
The Robber Bride
The Sot-Weed Factor
The Way We Live Now
The Wind in The Willows
The Winter of Our Discontent
To Kill a Mockingbird
Tuf Voyaging
Ulysses
Villette
Voice of the Whirlwind
Watchmen
We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
Where the Red Fern Grows
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Thanks, Baker!
This is nearly impossible! After much mental wrestling, I’ve come up with:
Lord of the Rings Trilogy- Tolkein (duh)
Little Women- Louisa May Alcott
Green Darkness- Anya Seton (more historical than romance, set in England in the 1500’s, this book has a surprisingly large number of fans)
All three are special in that I can immerse myself, instantly, in another world.
Yep.
Catch-22 was listed at least twice; Desert Solitaire and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest listed at least once.
.
The Catcher in the Rye was also listed twice; it appears as two separate entries on the list, with and without the first “The.”
I see where the error was with those three. The post listing them was being made while I made a post that came nine minutes later.
That’s the kind of thing that kept me hopping in December while compiling poster’s choices over in the Death Pool. Slight misspellings, different titles, and so forth.
The three great works of novel-length fiction that come to mind at the moment:
[ul]
[li]All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren[/li][li]Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut[/li][li]The Stranger, by Albert Camus[/li][/ul]
But it could be a totally different list tomorrow, no doubt.
oh KAY, then.
Thanks, Baker. That’s quite a list!
Here, in the order I wrote them down, is my list:
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
La Chartreuse de Parme, Stendhal (The Charterhouse of Parma)
L’Éducation sentimentale, Gustave Flaubert (The Sentimental Education)
I’m pretty sure that these are all books that I just happened to read at the right time. But there you go.
BIg Bang - SImon Singh
100 Years of Solitude
Siddartha - Hesse
This is really hard, even sticking to fiction. I’ll choose from books I’ve read multiple times and always seemed to get something more each time.
‘The Magus’ - John Fowles
‘Fifth Business’ - Robertson Davies
‘Para Handy Tales’ - Neil Munro
The English Passengers, Matthew Kneale
The Song of the Dodo, David Quammen
The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan
IIRC, this book contains the almost perfect sentance. What was written was, “The rain pocked the water.” If it was, “Rain pocked the water,” well…it sets up a whole scene in my mind. I love it.