Ooo! Ooo! I forgot about Heart of Darkness. The horror! The horror!
Two stories came immediately to mind:
Hyperion by Dan Simmons. The very first story related by the one of the passengers to be more specific. The one about the priest/missionary who restrains himself with crucifixion to defeat the parasite and makes the ultimate sacrifice, not just once but thousands of times. The whole book is very good, each story better than the last.
The second story is The Jehovah Contract by Viktor Korman. The book itself is kind of cheesy but the plotline really stuck with me. The Antichrist has finally appeared in the form of a televangelist and he hires a hit man to take out God.
Just finished Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. Not sure whether you’d count it as fiction or non-fiction but either way it’s mind-blowing. If I have to die I want to die like Leonidas.
Brave New World is also great (hence username) andA Clockwork Orange has some of the most awesome prose I’ve ever seen.
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, by Betty Smith. One of my favorite books.
To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.
This Perfect Day, by Ira Levin. Scary. What I always pictured the future to be, rather than a 1984-type of future.
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver.
So many I want to name (1984, Lord of the Flies, This Time of Darkness, Hamlet, His Dark Materials, Sophie’s World, The Bridge, The Naked Ape, The Language Instinct…), but the greatest story I’ve ever read is Ted Chiang’s** Story of Your Life.** I exhort anyone who has an interest in science fiction, language, philosophy, or well-written prose to read this story as soon as possible. I read it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction (16th Edition), which has a number of other memorable stories, among which this one still manages to stand out.
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I read this at least once a year.
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.
A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Both were beautifully told and A Farewell to Arms really shook me up.
Number Six, I love Red Ranger Came Calling! I put it out every Christmas with the decorations.
LOTR (of course)
**The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ** series
On the Beach - not enjoyable, but certainly memorable
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Stand
The Black Rose Thomas Costain
Gone With the Wind
Forever Amber
And you can’t go wrong with the comic book adventures of Scrooge McDuck with Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie against the odious Beagle Boys or Flintheart Glomgold.
Um, Flintheart Who? I read a lot of S. McDuck back when I was a lad and don’t remember this character. I always thought his arch-nemesis was Magica de Spell.
Flintheart Glomgold was Scrooge’s chief rival for the title of “World’s Richest Duck.”
In The Second Richest Duck by the great Carl Barks, Scrooge learns that Glomgold is now thought to be the world’s richest duck and goes to Africa to find out if it’s true. When the two count their assets, they find out they’re perfectly equal. The only way to break the tie is to compare their giant balls of string - by unrolling them across the African continent to see who has the most.
According to this site:
http://stp.ling.uu.se/~starback/dcml/chars/flintheart.html
Flintheart only appeared in three of Barks’ stories.
(I forgot about Magica De Spell. She always wanted Scrooge’s lucky No. 1 Dime.)
Oh, now I remember him. At least, I remember the ball of string. Didn’t he win by like a foot by tacking on a piece of string he found in his pocket? I remember another contest he got into with a Middle Eastern billionaire. Building statues. They made statues so huge that they took up the entire city.