What's the SDMB required reading list?

Cafe Society
41

Catch-22, for a sense levity in the face of institutional madness.

42

That was my intent with my answer. In each case, my recommendation is one that, within a specific genre, a particular book or series gets mentioned a lot. Within Cafe Society, for instance, **Watchmen **is discussed a lot and it’s position, for better or worse, as one of the definitive graphic novels is accepted and applied in a lot of threads. Ergo - worth reading and knowing about in a Doper context.

43

Lord of the Rings

  • The History of Middle-earth for the kids in long pants :wink:
    Guns Germs and Steel
    Harry Potter Series
    Disc World Series
    Salt
    Demon Haunted World
    The Relativity of Wrong
    CIA Fact Book
    Elements of Style
    The Christian Bible
    The Koran, Alcoran, Qur’an (take your pick)
    The Letters of Pelagius (ok just kidding, but it’s not bad)
    The Republic
    Meditations
    The Case for Mars
    And I’m running out of ideas, but I’m finding my preferences skew my list.
44

Robert A. Wilson’s The Illuminatus ! Trilogy, maybe ?

45

I think Dune is mentioned fairly often.

46

Martin Gardner’s* Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science* gets mentioned often enough to qualify, I think.

In the same vein but more obscure is The Natural History of Nonsense by Bergen Evans. I include it partly because Evans was a teacher of our Perfect Master.

47

“Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” should be in there as well.

48

I read Richard Russo’s “Straight Man” only because so many people here on the boards said it was the funniest book they had ever read.

49

Davidson’s The Oxford Companion to Food, since reference books have already been mentioned. No good bookshelf is complete without it.

The Devil in the White City probably is quite well-known here.
Why People Believe Strange Things of course.
As mentioned, all of Lord of the Rings stuff.
The Economist as a periodical.
The Peshawar Lancers at least amongst the guys.
Didto for the Hornblower and Flashman series.
1984 and Animal Farm as well as Feirenheit 451 and probably The Martian Chronicles.
The New York Times as the newspaper of record.

50

We also often mention:

The Maltese Falcon (often to say how it is almost identical to the movie)
The Princess Bride (to say how it is so different from the movie)
**Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland **(although now, who knows?)

The Collected Works of William Shakespeare

51

I see **XKCD **popping up a lot in threads.