# Which books would you describe as "brilliant"? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 9, 2006, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164 "2006-01-09T16:02:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Meeko](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e495f1/32.png) [@Meeko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meeko)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/61 "2010-09-27T16:33:23Z")
**Snowcrash** Neal Stephenson Discussion spoils the end of the book. The entire idea presented of Meme is presented. I’m not sure if the book itself uses the term meme per se. The entire idea of a “mind virus” [I believe this approximates Brodie’s title] is intriguing if not a bit scary, frankly. To have read the book 10 years ago, and to now live in a world of “Viral Video” really testifies to the impact I think this book had. Granted, I had to google meme and so on and so forth, but I think that for most readers of Snowcrash, they left with this impact, or greater. I read the book in High School, so arguably I missed a few issues in the book. To say nothing about the philosophy on Onan and The Code of Hammurabi being essentially conveyed to humans in binary. - - **Xenocide** Orson Scott Card to a lesser extent. Ender has been the only series I ever got past the first book on. [And for the other series, I’m not sure I even finished the first book. [I dropped both Wheel of Time and Sword of Truth.] Ender’s Shadow grabbed me, and was my first, and only “page turner”. Ender’s Game not so much [I actually stopped reading Game for a while, and decided to give it another chance. So glad I did.] But I digress. I blame my ADHD in part for not getting through books, even if I find them “readable”. Understanding my ADHD and other issues with the help of professionals had me believing for a while that I had a deep connection to Xenocide :: \*\* OCD. \*\* Reading the Table of Contents I saw Chapter 3, IIRC, “Clean Hands”. Knowing the non-ficiton book \*\*“The Boy Who couldn’t stop washing” \*\*I looked for an acknowledgment to the work. Having found it, I knew OCD would figure Prominently in the book. It’s just the thought that : Having OCD being … hijacked into a device for world wide domination and control is just a bit scary. Granted a smaller subset of the population than could be targeted in Snowcrash, but then again, when Path was nearly completely populated with people with OCD in the higher classes, indeed, the litmus for the higher class… it’s a bit unnerving. I am not so convinced now that I have that connection to the book. I was only told second hand that ADHD and the above came together as a package deal, inseparable. I don’t buy in to this anymore. Many times I have thought of re-reading Snowcrash Not so Much Xenocide. This would be no small feat as I have attempted **many** books, just for one reading. [Neuromancer got two whacks at it, failed both times.] To say nothing that Xenocide is a thicker book. To say nothing that I have stalled on Ender over Shadow Puppets. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 4:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/62 "2010-09-27T16:37:49Z")
**Rats, Lice and History: Being a Study in Biography, which, after Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indeispendsable for the Lay Reader, Deals with the Life History of Typhus Fever** by Hans Zinsser. as the title implies, a “biography” of Typhoid fever. Weird and wittily written. **Silverlock** by John Myers Myers. Long before Alan Moore was doing cultural mashups in the Graphic Novels, John Myers Myers wrote this wonderfully convoluted fantasy novel putting together characters from throughout Western Literature, without telling you where any of it came from. Even if you think you’re well-read, i virtually guarantee you’ll miss something without a guide. Fortunately, one has been written. There also used to be one on the Internet, until about a year ago. > **[Silverlock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverlock)** > > Silverlock is a novel by John Myers Myers published in 1949. The novel's settings and characters, aside from the protagonist, are all drawn from history, mythology, and other works of literature. > In 1981, The Moon's Fire-Eating Daughter was published. Thematically related to Silverlock, it was billed as a "sequel to Silverlock" on the cover. > While on a sea voyage, a ship named Naglfar founders. One anhedonic passenger, A. Clarence Shandon (M.B.A., Wisconsin), is washed ashore in a fictional lan... **Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches** and other books by Marvin Harris. The Anthropologist responsible for the approach he called _Cultural Materialism_ explains the whys and wherefores of human behavior in a very accessible book for the layman. **Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies** by Jared Diamond. a book that needs no introduction on _this_ board. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/63 "2010-09-27T17:25:42Z")
> [@Cuckoorex](#): > > _The Lucifer Principle_ by Howard Bloom I found the writing in this book sometimes cheesy and repetitive and the ideas sometimes suspect…even xenophobic…but…there’s _something_ about it. Maybe it’s that he brings together _other_ interesting ideas that _other_ people had…but I definitely agree with some of what he says, particularly about memes, superorganisms and the pecking order. > [@CalMeacham](#): > > **Silverlock** by John Myers Myers. Long before Alan Moore was doing cultural mashups in the Graphic Novels, John Myers Myers wrote this wonderfully convoluted fantasy novel putting together characters from throughout Western Literature, without telling you where any of it came from. Even if you think you’re well-read, i virtually guarantee you’ll miss something without a guide. Fortunately, one has been written. There also used to be one on the Internet, until about a year ago. > > [Silverlock - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverlock) Read _Silverlock_ and found myself unmoved. Dunno why. > [@CalMeacham](#): > > **Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies** by Jared Diamond. a book that needs no introduction on _this_ board. This book revolutionized my own thinking about human history and dealt a stinging blow to racist theory. It’s one after another of those instantly illuminating moments when things never really understood suddenly become clear and you know it _must_ have happened just so. I’ll add historian John Keegan – although I find some of his broader works fascinating (especially some of the thinking in his _A History of Warfare_), his much shorter first book remains his masterpiece: _ **The Face of Battle** _. Keegan penetrates thick layers of romanticized cliché, sometimes with letters and testimony of soldiers themselves, sometimes with simple thought experiments. This is, at its heart, a profoundly anti-war book by a man whose life has been devoted to war and warriors. I feel that every human of draft age ought to be assigned to read it. . ---
**Author:** ![GargoyleWB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gargoylewb/32/199_2.png) [@GargoyleWB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GargoyleWB)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/64 "2010-09-27T18:22:35Z")
**Illuminatus** trilogy (R.A. Wilson) **Snow Crash** , N Stephenson **Dune** series, F. Herbert **Steel Beach** J. Varley **Bridge of Birds** B. Hughart **Princess Bride** S. Morgenstern **Nausicaa** graphic novel Miyazaki **1984** G. Orwell All of these have left me feeling I’ve just read something truly unique and special, and modified my brain and perception of the universe in a way that made me feel that I closed the book cover a different person. ---
**Author:** ![DirkGntly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d9b06d/32.png) [@DirkGntly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DirkGntly)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/65 "2010-09-27T19:06:46Z")
“There is a Monster at the End of This Book” ---
**Author:** ![FoieGrasIsEvil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foiegrasisevil/32/16638_2.png) [@FoieGrasIsEvil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FoieGrasIsEvil)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/66 "2010-09-27T19:18:05Z")
_Battlefield Earth_ series by L. Ron Hubbard. All ten of 'em. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/67 "2010-09-27T19:24:20Z")
> [@](#): > > Battlefield Earth series by L. Ron Hubbard. All ten of 'em. Ah-hah. You read them so closely, and they had such an impact on you that, you failed to notice that the title of his bloated _dekology_\* was really **Mission Earth**. **Battlefield Earth** was the title of his bloated single-volume novel, memorialized as a movie by John Travolta. \*_Dekology_ – a story in 10 volumes. as L. Ron said in the beginning of his. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/68 "2010-09-27T19:27:03Z")
> [@FoieGrasIsEvil](#): > > _Battlefield Earth_ series by L. Ron Hubbard. All ten of 'em. > > 😃 Whew, your smilie didn’t show in my email notice for the post, and I was gonna come here and 'splain to you what an awful pile of dreck the first books was. ---
**Author:** ![Kansas\_Beekeeper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/c37758/32.png) [@Kansas\_Beekeeper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kansas_Beekeeper)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/69 "2010-09-27T19:43:10Z")
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. ---
**Author:** ![StusBlues](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/dc4da7/32.png) [@StusBlues](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/StusBlues)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/70 "2010-09-27T19:45:50Z")
I’m not a big novel reader, but I’ll add _A Thread of Grace_. Very powerful story of Italian civilians resisting the banality of evil during World War II. ---
**Author:** ![Meeko](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e495f1/32.png) [@Meeko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meeko)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/71 "2010-09-27T20:39:02Z")
> [@Meeko](#): > > **Snowcrash** Neal Stephenson > [@GargoyleWB](#): > > **Snow Crash** , N Stephenson Obligatory Did I make you post that comment? Comment 😉 Also, small wonder that Snow Crash is near the top of the list. **I have tried reading Illuminatus and Dune as well.** put both of them down. Was actually told I couldn’t read Dune durring down time in a study hall period, because it was not assigned to me by a teacher. For a fraction of a second, I entertained asking my Home room teacher to assign it to me. But, I didn’t want to lock myself in to it. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/72 "2010-09-27T21:16:13Z")
> [@Tamerlane](#): > > An idiosyncratic pick, but Watership Down by Richard Adams. Brilliant in concept, marvelous in execution. Heh, I just re-read that the other day - my wife was all “WTF are you reading a kid’s book about rabbits for?” and I was "well, it isn’t _really_ … ". 😃 Not that I am unwilling to read well-written kids books for fun, but I’m not sure this really qualifies. I was vastly amused at the choice of chapter-heading quotations, which were well-nigh perfect. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/73 "2010-09-27T21:21:59Z")
My own picks: - _The Master and Margarita_ by Bugalikov - _Ficciones_ by J.L. Borges - _The Man Who Was Thursday_ by Chesterton - _Invisible Cities_ and _If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller_ by Italo Calvino - _The Periodic Table_ by Primo Levi - _Cloud Atlas_ and _Ghostwritten_ by D. Mitchell No doubt there are many others, but these pop into my head right off the bat. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/74 "2010-09-27T21:52:42Z")
_The Naked Ape_ ---
**Author:** ![Busy\_Scissors](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/d78d45/32.png) [@Busy\_Scissors](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Busy_Scissors)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/75 "2010-09-27T22:17:36Z")
The word ‘brilliant’ in the OP means it has to be Gravity’s Rainbow for me - mentioned already by several posters. It’s written with such incredible flair and panache, it’s what comes to mind as a brilliant novel. There’s been some exceptional books mentioned that are as good or better, but nothing I’ve picked up has had that same flamboyant impact. And that’s me reading it 20 years after it was published. Imagine being a writer reading it when it came out (1973), it would put you on your back. A mixture of awe, inspiration for your own work, and despondency that the position of world’s best writer was now irrefutably occupied by someone else. ---
**Author:** ![jackdavinci](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackdavinci/32/3259_2.png) [@jackdavinci](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackdavinci)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2010, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/76 "2010-09-27T23:36:58Z")
_Anathem_ pretty much blew me away. ---
**Author:** ![GameHat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ed655f/32.png) [@GameHat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GameHat)\ **Post date:** [September 28, 2010, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/77 "2010-09-28T00:12:52Z")
_Catch-22_ _Mrs. Dalloway_ ---
**Author:** ![GameHat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ed655f/32.png) [@GameHat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GameHat)\ **Post date:** [September 28, 2010, 12:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/78 "2010-09-28T00:19:26Z")
missed the edit, add to my list: _A Clockwork Orange_ ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [September 28, 2010, 12:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/79 "2010-09-28T00:19:58Z")
_Lord of Light_ by Roger Zelazny. The first Amber series by Roger Zelazny; the second was good too, but only good. _Creatures of Light and Darkness_ by Roger Zelazny. ---
**Author:** ![Lust4Life](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ecc23a/32.png) [@Lust4Life](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lust4Life)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2010, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164/80 "2010-09-30T17:24:42Z")
The Aubery/Maturin series were without exception brilliant, as are Pratchetts Discworld series and Ed McBains Precinct novels up until ten years ago. I’d also second the Hornblower series and nominate Farmers Dayworld series. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-books-would-you-describe-as-brilliant/339164.md?page=5)