My favorites so far are Tom Clancy, Stephen King(Dark Tower only), Ayn Rand, and George Orwell…of course I have a much larger list of nonfiction writers…Ron Paul being at the top. ;-)

I read it in 1960 or so. 1984 seemed so far off. Anyway, my friend, I’d bet anything that you’d like Peter Bowen’s Gabriel DuPre books. Read Coyote Wind, and tell me I’m wrong.

I also enjoy the scifi/fantasy school. While I thought that Peter Jackson did a wonderful job, the lush visual descriptions in the original books of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (plus the Hobbit) set the bar for everything that came after and launched a new genre.

Asimov – 2001, a Space Oddesy. Who can forget Hal?

Ray Bradbuy: Martian Chronicles is a classic, as is Something Wicked this Way Comes

Gordon R. Dickson – The Dorsai Series was without peer.

Terry Goodkind – his Sword of Truth series is a B TV series, but it’s well written.

David Eddings – his two trilogies are great fun, and his Polgara and Belgarath books fit in well.

Terry Brooks does a nice fantasy series as well.

R. Zelazny – Nine Princes in Amber

sci-fi/fantasy: George R.R. Martin, Tolkien, Frank Herbert (but not so much Brian), Philip Pullman, the entirety of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, but above all, everything by Matt Stover. He writes the most amazing stuff. I have Gene Wolfe’s Shadow & Claw waiting to be read right now.

I also like some of Harry Turtledove’s alternate history novels, mostly his Timeline-191 series (even though the series gets progressively worse).

I also read academic military and diplomatic history works.

I love books, therefore, picking favorites is horrible. I tend to read a lot of kids books – they’re good, though!

I love Gregory Maguire — Wicked, Son of a Witch, and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister are all good.

Ray Bradbury — Now and Forever, and Dandelion Wine are my favorites, but I also really liked Martian Chronicles.

Alice Hoffman — River King was my favorite, but I like anything she writes.

Eoin Colfer — The Artemis Fowl series is fantastic. It’s technically a kids series, but it’s just terrific.

Jonathan Stroud – The Bartimaeus Trilogy. Again, for kids, again, fantastic.

The Book Thief by Martin Zusak is probably one of the most amazingly written books I have ever had the pleasure to read. HIGHLY recommended.

Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card. This book changed my life. I really am not kidding.

East of Eden, John Steinbeck

Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova,…

I could probably go on for several pages. Oh yeah, Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen. Last Book in the Universe, Rodman Philbrick…Okay, I’ll shut up now.

These are a few great books about Broncos history.

The Color Orange: A Super Bowl Season With the Denver Broncos (Hardcover)
by Russell Martin
- A great ride through training camp and on into the season that culminated in “The Drive”

Going Long : The Wild Ten-Year Saga of the Renegade American Football League In the Words of Those Who Lived by Jeff Miller
- Just listed this in an early post, but this is a damn good read for anyone interested in real stories about the old AFL from the people who lived it.

My wife just bought me this one.

A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL by Stefan Fatsis
- Haven’t started it yet, but she has (she’s a fan of the writer from some book on Scrabble enthusiasts) and she tells me it’s great (and she’s from Seattle and therefore not a football fan). Once I get through the Rick Riley compilation that I got at the $1 store (for $1) that I’m reading now, I’ll get into it.

J

I must have been out of it – I read everything from his Understanding Physics to his treatise on the Bible. His Foundation trilogy was an amazing effort.

James Clavell – Shogun. The book was better by far than the miniseries, and I liked the series. His Noble House was also brilliant

(I worked for bookstores for years, including the Tattered Cover during my Denver days):

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
The Brothers K by David James Duncan
A River Runs Through It by Norman McLean
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
The Work of Wolves by Kent Meyers
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Come on!! Twilight is the best book ever because of its realistic portrayal of vampires. I mean, the new Van Helsing movie totally gives vampires a bad name. They’re not mindless killers- they’re passionate high school boyfriends!

(Actual Twilight argument from a fangirl at my high school. I only changed it a little bit. I promise.)

My favs…

Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
As The Crow Flies – Jeffery Larcher
Libra – Dom DeLillo
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemmingway
Billy Budd – (Novella) Herman Melville
Paradised Lost – Milton
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
The People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn
I Know This Much Is True – Wally Lamb
Walden Pond – Henry David Thoreau

I think every one who reads a good book loves to turn a friend on to it. I’m saving all these recommended books, and will check them out. For some non-fiction, try
Carlos Castaneda’s books about Don Juan Matus. Castaneda, a grad student at UCLA majoring in anthropology, in the mid 60’s, meets Juan Matus, and enters into a 16 year apprenticeship. Don Juan blows my mind. I read these books over and over. The first is The Teachings of Don Juan; A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. The second is A Separate Reality. Then Journey To Ixtlan, then Tales of Power. There are about twelve altogether.

A Book of 5 Rings – Musashi
The Art of War – Sun Tzu
MasterPath: The Divine Science of Light and Sound, Vol. I

Poetry (yes, I read poetry): Yeats. Perhaps the best of a long line of Irish authors, and that includes Swift.
Emily Dickinson.
Hey, did we forget Rudyard Kipling? Some of the best lyrical writing ever.

And on the other end of the board, John D. MacDonald, whose Travis McGee series was brilliant, and John Sanford, a modern descendant.

Authors:

Victor Hugo
Jack London
Tom Clancy
James Clavell
John Lecarre
Jeremy Bolander
William Makepeace Thackery
Ken Follett

If I listed books, I could just keep going on, and on, and on, and on, anon. : )

was Hole in my LIfe. An autobigraphy of author Jack Gantos who while he was a kid living in the Carribean got caught smuggling drugs

Some biographies that are real good are Donovan, about Bill Donovan who ran the OSS during WW II; Truman, about President Truman; Nimitz, about Admiral Chester Nimitz, who took over the U.S. Navy in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor; and The Last Lion, a two volume work about Churchill (unfortunately, Vol II ends about 1941, and the author never finished Vol. III).

I like WW II books – anything by Cornelius Ryan (The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far) is good. John Toland’s The Rising Sun, about the war in the Pacific, is real good.

Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman is very good – about the start of WW I, and the first couple months of fighting.

The God Particle, by Leon Lederman. Lederman is a particle physicist who won the Nobel in the 90’s. He does a very good job of explaining particle physics to us laymen (did you know that 30 million muons pass through your thumb every second?)

It’s a bio on Benjamin Franklin – very interestin gread about a man who was so many things as to defy a short description. Good read.

There is also a book called Earth: The Sequel. It’s about the revolution in alternative energy, well written and documented. Im interested in the firld, and I was surprised to learn how much of the book, researched in 2007 and published in 2008, was already out of date. The tech revolution moves on….

Do any of you sciFi fans recall a short story, written, I think, by Asimov, call ‘Technology’? It used to be required reading for employees of the Pentagon. It described how a technologically advanced country/race lost a war becuase they kept chasing the Newest Best Thing. Since there is always something better being developed, they never got their weapons actually on line and produced. I loved it, but that was 25 years ago and I’ve lost track of it.

I spent almost 20 years working in the Trade Book Dept. at the University of Oregon Bookstore, and I’ve read many of the books mentioned above, especially sci-fi, and heard of many more. In fact sci-fi was one of my sections. In addition to the many authors mentioned above, of whom Heinlein (Revolt in 2100, Covenant, many et ceteras) is my favorite, I loved Harrison’s Deathworld series and all of Andre Norton’s novels. I loved Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear and sequels, Larry Niven’s Kzin novels, and (Niven’s and Pournelle’s?) amazing The Mote in God’s Eye. Robert L. Forward’s hard science Starquake is reminiscent of the latter, in that he creates a really alien reality virtually from scratch and in loving detail, but has an additional time dimension in that these creatures, living on a neutron star, go through entire civilizational cycles in not much more than the blink of a human eye. I used to really like Ursula K. LeGuin (The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness), and I loved Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, about a near-future religious dictatorship in which the few remaining fertile women are basically child-producing slaves for Christian bigwigs. It was made into a movie starring Robert Duvall as the Christian general. Lately I’ve been enamored of S.M. Stirling’s “change” novels, first the trilogy Dies the Fire, The Protector’s War, and A Meeting at Corvallis, and now a new series, picking up about twenty years later with The Sunrise Lands and The Scourge of God, with two to go and me reduced to reading the first four chapters of the next installment online at Stirling’s site. Tease, tease.

But much of my favorite stuff is nonfiction, such as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, and Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Kuhn’s work reflects my interest in scientific development and change and, more generally, historical turning points that are part of large-scale historical rhythms. Hence Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers; Thomas Goldstein’s Dawn of Modern Science, which led to works on art history such as Irwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism and Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, and Samuel Edgerton, Jr.‘s lovely and informative coffee-table book The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution. The Great Devonian Controversy, by Martin J.S. Rudwick, brilliantly chronicles an eight years long (1834-42) transition in the science of geology. Robert Muir Wood’s The Dark Side of the Earth is the best of many good books on the more recent 1960s revolution
in the earth sciences. Peter J. Bowler’s The Non-Darwinian Revolution offers a deeply subversive account of the nature of that turning point and of the subsequent historical path to the modern synthesis.

My interest in the seventeenth century is reflected in Mark A. Kishlansky’s Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England, which shows how failing to recognize virtually a reversal of the meanings of terms like “free election” and “voting” between the early and late seventeenth century has misled historians about the nature of society and politics during the former period and has also rendered invisible certain aspects of the sociopolitical transformation which took place during the middle decades
of the century. A different aspect of the profound sociocultural changes of the seventeenth century can be found in books directly or indirectly about the Scientific Revolution, such as Steven Shapin’s and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump, which covers the social/intellectual preconditions for the rise of Baconian experimental science; and Peter Dear’s Discipline and Experience, which covers some of the same ground by showing via document analysis how “experimentum” referred to a singular occurrance for Baconians but to a recipe for “having an experience” for pre-Baconians. Other books which reveal historical/social/psychological transitions are Gary Tomlinson’s Music in Renaissance Magic and Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon.

Psychology, especially developmental, and biography are the subject matter of many of my favorite books. Jean Piaget is good but L.S. Vygotsky is sensational, most notably in Thinking and Speech (usually rendered as Thought and Language) and in Vol V (Child Psychology) of his Collected Works. My biographies cluster in multiples around certain individuals, such as Adolf Hitler (Hitler, by Joachim Fest); Sigmund Freud (Freud, Biologist of the Mind, by Frank J. Sulloway); Carl Jung (C.G. Jung: The Haunted Prophet, by Paul J. Stern); Charles Darwin (Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, by Howard E. Gruber); and Isaac Newton (Never at Rest, by Richard Westfall), to name only my favorite on each, and various oddball singletons, such as Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind, about brilliant mathematician John Nash, who became schizophrenic – basically stark, raving mad – but who decades later regained his sanity and won the Nobel Prize in economics for his earlier work; and James Watson’s The Double Helix.

Other books which don’t neatly fit any of the above categories but which left their “imprint” on me are Janet Gleeson’s The Arcanum, the strange story behind the discovery (in the West) of how to make porcelain; Dr. Robert D. Hare’s Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us; Bill Bryson’s
The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way; Peter Marris’ Loss and Change, about how “understanding grief can help us to understand processes of change, both personal and social,” and how urban renewal in third-world countries can go wrong when the (usually Western or Western-oriented) developers fail to understand and take into account the cultural backgrounds of the peoples involved; and Lawrence Harrison’s Underdevelopment is a State of Mind: The Latin American Case, in which he tries to account for different developmental patterns in different countries by referring to cultural backgrounds (including who colonized them) and to the inculcation via child-rearing practices especially but also other agents of socialization of culture-specific mentalities which underlie characteristic national/regional failures and successes.

Wow! Didn’t mean to list so many favorite books. Maybe that’s what twenty years in a university bookstore will do to you, or maybe that’s why I was there in the first place.