Your Favorite Books of All Time

[Jack7]

I read a great deal. Both for pleasure, and professionally. And for study and just because many things interest me.

I guess I could create a list of thousands of favorite books. But below are books I have read that have had the greatest influence on me, that I have enjoyed the most, and/or that I consider the greatest books I've ever read or re-read. They're listed in alphabetical order.


A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Aeneid
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Ancient Christian Writer's Library Series - most of them
Anna Karenina
Art of Memory
Art of War
Atlas Shrugged
Beowulf
Brave New World
Bureaucracy
Cantos of Ezra Pound
Chanson De Roland
Closing of the American Mind
Common Sense
Complete Poems of Hart Crane
Crime Classification Manual
Cybernetics
Decameron
Dialogues of Plato
Dracula
Dream of the Red Chamber
Endurance
Eugene Onegin
Faust
Frankenstein
Gilgamesh
Godel, Escher, Bach
Gulliver’s Travels
Heart of Darkness
History of the Peloponnesian War
Hitler and Stalin
Horatio Hornblower Series
How to Win Friends and Influence People
I Ching
Idylls of the King
Iliad
Journals of Captain Cook
Journals of Lewis and Clark
Kabbalah
Leaves of Grass
Lives of the Noble Graecians and Romans
Lives of the Poets
Les Fleurs du Mal
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Moby Dick
Modern Scholar Lecture Series - not really books but invaluable to me
Njal’s Saga
No Country for Old Men
Novum Organum
Odyssey
On Liberty
On War
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Orthodoxy
Paradise Lost
Pilgrim’s Progress
Praise of Folly
Red Square
Relativity
Rendezvous with Rama
Richest Man in Babylon
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Rubaiyat
Sherlock Holmes
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sonnets from the Portugese
Tao Te Ching
The Bible - especially the Torah, Old Testament Minor Prophets, and the Gospels.
The Big Sleep
The Brothers Grimm
The Brothers Karamazov
The Christian Tradition
The City of God
The Collected Works of Jung
The Collected Works of Saint Thomas Aquinas
The Collected Works of William James
The Conservative Mind
The Constitution of Liberty
The Divine Comedy
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Federalist Papers
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
The Foundation Series
The Great Books of the Western World - most of them anyway
The Guide for the Perplexed
The Gulag Archipelago
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
The Jack Aubrey Series
The Leatherstocking Tales
The Lord of the Rings
The Magic Mountain
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
The Persian Expedition
The Philokalia
The Pillow Book
The Plays of Aeschylus
The Plays of Euripides
The Plays of Shakespeare - most of them
The Principia
The Principles of Quantum Mechanics
The Razor’s Edge
The Screwtape Letters
The Seven Story Mountain
The Silmarilion
The Sonnets of Shakespeare
The Spook's Apprentice Series
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
The Sun Also Rises
The Unheavenly City
The Wasteland and other Poems
The Wealth of Nations
The White Stag
The Works of Archimedes
The Works of Euclid
The Works of Roger Bacon
The Yoga Sutras
Think and Grow Rich
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism
Two New Sciences
Walden


What are some of your favorite books?

 

[Thunderfoot]

Fantasy/Sci Fi
The MYTH Inc. series
The Phule's Company Series
The Tales of the Vulgar Unicorn
The Original Shannara books
The Harper Hall of Pern series
The Lord of the Rings
The Hitchiker's Guide authorized 5 book trilogy
The Thrawn cycle (Star Wars - Timothy Zahn)

Historical Fiction
The Eagle Has Landed
The Green Berets
(Both movies based on these books are great, but the books leave them both in the dust)

Classics
Slaughterhouse 5
Catch 22
Frankenstein
The Red Badge of Courage
The collected works of William Shakespeare
Beowulf - in the original barely readable old English

 

[Ed_Laprade]

In no particular order, and I'll undoubtedly forget stuff.

Starship Troopers. (Well, most of Heinlein's early stuff.)
Most of Andre Norton's early stuff.
Weber's Honor Harrington series.
The Foundation Trilogy.
A Distant mirror.
Auel's Earth's Children series.
Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion.
Just about anything on the medieval period.
Most of Doc Smith's stuff.

 

[Cor Azer]

Wow. My list is much shorter...

A Song of Ice and Fire
Hobbit/Lord of the Rings
Hitchhikers Guide

Tons of other books I like, but For several I can readily admit they're far from classics.

 

[ggroy]

"Introduction to Heat and Mass Transfer" (1963) by Ernst R.G. Eckert.

(I don't have any favorite fiction titles).

 

[Celtavian]

Books that moved me

Let me see.

Count of Monte Cristo
Lord of the Rings
Great Expectation
Many of my college science books involving biology and chemistry.
My college economics and accounting books
The Bible
To Kill a Mockingbird
A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
The Bill of Rights and the Preamble to the Constitution
Lincoln Biography
Ulysseus S. Grant Biography
A Little Princess
Charle and the Chocolate Factory
Many Roald Dahl stories really.
The Narnia Chronicles
Arthurian Legend, even the somewhat comedic The Sword in The Stone
War and Peace
Everything I've read by H.P. Lovecraft
Most of Robert E. Howard's work
Many of the Elric books
A Prairie Guide's Companion
Medieval history: The A Knight and his... series and Life in a Medevial Castle. And many books that study Medieval battle, court life, and trade. A book on the German School of fighting I've forgotten that proves unequivocally that knights were as well-trained as their eastern samurai/bushi/ninja counterparts. The Western fighting styles of wrestling and boxing are as effective as any martial art out there, though not as flashy unless you take into account Pankration.


There are really too many books to name. Those are some of my favorites or at least favorite authors or topics.

 

[rangerjohn]

Again in no paticular order
The Bible
Lord of the Rings/Hobbit
Dune
Chronicles of Narnia
Myths of all sorts
Roger Zelazny, Especially, Amber
Just about anything by:
Piers Anthony, Andre Norton, Heinlein, Anne McCaffery

Oh, and there was this one Red and White book, that came in a box. talking about, fighters,clerics and magic-users, thieves, dwarves and elves, oh and halflings.


I've read literally, thousands of books, these are the ones that stand out.


From what I understand, I would have loved E.E. Doc Smith, but I was never given the chance.

 

[Shade]

• The Malazan Book of the Fallen (I'm only 3/4 through book 5, but unless it seriously fizzles, this may be the best series I've read)
• A Song of Ice and Fire
• The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit
• The Name of the Wind and Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
• The Mistborn Trilogy, The Way of Kings, Elantris, and Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson
• The Kane stories by Karl Edward Wagner
• Conan, Solomon Kane, Kull, and Bran Mak Morn tales by Robert E. Howard
• Anything horror-related from Lovecraft
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• World War Z
• The Walking Dead collections
• Perdido Street Station and The Scar
• Hiero's Journey by Sterling Lanier
• The Moon Pool and several others by A. Merritt