Top 5 Novels
Ok people, time to think a little. What are your 5 favorite novels of all time? Take all weekend to think about it if you need to. Here's mine:
1-"Frankenstein", Mary Shelley
2-"Of Mice and Men", John Steinbeck
3-"The Agony and the Ecstasy", Irving Stone
4-"Stanger in a Strange Land", Robert Heinlein
5-"At the Mountains of Madness", H.P. Lovecraft
Some books I would like to read but haven't gotten to:
"Ulysses", James Joyce
"Brave New World", Aldous Huxley
"Gravity's Rainbow", Thomas Pynchon
"The Catcher in the Rye", J.D. Salinger
"Farenheit 451", Ray Bradbury
PS - If any of you haven't read enough books to come up with 5 best... you have my pitty.
PPS - Dan... if you list 5 King books, I'll hurt you.
posted by Aaron at 5/05/2006 12:57:00 PM
22 Comments:
You will get 1 King book, which was a collaboration with Peter Straub
In no particular order
Stephen King/Peter Straub - The Talisman
C.S. Lewis - Chronicles of Narnia
Jack London - The Sea-Wolf
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
Edgar Allen Poe - His collections - I am including almost all his work.
Honorable mention -
Joseph Heller - Catch 22
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
I also have completed my Easton Press collection of the 100 Greatest Books ever written. No, I have not finished them all yet.
3:44 PM
Excellent choices Dan. That Easton collection sounds pretty cool. I will have to check it out.
3:51 PM
Check it out but at roughly $50 a book, with shipping and handling, the whole collection will set you back a little over $5,000. However it does make for a very impressive library, plus I love to read so it's worth it. It might be cheaper to just borrow some from me. I have almost everything that was mentioned.
3:54 PM
Wow. I figured they would be cheaper. I think I will look to alternative means to build my library. One thing about having alot of books... it sucks when you move. They are heavy!
Thanks for offering to let me borrow. Does this mean you are moving to Vegas? Come on.. you know you want to!
4:14 PM
does harry potter 1,2,3,4,5,and 6 count??
i'm just here to torture aaron. he's warped me!!!!
4:41 PM
"Noooooooooo" Aaron says just before crumpling to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably.
4:46 PM
cool...the desired effect...
4:48 PM
Unfortunately I did not write the Da Vinci Code. However when I publish my first book I will do it under the name Dan Brown in an effort to confuse the public and drive up sales.
8:48 AM
ESPN Magazine? Oy. Not exactly where I would go to find cultural enrichment but I guess you can count it.
Dan, can we expect you to make a Kingesque cameo in the DaVinci Code movie?
8:51 AM
Ok now that the weekend is over and I have sufficiently tortured Aaron, here is my real list:
1)"The Color Purple" by Alice Walker
2) "A Tale of Two Cities" Charles Dickens
3) "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" Mark Twain
4) "The Telling" Ursula K. Le Guin
5) All of the Harry Potter books, because really its just one big story...
I would have put the "Lord of the Rings" Trilogy, but I have only seen the movies. None of my picks are in any particular order. I have so many favorites, 5 can't do it justice. There are probably some I have forgotten, just because its 10am and I haven't woken up enough yet!
10:08 AM
Strangely enough, I will be playing the part of the Albino Monk.
10:20 AM
Dan as an albino? scary....
10:26 AM
I'm not a big fan of reading novels, but I have read enoough to at least come up with 5.
1.Ghostrider by Neil Peart
2.Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
3.The Firm by John Grisham
4.Lord of the Rings(The Fellowship of the Ring) by J.R.R. Tolkien
5.The last one is a book on the OJ Simpson murder case. The title is something along the lines of How OJ Simpson Got Away With Murder. The book is at home and I forgot the author's name.
11:02 AM
Since some have included some non-fiction, I have another to add.
-"River Out of Eden", Richard Dawkins
It's a fascinating look at evolution from the perspective of the gene. He also wrote a book called "The Selfish Gene" which is on some 100 Best lists. I haven't gotten to that one. I'll get to it after I read "A Brief History of Time" by Hawking.
Some Honorable Mentions go to:
-"The Hobbit", J.R.R. Tolkein
-"To Kill a Mockingbird", Harper Lee
-"The Vampire Chronicles" series, Anne Rice (I only read up to "Memnock the Devil")
-Anything by H.P. Lovecraft - They are mostly short stories (circa 1890s) but they are amazing and changed the face of horror forever. The Kings and Barkers of the world wouldn't be where they are without him.
Anything
11:34 AM
so, by reading ESPN magazine you can learn to be a canadian?? cool, so when we go abroad sometime we don't have to admit that we're american. since the rest of the world hates us, eh!
12:20 PM
I already know how to pass for Canadian, eh. No need to learn abewt that.
12:28 PM
Are we doing top 5 non-fiction now?
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson
Fun While it Lasted - Bruce McNall
Charles Darwin - The Origin of Species
I guess #5 would pretty much be any book dealing with Winston Churchill
1:48 PM
Believe it or not, I haven't yet read The Origin of Species. I have read so many excerpts that I have probably covered most of it but I never read it start to finish.
It's amazing that, while most of the his ideas are terribly outdated by modern standards, in some ways we are still discovering just how prescient Darwin was. And to think he came up with it all before the advent of genetics.
2:19 PM
You can't fool me. I watch South Park.
It amazes me how Americans seem to think everything north of the U.S.-Canada border is covered in frozen tundra and glaciers. I'm sure people get mauled by polar bears in Toronto all the time.
1:01 PM
That's pretty funny. I don't get the zed/zee thing. Care to fill us stupid Americans in?
1:41 PM
I see. I had not heard that before. I know that zero is sometimes called zed but this one is new to me.
8:07 AM
That's a good question. I don't recall. Maybe I misunderstood the whole thing.
8:45 AM
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