OT - Best Book You Have Read?

If you're looking for a good fantasy series, check out The Prince of Nothing by R. Scott Bakker. Well plotted, suspenseful, and without the obvious Tolkien rip-offs. No merry bands of travelers, quests to save the world, or anything else. Just a spectacular world still recovering for a 2000 year old apocalypse and looking at the possibility of another one. I highly recommend it. The author was a philosophy professor and PhD. However, he doesn't make the Terry Goodkind mistake by spending his novel proselytizing or transforming philisophical discourse into dialogue. Instead, the philosophy just informs his writing and its themes and gives a nice intellectual depth.

I can't get enough of their books.  If you read Sahara you'll realize why Clive was so pissed off about how the movie turned out.  The Autobiography of Bill Pete was a favorite of mine when I was a kid, he was a cartoonist for Disney.

I am Legend was a fantastic, quick read that was much better than the movie.

Timeline-Michael Crichton-really good

The Hobbit - Tolkien

The Weight of Glory - C. S. Lewis

Choke - Palahnuik 

Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.  The book that the movie "Gettysburg" is based off of, very moving.  Can even give you some brief feelings of sympathy for the Confederacy, at least until the next time you hear an SEC fan talk.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.  If you like thoughtful, intelligent sci-fi (and based off of the responses so far, I think a lot of you do.)

Hyperion and The Terror by Dan Simmons.  Two great reads in very different genres (sci-fi and historical fiction) by one of my favorite authors.

Non-fiction book about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair centered around architect Daniel Burnham, who constructed the fair and Dr. H.H. Holmes, UM alum, who was a serial killer of young ladies.

Excellent, gripping read about Robert Ressler and his days in the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit as a criminal profiler. He's talked with and interviewed the lowest that mankind has to offer....From Ted Bundy to Richard Trenton Chase, and the book pulls no punches. It's filled with gruesome stories and intriguing mysteries, and Ressler brings you into the minds of some of the 20th Centuries' most ghoulish psychopaths. A must read for True Crime buffs.

Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

Douglas Coupland - Life After God - Gen X existential short stories

Anything by Hideki Murakami - Start with Kafka on the Shore or the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Kazuo Ishiguro -Never Let Me Go - The less you know about it, the better it is

Zadie Smith - White Teeth and On Beauty

Joe Queenan - True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans

Philip Roth - The Great American Novel

David Winner - Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

Bill James: Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?

Thought I could take a break from work for a few minutes, and got sucked into this massive thread! Should have known better.

Got a few new ideas, ordered a couple of books from Amazon to add to my queue (The Long Walk and A Walk in the Woods). Thanks!

I'd say this list is getting pretty comprehensive. My faves have all been mentioned except one (unless I missed it).

Sometimes A Great Notion (Ken Kesey, most famous for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and being big in the hippie/psychedelic scene for many years). The way he describes nature (both human and environmental) blew my mind...I couldn't put the book down. It's tied with East of Eden and Brothers Karamazov in my 3 favorite/best books.

Also not sure I noticed Tom Robbins. Incredible writing style that really grabs you and takes you for a ride. Skinny Legs and All, Still LIfe with Woodpecker, and Jitterbug Perfume are my faves.

I'll go with entertainment and reality:

From Russia with Love - Ian Fleming.  They're all good, but that's the best of the books.

Anything written by Bo.

Louis L'Amour's books are fun and easy reads.  He is a great storyteller and pretty much any of his books are worth reading.  I especially loved 'The Sacketts' series. 

The Guns of August -- Barbara Tuchman

The Zombie Survival Guide--Max Brooks

The Killer Angels--Michael Shaara

John Adams--David McCullough

Company K--William March

The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz--Hector Berlioz

So my list will probably skew that way (especially toward epic adventure). The list could easily be four times this long, but here's a good start (many already included upthread):

• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein. It's essentially the tale of the lunar colony's revolt against the Earthbound "Lunar Authority" and planetary government.
• Stranger in a Strange Land, also by Heinlein. A human raised by Martians returns to Earth.
• 1984 and Brave New World. Both excellent dystopias.
• The Foundation series, Isaac Asimov. Oddly, I think the two prequels and two sequels to the original trilogy are better than the originals. The prequels begin with the Galactic Empire in decline, and you move into a sort of interstellar Dark Ages from there.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide series, Douglas Adams. The best way to describe this is "Monty Python in Space".
• The Discworld series, Terry Pratchett. This is to medieval fantasy what Hitchhiker's Guide is to sci-fi.
• The Harry Potter series. While it's not unusual for me to pick up a book before bed, only to glance at the clock and see that it's 2 am, book 7 is the only one I've ever read where I did that, turned out the light, then turned it back on and started reading again because I was so into the book I couldn't fall asleep. Got hooked in middle school when the third one came out.
• Lord of the Rings. I never did get into The Silmarillion, as that one seems to be more world-building.
• A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin. Unfinished series at the moment (7 books planned, four out ... and the fifth's been in progress for five years now). Epic fantasy, but with an insane number of plot threads to track.
• If you're looking for nonfiction-biographical stuff, Failure Is Not an Option (Gene Kranz) and anything by Richard Feynman are good choices.
• I haven't read these (and they appear to be out of print), but if you like non-fiction chemistry lab horror stories I've heard that Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? (Max Gergel) and Ignition! (John Clark) are highly entertaining and terrifying (among other things, the latter describes an attempt to use as rocket fuel a particularly nasty compound that will spontaneously ignite just about anything - including sand and asbestos).

William Gibson:

_Neuromancer_

_Pattern Recognition_

_Burning Chrome_

Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra

A crime novel set in Bombay - the interwoven stories of a gangster and the policeman who hunts him down.

A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth

A 1000-page novel set in 1950s India, centered on a girl trying to decide who to marry.  But also about a lot of other people in her family and the city they live in, and about politics and love and pretty much everything else you can think of.  I don't think I've ever identified with characters so much as in this novel.

2666, Roberto Bolano

I'll cop to only having read about 500 pages of this one, but the fourth section alone - "The Part About the Murders" - is terrifying and brilliant.  I'm actually not partial to his other work, but this stands alone.

The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa

Suite francaise, Irene Nemirovsky

Child 44 (and The Secret Speech), Tom Rob Smith

Crime novels set in Soviet Russia.  Page-turners, but also literary and full of fascinating detail about Soviet life.

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

The Stand, Stephen King

The Gold Coast.  As soon as I finished it, I went out and bought The Gate House (its sequel).  

Didn't read through the whole list so SIAP.  

The Count of Monte Cristo (unabridged) - Alexandre Dumas

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Catcher in  the Rye - JD Salinger

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

1984 - George Orwell

Lone Survivor - Marcus Luttrell

The Secret Knowledge of Water by Craig Childs

If you like mysteries, these are very good, especially the Hercule Poirot mysteries.