I like loved On the Beach

Good pick

Here's ten from me (I'm not saying it's official)

Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch - Henry Miller

The Death and Life of Dith Pran - Sydney Schanberg

Denial of Death - Ernest Becker

Cosmos - Carl Sagan

Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe

Road to Los Angeles - John Fante

Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Black Rain - Masuji Ibuse

Death on the Installment Plan- Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Cosmos is an excellent pick.

If I were to stick to fiction, as grindy did, my list would probably go:-

The Solid Mandala by Patrick White
Nausea by J-P Sartre
A Room With A View by E.M. Forster
1984 by George Orwell
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Woolf
Eyeless In Gaza by Aldous Huxley
A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens
Titus Groan (and follow-up volume) Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake "Counts as one choice!"
Emma by Jane Austen
The Hours by Michael Cunningham (thus saving the trouble of reading a Virginia Woolf book!)

With runners up:-

The Magus by John Fowles
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag
Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler

And some previously mentioned books that might've been on my list, but ten is ten so what can you do :-

A Scanner Darkly, Down And Out In London And Paris, The Naked Lunch, Lolita, Night , The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh and The Death and Life of Dith Pran. Good choices, all!

So cheery!

^ LOL Who says reading should be fun?

Watership Down - Richard Adams
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - PKD
Metamorphosis - Kafka
Animal Farm - Orwell
Ariel - Sylvia Plath
95 Poems - e.e. cummings
Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
The Sunset Limited - Cormac McCarthy


Sooooo whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite. :(

Bitch you are white.

Calvin and Hobbes >>

Bitch, I know, it's self-deprecation.

I came very close to putting Flowers for Algernon on my list.

I love everything about this.

When I picked that book up I was so engrossed that the whole world around me ceased to exist. I read it three times in a row over a weekend and it's the last book I've read that really shook me emotionally. If you have any recommendations for something similar I'm all ears!

From my list, honestly, Frankenstein. It's unfortunate that movies have so colored people's perception of this story because the book is so much more than all that. It's complex and emotionally frought and pretty heartbreaking. In many ways, the monster is analogous to Charlie as a freakish outsider who is tragically self-aware.

I wasn't able to connect with Frankenstein like that. I'm not sure if it was my frame of mind when I read it or what. I read it about 20 years ago I guess. Honestly, I don't think I understood it completely. I followed the basic plot but I think I missed a lot. It sucks when you're distracted and don't appreciate a book like you should.

My Lion books mass market PB features what must be the least appropriate cover of any edition I've encountered. I take it the scene is support to represent Victor's cousin Elizabeth who died on her wedding night at the hands of the monster. But hey, anything to sell a book.

http://i.imgur.com/cOcMzk4l.jpg

That's hawt

^ Yes, I also loved this unique book; it's so neatly constructed and has some very moving moments, as when, quite early on, Miss Kinnian has to run out to the ladies room. That gets me every time! I still remember the first time I finished the book, aged about 15 and impelled to go for a walk to let the story percolate through my mind.

I'm always intrigued by the diary format - the idea that we'll see the intimate workings of someone's mind - and a much shorter fictional diary is Gogol's Diary of a Madman , although it doesn't have the emotional wallop of Flowers For Algernon. Alternatively, if you want the real thing, there is August Strindberg's From An Occult Diary.

^ That's an interesting connection that I might follow up on given the chance, never having read Frankenstein.

For a book as powerful as Flowers For Algernon, I can recommend the first book on my list, The Solid Mandala. The writing is more dense and convoluted, but it also explores the life of outsiders. In this case, the lives of two drab people who wouldn't usually merit a second glance are meticulously examined. The author shows us that despite the trappings of mediocrity, their lives are full of unguessed-at wonder and drama. Even though I take it slowly, perhaps ten pages a day, I've read The Solid Mandala about five times; it's one of those few books that has discernably affected who I am today because of its underlying messages - about the conflict between the heart and the head, and about the worth of the ordinary person.

What would be the name of one of his books Frownland? I've never thought about reading a book about this subject, but the more I think about it, it'd be a great read.

Night is autobiographical so I'd go with that one.

Just ordered it. Thanks everyone for the rec.

Two more

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn (not perfect or even unbiased, but informative and shows a different perspctive. It also discusses how history is decided and recorded in great detail)
The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan (a wonderful insight on skepticism and science)

That second one is great. Stuff like that should be read in schools.

The Zinn

If you don't think America has always been about money and only money read that book. It's all about greed greed greed.

American Revolution
WW2
Suffrage

The backbone of everything was some kind of money angle.

I can't believe I have yet to read both of these classics. Adding to my list immediately; thank you.

HOW!? HOW DID I FORGET TO PUT THIS ON MY LIST!?

That should have been the goddamn first thing. It shaped me to who I am today.

Me too. I guess you took after Hobbes.

You should read David Copperfield for a highly relateable coming of age material, you ignoramuses.

























































Nah that ****'s great.

Van Gogh would’ve sold more than one painting if he’d put tigers in them.

Wait... are we best friends now or are you just a figment of my imagination?

The world is a lot less scary when you have a best friend.

It is when they're Tyler Durden.

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/i...Xl4VwHOvdiFrjw

Fun fact: This was my first avatar when I joined here.

Unless they wanna kill you.

I'm pretty sure I still have some of my old Calvin & Hobbes books actually. A lot of them have been lost over the years though. I'm still sad whenever I remember an old strip but can't find it in my collection cause it's gone.

I've lost maybe two but the rest are some of my prized possessions. Calvin and Hobbes was the first thing I "discovered" on my own. I just randomly dug it out of a shelf at the library. Digging for music and films just kind of came natural after that.

This is totally worth $100.

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Calv.../dp/1449433251

And shout out to Far Side.

When I was younger I read a ferocious amount, mostly science-fiction and fantasy, but these days I don't seem to have as much time. Still, my list, for what it's worth, in no particular order:

Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Saville (Dan Davies) One of the most chilling and disturbing books I have ever read, not only to read the depth of Saville's crimes but also the culture of personality and the sense of appeasement that allowed him to get away with it for so long. The only book I have ever read where I wished to kill the central character, even though he was dead already.
The Iliad (Homer)
The War of the Worlds (HG Wells)
The Prince (Niccolo Machiavelli)
Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son (Gordon Burn) The life and crimes of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper
The Father of Forensics: How Sir Bernard Spilsbury Invented Modern CSI (Colin Evans)
The True History of The Elephant Man (Michael Howell and Peter Ford)
Charles Dickens: a Life (Clare Tomalin) I think this is the only book where I cried like a baby when he died. :(
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

The book or the series? I'd say you can't read just one (although the last is only necessary cause by then you've already made it that far so you might as well). Have you read And Another Thing... btw? I assumed it would be a ****ty cash-in, what with Douglas Adams being dead and all, but I actually thought it was a return to form (so to speak) that was surprisingly funny and ended the series on a much better note than the previous book had.

1984 is my favourite book of all-time. Read it 3(?) years ago, and I've read it once a year every year since. I had to read The Iliad and The Prince for school this year. The Iliad was okay, definitely dragged in a lot of parts though. Diomedes was a total bad ass though. I'm currently in the process of reading The Hitch-Hiker's Guide and I'm absolutely loving it so far.

You should read Atlas Shrugged. As a libertarian it'll either make you cheer or put you off the whole idea entirely. Or just bore you to tears.

**** Atlas Shrugged btw, just in case anyone was thinking I liked the damn thing.