I read Anthem and didn't give a **** about it, so probably won't bother unless it's not as boring?

I've never made it through Atlas Shrugged. Anthem was so on the nose that it became the nose. I read The Fountainhead at 14 and found the writing a lot more interesting and less in your face preachy than the other two. You're not missing out on much though.

I'm going to continue not to bother with it then.

Good move. You should read the books on my list because they rule.

Never read Anthem or even heard of it so I have no idea. Atlas Shrugged is **** though. I was a libertarian at the time and even I gave up on it though I loved the preaching. There's an entire chapter that's a metaphor for giving birth that's really just a boring literal train ride. Do with that what you will.

I don't know what page it's on so quote it and I'll take note for over my winter break from class.

I made post number two in this thread. I later appended A People's History of the United States and Demon Haunted World.

Have you read a lot of Virginia Woolf? I have to read To The Lighthouse next month for school.

Only To the Lighthouse and The Waves. If you're prepared for TTL's style, it won't be as boring as your classmates will make it out to be. The Waves is similar but the base content (not the subtext) is interesting and the weaving of seven lives together was executed brilliantly.

Cool, I'm kind of stoked for the next few sections because we're getting into more modern literature and there's a lot of interesting reads. I doubt my classmates will complain it's boring though, they're all ****ing nerds.

Well I read up to Mostly Harmless. I can't remember what happened that I didn't buy that last one. Thought I had downloaded it. Or maybe it wasn't available. I mean, who wants paper books in this enlightened era?
I re-read 1984 a few weeks ago; got through it in three days. Never read anything so quickly before. I literally could not put it down, even though I'd read it before.
Jesus! At 14 I was reading Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Alan Dean Foster! Were you ever even a child?? :eek:

Sometimes. I read House of the Scorpion at 12 and loved it.

I joined the library at age eight and got The Jungle Book out. I was most upset that there were no dancing bears, crafty snakes or high-and-mighty tigers in it!

Dude, you need to read all the Hitchhiker's Guide books. The last one might not be great but you still have to read it. *******.

Yeah, I'm just not sure what's left to tell. I'm also not a fan of reading posthumous books, as it were.

It's actually good though. I'd definitely recommend it as a good way to tie up the story after reading the last Adams book.

My ten would be:

1984 by George Orwell
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

I listed ten books I thought would be important to read instead of listing my top ten favourites (although it is pretty close to what my top ten favourites would be).

Fans of Douglas Adams should read his book Last Chance to See. I liked it a lot more than Hitchhiker's (and I liked Hitchhiker's). I wish Adams had written more non-fiction.

I want a Youtube video of Ken Ham reading On the Origin of the Species out loud.

Solid list except for A Brief History of Time. Admittedly, I haven't read the books by Chomsky, Foucault, Mill, or Zinsser.

Wanna stab yourself in the stomach? Have a kid and then read King's Pet Cemetery a few weeks later.

I made this mistake. Very few books have made me break down and cry. That was one of them.

On The Beach and The Road are two others I can think of right now.

on liberty is pretty meh imo, there were some notable sections and quotes but aside from that it was hard to get through.

I tried to do this and found that I can't really compare fiction and non-fiction. So, I made two lists.

Fiction:

• George Orwell - 1984
• Ernest Hemingway - "The Snows of Kiliminjaro" (short story)
• Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
• Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
• Joseph Heller - Catch-22
• J. R. R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
• Richard Adams - Watership Down
• Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
• Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Those are the first ten works of fiction I'd recommend to a friend looking for something to read. I find them all both profound and entertaining. It hurt me to omit my all-time favourite writer, P. G. Wodehouse, but he doesn't have one definitive work.

Non-fiction:

• Viktor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning
• Richard P. Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
• Douglas R. Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
• Plato - The Republic
• The Bible
• The Quran
• Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species
• Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
• Henry David Thoreau - Walden
• Truman Capote - In Cold Blood

The five in the middle are books I've read that I think deserve to be read by everybody, and the other five are personal favourites. A couple of them check both boxes.

Seriously? You think people actually need to read the Bible?? As elphenor would no doubt say, the biggest propaganda production ever released by Christianity?

My own work has made me cry, but I'm not sure if tears of frustration count.

Know the enemy.

I've read all of the Bible. The interesting stuff is easy to miss because it's buried in mounds of repetitive boringness. You have to be alert.

Regardless, it and the Quran shouldn't be on a non-fiction list.

I'm not sure if the Bible is plot driven enough to be fiction. I guess because there are stories buried in an endless list of names and temple dimensions and exaltations. I doubt more than 1 percent of people with Ph.D's in Divinity have actually read it. It's excruciating. So is Darwin. Which I also felt like I needed to put myself through.

1. Whether or not you agree with the ideas in the Bible and the Quran, they have shaped the world. Without understanding those ideas, you cannot understand the history of the past 2000 years. It would be like trying to understand the history of the Soviet Union without reading the Communist Manifesto.

2. "Non-fiction" does not mean the same thing as factual. If it did, Nietzsche and Plato would have to be removed from the list.

I think "made up" is a sufficient qualifier.

I read that boring **** as well. It's not exactly fiction, is it?

The **** else would it be? And The Silmarillion is awesome.

Would you classify philosophy as fiction?

EDIT: Read The Silmarillion when I was a Tolkien nut. God, it was dry.

Plenty of fiction has philosophy. But it's fiction cause it makes up stories.

Well I've never read it and I know enough about history by reading, you know, history, not some (as Batty says) made-up half-fairytale crap. Stuff like that poisons the perception, I feel. I certainly wouldn't want someone to read that and think "Gee! There really was a Garden of Eden?" :rolleyes: As close to fiction as it gets.
But very hard to get through.

Not for me. I loved every bit of it. Pure world building.

Too many names, battles, places, not enough action if I remember.

Well I guess if you're some basic plebe who can't read a book without action scenes every three pages...

I checked it's considered fiction. I thought of it more like a book about a fictitious world. Like if another author wrote an encyclopedia on the universe of Tolkien.

Sort of like a Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual or like a module. Not exactly but sort of.