Top Ten Non King Books

[pathoftheturtle]

9. The Illiad- ?
10.The Odyssey-?

Homer?

i couldn't remember right of the bat...i was thinking at a very wierd time for me...thats what insomnia does to some people. i almost forgot who wrote Little Women....lol

np. Happens to me, too; all the time.

I thought maybe you had used the "?" on purpose because Homer drew from pre-existing oral legends. Or because there's so many good translations of his books.

*shrug* It's all good. Nice picks, BTW, though I skipped over such in my list. If not, I'd also have included works like the Celtic táins and the Norse eddur. And the Upanishads and Sanskrit epics. And Tao Te Ching. (And many Amerind collections, and The Epic of Gilgamesh, and...

[divemaster]

1. The Bonfire of the Vanities
2. Memoirs of a Geisha
3. Starship Troopers

4-10, no particular order:
Re-Birth (aka The Chrysalids)
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Weapons Shops of Isher
Crime and Punishment
Phantoms
Jaws
The Lord of the Flies


As a kid...
The White Mountains trilogy
Lassie Come Home
Where the Red Fern Grows
The Enormous Egg

[ErinPatricia]

The Belgariad by David Eddings
The Malloreon by David Eddings
Polgara the Sorceress by David Eddings
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders
The Fu*k Up by Arthur Nersesian
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
The House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende
Eva Luna/The Stories of by Eva Luna Isabelle Allende
Ransom Seaborn by Bill Deasy

[ola]

Where the Red Fern Grows

My fourth grade teacher read that aloud to the class in parts, and at the end she started crying. I had to re-read it on my own because of the impression it made on me. She wasn't really a crying-in-front-of-class sort of lady.

[Sickrose]

This is a difficult one but I would go for:

1. 1984 - Geroge Orwell
2. Ragged Troussered Philanthropists - Robert Tressell
3. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
4. Coming Up for Air - George Orwell
5. Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
6. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
7. How the Dead live - Will Self
8. The Dubliners - James Joyce
9. The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland
10. Bartleby - Herman Melville

[mystima]

9. The Illiad- ?
10.The Odyssey-?

Homer?

i couldn't remember right of the bat...i was thinking at a very wierd time for me...thats what insomnia does to some people. i almost forgot who wrote Little Women....lol

np. Happens to me, too; all the time.

I thought maybe you had used the "?" on purpose because Homer drew from pre-existing oral legends. Or because there's so many good translations of his books.

*shrug* It's all good. Nice picks, BTW, though I skipped over such in my list. If not, I'd also have included works like the Celtic táins and the Norse eddur. And the Upanishads and Sanskrit epics. And Tao Te Ching. (And many Amerind collections, and The Epic of Gilgamesh, and...

one that i didn't mention but should be on the list was Beowulf. i always thought that was a cool story. and of course Gilgamesh...i like those kinda stories as well.

[pinkymcfatfat]

In no particular order:

1- The Haunting of Hill House- Shirley Jackson
2-The Graveyard Book- Neil Gaiman
3- The Theif of Always- Clive Barker
4- Principia Discordia- Malaclypse the Younger
5- Watership Down- Richard Adams
6- Good Omens- Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
7- A Susposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again- David Foster Wallace
8- Devil In The White City- Erik Larson
9- Necronomicon Omnibus of H.P. Lovecraft
10- Imajica- Clive Barker

[Brice]

great list

[ManOfWesternesse]

... no particular order:
Re-Birth (aka The Chrysalids)

John Wyndham? - good choice. A great book, but I guess I'll always put 'Day od the Triffids' before it.

[divemaster]

I also enjoyed The Day of the Triffids. But there's just something about young love or puppy love and kids having to figure stuff out that really gets to me. (That's also why Wizard & Glass is not only my favorite Dark Tower book, but one of my favorite books of all time). The plight of the two kids in The Chyrsalids and having to hide her secret (Beware thou the Mutant!) in this post-apocolyptic tale is very compelling.

It's not too much of a stretch to think than anyone who posts on tbis mesage board would like this book.

[Brice]

My roommate keeps telling me I should read both of these books.


Too many books to read.

[ManOfWesternesse]

Indeed divemaster The Chrysalids is a great read.
Brice , when you get around th those 2 - add in The Midwich Cuckoos as well why dontcha! I re-read those 3 Wyndhams quite regularly.

divemaster - you should try (if not already) the 2 books I'm currently reading (at the instigation of my 15-yr-old daughter).
The Hunger Games + The Hunger Games - Catching Fire. You might like 'em.

[Brice]

I don't think we have that one at the house. Of course if I like the other two I'll definitely try to find it.

[Jean]

Brice - if you haven't read Triffids or Cuckoos, you just got to drop everything, I repeat everything, go get yourself a copy of each, and start reading immediately, I repeat immediately.

[ManOfWesternesse]

- that should get him moving Jean!

[Brice]

But...but I'm in the middle of books.

[Jean]

so am I, of about a dozen or so. A couple more or less won't change anything.

[Brice]

True!

[MelissaBee]

I love questions like this.

Here's my Top 10 list, and while the books are always pretty much the same, the order varies from time to time.

1. The Subterraneans - Jack Kerouac
2. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
3. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
4. Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto - Chuck Klosterman
5. Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
7. Goodbye, Amelia - Simone Felice
8. Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame - Charles Bukowski
9. Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
10. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams

[Fox92]

What a great thread!

Well, here we go:

1. Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling (No comment)
2. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (I began to read the first book three or more times, didn't like it all at first, but then suddenly I just couldn't stop...)
3. Short stories by Ray Bradbury (I adore his short stories, All Summer in a Day was his first work I read. That was really awesome.)
4. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card (About two years ago a friend of mine told me about the upcoming movie and I decided to read the book. Actually, I'm not fond of sci-fi and all these alien attacks, but Orson Scott Card was just perfect.)
5. Dances on the snow, Sergey Lukianenko (Great Russian writer, this story is a little bit like in Ender's Game.)
6. Drei Kameraden, Erich Maria Remarque (A masterpiece. For all times.)
7. Across the River and into the Trees, Ernest Hemingway (My favoutite Hemingsway's work, I don't know, for me it's just soaked with tenderness.)
8. Kazan, James Curwood (Wolves wolves wolves! Wolf-dogs, to be precise )
9. The Master and Margaret, Mikhail Bulgakov (Do I need to comment on this point?)
10. The Vampire Armand, Ann Rice (Well, vampires are one of my greatest weakness, but in this particular case that was descriptions of Venice and paintings that stole my heart.)

To be honest, this list can be endless

[Empath of the White]

1. The Elric saga, from The Stealer of Souls to The White Wolf's Son by Michael Moorcock
2. Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
3. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
4. The Bas-Lag novels by China Mieville
5. The Conan series by Robert E. Howard
6. The Twilight Reign by Tom Lloyd
7. The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie
8. Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
9. The Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust
10. Weaveworld by Clive Barker

[thegunslinger41]

Too early and not had my coffee yet...here goes (in no particular order)

1) Lord of the Ring
2) Survivor - Chuck Palahnuik
3) Lord of the Flies
4) Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
5) Enders Game - Orson Scott Card
6) Sphere - Michael Crichton
7) Count of Monte Cristo -Alexander Dumas
8) Harry Potter series
9) Dark Rivers of the Heart - Dean Koontz
10) Wizards First Rule - Terry Goodkind
11) Christ the Lord (Road to Cana) - Anne Rice
12) The Host - Stephenie Meyer (pretty freakin awesome read)
13) Delerium -Lauren Oliver


Ok...that was 13.

-Gabriel

[Jean]

6) Sphere - Michael Crichton
7) Count of Monte Cristo -Alexander Dumas
8 ) Harry Potter series
9) Dark Rivers of the Heart - Dean Koontz

: bearhugs :

[Stebbins]

I'm not done with either series yet so I can't say which particular one of each, but definitely one of the Travis McGee books by John D. MacDonald ( One Fearful Yellow Eye is probably my favorite through thirteen of the twenty one), and a Parker novel by Richard Stark. This is a very good thread and I'll have to compile a list when I'm a bit more well read.

[CyberGhostface]

It would be very hard for me to make a definitive list so I'll play it loose.

In no particular order:

1. Dracula by Bram Stoker -- I've probably reread this the most after It and The Shining.
2. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
3. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
4. Short stories of Ray Bradbury
5. Short stories of Roald Dahl
6. Short stories of Edgar Allan Poe
7. Works of Joe Hill
8. A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket
9. The first three Hannibal books by Thomas Harris
10. The Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer