Favourite books/authors.

[Peeperkorn]

Fiction:

The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann).

The Death in Venice (Thomas Mann).

A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy O'Toole)

Justine (Durrell).

The Red and the Black (Stendhal).

The Neverending Story  (Michael Ende).

El Pozo (Juan Carlos Onetti).

El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Cervantes)

Poetry:

Duino Elegies (Rainer Maria Rilke).

Illuminations and A Season in Hell (Rimbaud).

John Keats' Odes.

I Canti (Leopardi)

Lavorare Stanca (Cesare Pavese).

Leaves of Grass (Whitman).

Romancero Gitano (García Lorca).

Philosophy/Political philosophy:

Voltaire.

Nietzsche.

Thomas Hobbes.

Karl Popper.

Max Weber.

Pierre Bourdieu.

Michel Foucault.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Im a bit late but...
Edited 3/8/2012 8/24/2012 1/17/2013
Philosophy
Liberty Defined (Ron Paul)
Conscience of a Conservative (Barry Goldwater)
Common Sense (Glenn Beck before he went batsh*t crazy)
The Revolution (Ron Paul)
The Letters of Ayn Rand (Leonard Peikoff)

Non Fiction
The Bible
Game Change (Mark Halperin)
Rawhide Down (Del Quentin Wilbur)
Nixon-Education of a Politician (Stephan Ambrose)
Nixon-Triumph of a Politician (Stephan Ambrose)
Nixonland (Rick Perlstein)
Confessions of an Economic Hitman (John Perkins)
My Enemy, My Brother (Hanna Shahim)
Vietnam in Pictures
Century (basically like Vietnam in pictures, from 1899-1999)
Alternate History (my favorite is Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo on the Alternate History Board)
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail of 1972 (Hunter Thompson)
This Wheels on Fire (Levon Helm)

Fiction
1984 (George Orwell)
Animal Farm (George Orwell)
Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
Anthem (Ayn Rand)
We the Living (Ayn Rand)
The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)

[Platypus]

I'm on the verge of outgrowing her for good, but my favourite authoress is still Diana Wynne Jones.

Books: The Book Thief, Giles Goat-Boy, a couple of DWJ books, the Melways, Perfume, and the Hornblower books are all up there.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I'm on the verge of outgrowing her for good, but my favourite authoress is still Diana Wynne Jones.

At some point, then, you'll notice the PoMo. And maybe come back for good.

[Mr. Taft Republican]

Phil.
The Antichrist-
Thus Spake Zarathustra- Nietzsche
The Essential Kierkegaard
The Conscience of a Conservative- Barry Goldwater

Fiction.
Demons-
The Brotherz Karamazov-
Notes from the Underground- Fyodor Dostoevsky
Ivanov-
The Early Stories- Anton Chekhov
Ender's Game- Orson Scott Card
This Side of Paradise- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Paradise Lost- John Milton
Master and Man-
The Death of Ivan Ilych- Leo Graf Tolstoy

Non-Fiction.
Russia Against Napoleon
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

[Gustaf]

I always find it hard to list favourites like this.

But Lagerlöf, Dostoyevski and Graham Greene are all up there. I really like Catch-22. I really liked Freedom by Franzen. And a lot of other stuff...

[J. J.]

Fiction:

Dune, Herbert, 1965
Heart of Darkness, Conrad, 1905
The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald, 1925
Goldfinger, Fleming, 1959
Zotz, Karig, 1947

Nonfiction:

Deadnaught, Massey, 1991
The Prince, Machiavelli, 1532
The Guns of August, Tuchman, 1962
Republican Party Reptile, O'Rourke, 1987
Parliament of Whores, O'Rourke, 1991
Colored People, Gates, 1994  (the only book that ever made me homesick for Western Pennsylvania)
Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised. Robert, et al., 2011

[Beet]

Fiction:
Probably Tami Hoag, if anybody.

Non-Fiction:
Jared Diamond, Nicholas Kristoff, Eric Hobsbawn, Robert Caro, Sean Wilentz, Rebecca Traister, Liaquat Ahmed, Bethany McLean, Robert Skidelsky, and Barry Eichengreen come to mind.

[The Mikado]

Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dostoyevsky are my big three.

[Lasitten]

Fiction:
Hugo - Les Miserables
Orwell - Animal Farm
Linna - Under the North Star & The Unknow Soldier
Pratchet - Small Gods
Vonnegut - God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

Non-Fiction:
Harvey - Social Justice and the City
Diamon - Collapse
Bauman - Thinking sociologically: An introduction for everyone

[Insula Dei]

There's a nice quality of consistency about Peeperkorn's list.

[Modernity has failed us]

Dr. Seuss

[Insula Dei]

So, I'm bored beyond belief and I figured it might be interesting to compose a little list. Since a comprehensive list seems doomed to be an exercise in repetitivity and banality, I thought I'd try and find out what in my opinion are the 10 best books ever written in Dutch (er, novels written after 1850, that is).

Now, there is a semi-official canon as laid out by the Maatschappij voor Nederlandse Letterkunde:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_van_de_Nederlandse_letterkunde

This list has many flaws, but it does seem to include most people whom I'd think would warrant inclusion. (Focus is on 'most', I didn't compose my own little list to compare it to the one over there.)

Anyway, here's my own:

1. Multatuli, Max Havelaar
2. WF Hermans, Nooit Meer Slapen (Beyond Sleep)
3. Nescio, Boven Het Dal (Above The Valley)
4. Willem Elsschot, Lijmen/Het Been (Soft Soap/The Leg)
5. WF Hermans, Het Behouden House (untranslated: The Preserved House)
6. Louis Paul Boon, De Kappelekensbaan (Chapel Road)
7. Hugo Claus, Het Verdiet van België (The Sorrow of Belgium)
8. JJ Slauerhoff, Het Verboden Rijk - Het Leven Op Aarde (The Forbidden Empire - Life on Earth)
9. Tim Krabbé, De Renner (The Rider)
10. Harry Mulisch, De Ontdekking van de Hemel (The Discovery of Heaven)

Just a private little distraction, obviously.

I'm a bit doubtful about no. 10, but somehow not including Mulisch would seem a little excessive if I also was already going to omit Couperus and Reve while including Krabbé and Slauerhoff. Maybe I ought to have given it to Du Perron's Het Land van Herkomst (The Country of Origin) just to have someone with a Forum affiliation in. If I was going to include poetry as well, I think van Ostaeijen's Bezette Stad (Occupied City) might have proven irresistible.

On closer reflection, I appear to have failed to include any WWII literature. Trust me that's a prestation that can count, too.

[Lief 🗽]

Stephen Crane, Herman Melville and Franz Kafka. Heart of Darkness is my favorite book, but it's also the only Conrad I've read so I wouldn't put him in my top three authors.

[ViaActiva]

Fiction:

Collected Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Sentimental Education (Gustave Flaubert)
Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

Non-Fiction:

The Embarrassment of Riches (Simon Schama)
The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (J. Hale)
Gladstone (Roy Jenkins)
Robert F. Kennedy (Arthur Schlesinger)
Friends and Rivals (Giles Radice)

Philosophy:

Utopia (Sir Thomas More)
The Prince (Machiavelli)
The Idea of History (R.G. Collingwood)
Liberalism (L.T. Hobhouse)
The Future of Socialism (Anthony Crosland)

[Rooney]

David Pietrusza and Ed Bearss are excellent writers of non-fiction. Bearss is probably the finest battlefield historian of the American Civil War and wrote the definitive work on the Vicksburg Campaign. In terms of fiction I have always liked Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe.

[traininthedistance]

Fiction/Drama:
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
Umberto Eco, Baudolino
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions
Tom Stoppard, Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

Poets:
Elizabeth Bishop
T. S. Eliot
William Carlos Williams
Wallace Stevens
Ted Hughes

Nonfiction, philosophy, etc.:
John Cage, Silence
Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Robert Caro, The Power Broker
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality
Jane Jacobs, pretty much everything
Bill Watterson, pretty much everything