Favorite and Least Favorite books?

[Beet]

In the spirit of the movies thread:

1 The Bible (NIV)
2 Guns, Germs, and Steel
3 Gone With the Wind
4 Cartoon History of the Universe
5 How to Make Friends and Influence People

Least:

Ender's Game
The Odyssey
The 48 Laws of Power

[Warren 4 Secretary of Everything]

Favorites
1.

2.

Least Favorites

[NewYorkExpress]

Favorites
1.

2.

Least Favorites

agreed.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Favorite
1. A Theory of Justice - John Rawls
2. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
3. The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck
4. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
5. The Republic - Plato

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I have so many favorites, I can't really decide.  However, there is only one book that has attracted my ire because not only did I not like it, I was forced to read it.  The Sound and The Fury, a tale told by the idiot Faulkner.  It soured me on the stream of consciousness technique.  It strikes me as a pretentious technique beloved of intellectuals who feel they are above such plebeian concerns such as whether a story is entertaining so long as they can consume a most exquisitely crafted mudpie for their literary repast. Whatever Faulkner's skill may be, The Sound and The Fury is a dull trite story signifying nothing whose only purpose is to display his virtuosity of a technique.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

In no particular order...

Favorite:

• The Case for God by Karen Armstrong
  I consider this one a must-read for anyone remotely interested in theology.  It doesn't actually try to convince you of the existence of God, but it does have profound insight on the history of religion and religious thought.
  
  
• Kissing Fish: Christianity for people who don't like Christianity by Roger Wolsey
  One of the books that introduced me to progressive Christianity and helped me form a lot of my theological views.  It is the book that got me interested in religion in the first place.
  
  
• Anthem by Ayn Rand
  Yeah, yeah.  It's Ayn Rand.  But it's actually not a bad book.  Its message is not inherently political unless you interpret it as such.  Although I can't say I'm fond of her other works, of course.
  
  
• The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
  Good love story.  Not much to say beyond that.
  
  
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
  Cute little story about life in the Deep South.  I'd read it whenever there was a power outage.
  
  
• Ethan Frome by Edith Warton
  Another nice love story.  Very good surprise ending.
  
  Least Favorite:
  
  
• A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
  I was required to read this in my sophomore year of high school.  I know it's a classic and all, but I just couldn't get into it.  It bored me to tears, honestly.
  
  
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
  I was also forced to read this one.  Good plot and all, but I could barely understand what the characters were saying half the time, so that right there discourages me from picking it up again.

[DemPGH]

Favorite:

1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Thompson)
2. Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
3. The Demon-Haunted World (Carl Sagan)
4. A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Galileo)
5. The Dream (Johan Kepler)
6. The Tempest (Shakespeare)
7. Invisible Man (Ellison)
8. The Awakening (Chopin)

My historical / non-fiction reading centers around the Middle Ages and Renaissance, of course. In the late '90s there were a couple books about pleasures and pastimes during the Middle Ages, which I found fascinating.

I'm sure there are obscure titles I have lying around, but those, aside from Kepler, are really grand favorites that people will have heard of.

No real books I hate, but I avoid a lot of genres and topics that simply do not interest me. At this point I kind of have a fairly good idea about what I'll like and what I won't.

[Miles]

Favorites

1. Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)
2. Sylvia Plath's Poetry
3. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
4. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (Kiran Desai)
5. The Pickup (Nadine Gordimer)
6. The Arabian Nights
7. The Guide (R.K Narayan)

As a kid, I was a big fan of the Goosebumps books and A Series of Unfortunate Events.  

[traininthedistance]

1.
2. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
3. Collected Poems, T. S. Eliot
4. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
5. Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco
6. The Crying Of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
7. Collected Poems, Elizabeth Bishop
8. Underworld, Don DeLillo
9. Silence, John Cage
10. The Power Broker, Robert Caro

Limiting myself to one book per author, otherwise Eco and Eliot would probably both get multiple slots.

[© tweed]

favorites:

Fiction: Turgenev - Fathers and Sons; Dostoevsky - Notes from Underground, The Brothers Karamazov; Tolstoy - Anna Karenina, War & Peace; Chekhov - Ward No. 6

Nonfiction: L. Kolakowski - Main Currents of Marxism; Hans Kung - On Being a Christian, Does God Exist?


Least Favorites: Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged (I read between 700 and 800 pages of it).  I could also throw in 50 Shades of Grey here too, of which I read about 100 pages.  both are remarkably badly written, though obviously in different ways.