Favorite books
 

I never really considered gfy a place for readers until I read this thread:
I'm in love

Being somewhat a book lover myself I got curious about what kind of books people on gfy prefer.

Here are some of my favorites (I'll probably ad more as I remember them):

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
The Queen of the South by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Fools Die by Mario Puzo
Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez
Neuromancer by William Gibson

Here's a few of my favs =_)

Battlefield Earth - L. Ron Hubbard
Enders' Game - Orsen Scott Card
The Belgariad - David Eddings

To be considered educated and literate, you must read the following titles/authors:

The Trial and Death of Socrates.
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
The Odyssey
The Iliad
Tao Te Ching
Gilgamesh
Thucycidides
Sophocles
Euripides
Catullus
Plato
Aristotle
Aeneid
Herotidus
Seneca
Boethius
Canterbury Tales
Shakespeare
Gibbon's History of the Roman Empire
Nietzsche
Hegel
Kant
Marx
Freud
Dostoevsky
Goethe
Thomas Mann
Baudelaire
Balzac
Hemingway
Melville
Gogol
Kafka

etc.

"The Pigeon finds a hot dog" by Mel Williams.

Some of my current and all-time favourites:

Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe
The Plague - Albert Camus
Atomized - Michel Houellebecq
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee
The Process - Franz Kafka
Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
most short stories by Bertolt Brecht, Lovecraft, Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe, Roald Dahl, Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, Albert Camus, Voltaire and Chekhov
most Greek tragedies
most of Plato's dialogues

I'm a bit of a book addict, to be honest.

Doesn't sound like a very good reason to read, "To be considered educated and literate" have you read them all yourself?

to kill a mockingbird
pride and prejudice
of mice and men

While you struggle with a TV guide, I read the Aeneid in the original latin.

You are correct of course, but there's a reason that these authors are considered classics. When you spend time reading them, the splendor of their thoughts becomes obvious. Seneca once said that scholarly pursuits are an essential part of living a good life because they allow you to spend time with some of the greatest minds of all time, even make them your friends, and I tend to agree with him.

Then again, how some of those names made the list, I'll never understand. Marcus Aurelius reads like Stoicism for Dummies, Freud is a speculative hack, as is Marx (Popper was undoubtedly right on the pseudoscientific nature of their theories), Hegel is boring and much of what he writes is elaborate nonsense, and, well, the list goes on.

I've read it too (not in latin though).

Actually The Aeneid and The Odyssey are mandatory readings at highschool here so almost everyone I know has read it.

My point is I read to either have fun or learn something (I posted my favorite "fun" books) not "to be considered educated and literate" as you suggested.

Funny how after reading the Aeneid in latin you still missed the whole point of simple two lines post :winkwink:

Your list made me remember I also liked The Gambler by Dostoevsky :thumbsup

I don't know how it is with highschools in your area, but in my own experience mandatory high school reading does very little to actually create a true appreciation of literature.

One of them,

"Pulp", Charles Bukowski

The Firm and A Time To Kill by John Grisham

any sort of intresting w/ bus....:thumbsup

War and Peace
Crime and Punishment
The Alchemist
By The River Piedra I sat sown and wept

The Communist Manifesto
Memoirs of a Geisha
The Little Prince
Velveteen rabbit
Lolita
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I'd go for "Euripides" for classic tragic drama writings. :thumbsup

how do i read?

The Little Prince
Pride and Prejudice
Les Miserables
Da Vinci Code
100 Years of Solitude
Crime and Punishment
The Catcher in the Rye