Here's mine:

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace - Incredibly insightful fiction.

Pastoralia by George Saunders - Great short story author. Inventive, funny, and tragic at the same time.

Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky - Mindblowing.

The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgeman - Funniest book of all time? Yes.

In descending order

3. Harry Potter #6 by J.K. Rowling - I don't like Harry Potter like i used to, honestly, i just want to see how it ends (must get to book store for #7), but this book was just phenomenol in my opinion.

2. Hungry City Chronicles by Philip Reeve - I love it when a book starts off weird and on the verge of corny, and then turns into an incredible and well thought out Sci-fi book that you can't put down

AND #1

HOUSE OF SCORPIONS by Nancy Farmer - Best book in the FREAKING WORLD! Nancy manages to cover SEVERAL controversial topics like cloning, immigration, and drugs, and also unleashes an incredibly memorable cast of characters that are so wonderfully written for it'll blow your mind. I love this book, it is the only book that i have ever read twice in my ENTIRE life. The book is just...phenomenol

Catcher And The Rye

Naked Lunch

Lies My Teacher Told me

The Communist Manifesto

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

The Stand by Stephen King

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King

wow... so many books...

Harry Potter series

( I'm gonna kick myself when I think of more!)

We studied the Great Gatsby so intensely in English Literature that it seems to have a permanent place in my literary sensibilities...

I liked Ender's Game a lot when I was reading it. I don't know, even though the main character was so young I enjoyed it. To Kill A Mockingbird is a great classic, too. I think I was the only one who liked reading it whe it was assigned to us in class though. D: There's always The Giver, too. While an easy read, and sort of done-to-death (Oh my, they live in the future and everyone's essentially the same and very un-human! What a twist!) I liked the way the plot moved and how the main character did what he did. Good ending too, or so I thought.

Catcher in the Rye (Holden is the only main character in a fiction novel I've had to read in high school that I didn't hate.)

Peeps (Its by the guy who wrote the Uglies.. which is horrid.... but Peeps is actually a really cool take on vampirism. Sadly the ending was really really dumb [giant worms living in the NYC subways = Vampires? WTF?!] and he wrote a sequil that had nothing to do with the first one.)

Freeze Tag (Not a very well known book but I finished the thing in one sitting. Its a real page turner about a girl with such a cold heart that she can litteraly freeze people and pass the trait onto others. Its really suspenceful and has an unexpected twist at the end, I only wish they told you more than "Megan helped Lannie out of the car "Come with me where its warm." The end." I wanted to know what happened to everyone. D: )

The Giver (One of the few books I've had to read for school my entire life I didn't hate. All the characters had cool names! 8 D

Oh yeah.. Uglies totally ripped The Giver off. >o> )

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

And I've read the manifesto too. Its strange how many of the things Marx called for were actually put into practice.

The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith ( i had to read it for a college class)

i liked it and even liked the movie (except the somewhat gay parts in the movie which wasn't in the book at all)

I Am Legend is awesome.

Well I liked most novels I've read, or I wouldn't have read them...
But in terms of truly life-altering, there is only one for me.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Yeah that's pretty much it.

King Solomon's Mines by H Rider Haggard. Victorian manly African adventures!

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet. Medieval lives, a cathedral, etc. Quite involving.

The first four Dark Tower books by Stephen King. The rest were all disappointments but the first four were every good adverb you can think of.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. Life-changing, I cried at the end.


Personal Reccommendations!

Exzhactly - Try The Handmaid's Tale. It's a story about an ultra-ultra-conservative community that was built in a modern world in reaction (or protest) to its modernity. Think medieval-type conservativism. It's a pretty thoughtful book.

Phatscurl- try a book of short stories by Ted Chiang called Stories of Your Life and Others - they're amazing and sci fi in the best, most creative senses of the word.

Phantom Penguin- The Way We Never Were by someone or other- a great reflection on the myths of the American 'traditional' lifestyle And although it is kind of girly, you might like a book called Three Swans, which is about 3 generations of women living through the 1900s China (including Mao's revolution, etc.) Moving stuff.

D0m - Philip Pullman's Golden Compass series. If you've read that, try Garth Nix's Sabriel series (which is less encompassing and not quite as sharp, but no less enthralling). If you've read those then you can just go read The Westing Game T_T

dantheman - If Fitzgerald is so ingrained, try Steinbeck or a book called The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - which is other amazing and yet mildly depressing stuff. (But amazing.)

Puff- The Giver was great, I didn't like 1984 or any of those other books, only the Giver. Your favorite books all seem to have young, mature characters. I'll reccommend Philip Pullman to you too. I think you would also like Neil Gaiman's book Stardust.

Emily - Catcher in the Rye was a horrible book, what an unlikable main character. T_T You might try A Confederacy of Dunces, that book's main character is also unlikable and delusional about his life, desires, and accomplishments (and can be quite witty at times)

fern - I dunno anything about that book so I'm gonna recommend The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay because that's the first thing I thought of when I saw that title (also it's an awesome book).

subcultured - You should read Lustmord, which is a book filled with writings and so forth from killers. (Not serial killers, from what I remember- all pleasure-killers with strange reasons for doing what they did.) It's very creepy.

Lizard - hmmmmm. I don't want to send you to a vampire book, that's too obvious. What about House of Leaves? (You can skip the footnote stuff, that's only one of the stories out of three. The stuff about the house are the best, scariest bits.)

mlai - I dunno, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler? It's a kids/YA book but I found it quite fun Not life-changing though. If you want life-changing try

LOLers, I don't get a recommendation.

But it's okay, I'm currently neck-deep in another life-changing novel, this one 10x longer than Wuthering Heights but I just can't stop at all. It's already made me so sad but if I stop reading it I'll just die. It's not in English so I don't need to mention it here.

Besides, I'm also slogging through Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, for research purposes. Up to p.456 of 938 total.

So my quota's full; I'm even neglecting my comics's buffer pages. Baaaad..

America(The Book), War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and I'm sorry, Puff http://www.drunkduck.com/community/view_topic.php?tid=32115&cid=239, but I really like the Zombie Survival Guide.

As a youngling, I always loved The Edge Chronicles.



That's the extended version of the cover of the first book, I always wanted my own banderbear...

I don't usually read books... that's one of the things I hate about myself. Sparknotes is my savior but I'll try check it out.

: )

My favorites are all of Agatha Christie's books, but especially the ones starring Tommy and Tuppence. I like all the Sherlock Holmes stuff too. Aside from those, I really enjoyed The Princess Bride and all the Wrinkle in Time series. (I haven't read The Tenth Kingdom, but my sister says it's great, and I loved the mini series.)

Oh, I also like a wordless picture book that's titled "Tuesday"

Find Waldo
America (The Book) A citizen's guide to Democracy Inaction
Candy from Strangers
Star Wars: Dark Lord
Lord of The Rings Trilogy
Lord of the Flies
Magic School Bus series


not in any order...but I will say I love America (the book)

I couldn't tell much from your post about what kind of books you like. I've never read wuthering heights so...

OK, try The Time Travelers Wife, or maybe Shadow of the Wind. They're both fairly recent books but I found them both moving- Time Traveler's Wife moreso, with a more complicated plot, more fluid writing and more emotional investment also. Shadow of the Wind has greater scope and more psychological themes.

fern- Please do give Kavalier and Klay a try, it's a big book but I loved it. Maybe you can read some summaries first to see if you'd like it. It's a semi-fictional story about two boys in the 40s who help invent comic books! (There's a lot of other stuff in it too- a sub-plot about the Golem, a missing family, some romance...)

XD
Alright, I take it you have a problem with this book and (apparently) people who enjoyed it, so I'll explain to you why I liked it.

Holden seemed like a real person, more so than the characters in 90% of the books I've read for school. There were reasons for his pompusness; he was a rich kid who lived between boarding schools his entire life and was still harboring depression from his little brother's death. Kids rasied that way, aswell as those who try to hide depression from others, act pompus to try to convice others and themselves that they are better than others to make themselves feel better. Deep down he thought he was lesser than everyone else on earth really needed someone to be there for him (he couldn't find that in his peers or parents, his older brother was too far away from home to help him, so he turned to his nine year old sister and his brother's grave.)

For a person in that situation it seemed a realistic sequience of actions. Holden was a realistic character who would be the equivalent of today's emo, I mean even people who hate the book think he's realistic (someone in the other book thread said that he reminded them of the people here on DD who were full of themselves. They're people... unless their, like, smapbots or something.) Catcher in the Rye is semiautobiographical, if you read a biography on J.D. Salinger you'll see a lot of resembalance between his life and that of Holden Caufeild's. He wrote what he knew, also makeing the story seem realistic. The reason Catcher in thr Rye is considered such a classic is because people were amazed how much they saw of themselves (and others) in Holden's character.

If you read more of Salinger's books (I'm actually reading Franny and Zooey for English right now) pompus rich kids with mental problems are a reoccuring theme (in the first 10 pages of F&Z you see that Fanny has some weird depression and relys on a book by a Russian man about God to "forgive herself" and her boyfriend is a pompus jerk who really only wants to hear praise for himself.) This is no offence to people who have money, however I work at a camp every summer where 90% of the kids live in Italy half the year, go to Boarding school (at age 5) and carry more money around in their pockets than I've ever seen. Out of the 12 kids I was incharge of last year 95% of them were pompus (and the other 5% had some kind of personality disorder.. but some had both)

I will be the first to admit Holden's constant whining is annoying, but its part of his character. I understand why people don't like it, but I do and I took enough bashing for it when we read it in school (also took bashing for not liking "Of Mice and Men." I respect your opinion, but you have to agree (as a teacher atleast) Salinger is one hell of a writer. : D

Quo Vadis by Siekiewitz (I always spell him wrong though)

The Gods of Foxcroft by David Levy

The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart

In the Palaces of Knossos by Kazantzakis



Also I must add (though it is not to be read twice)

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen

Even if it is a play and not a book. I still feel the impact of the punch it packed.


...and I guess it doesn't count to mention your own books, does it?


Edit I must admit I like Catcher in the Rye myself, though it is not in the top favourite lists. The whole book is an expose in poor parenting and adolescent depression among other things.

My Favorite books.....
Then that would be the books I have bought and re read at least 20 times.
The Thread That Binds the Bones - Nina Kiriki Hoffman, a pure Boy gets Powers, does Good, book.
The Uplift Series by David Brin. Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore, Heaven's Reach, Sundiver, Startide Rising, and The Uplift War about earthlings among the galactics. He can get long winded but overall fun.
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, about a shadow world of magic in the London underground.
Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck, about ruminations on getting old and change.
Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, about ruminations on how being a river boat pilot changed him.
Travels with my Aunt by Graham Green where a stuffy boring englishman learns to live life.

Great book. I "read" the audio book of The Talented Mr Ripley, narrated by Matt Damon, and thought the movie didn't do the book justice. In the book, Ripley was obviously gay, in the sense he liked men, but given the time it was written, it had to be very subversive about it. Ripley had a serious man crush on the guy he killed and killed him when he was spurned. I read somewhere that Ripley started being written as a woman, but somewhere along the way, Ms Highsmith switched the sex of the main character but not his actions. If you re read the book, and think of Ripley as a psychopathic woman, it all fits. I mean, the writer has Ripley doing impressions of Eleanor Roosevelt. Not a guy thing to do. Just my 2 cents.

The Bible
Many books have changed my life, but this is the only one that literally changed it for good.

I quite enjoyed that sequence of books, Sabriel, Lireal and something or other I believe.

Could anyone recommend me any books? Shouldn't be too hard since one evening I read a fictitious children's story, such as Beyond The Deepwoods*, and another evening I read something that is a harsh true story often about war or slavery, like The Tunnel.

*You could totally read that book if you were older, I just love the creatures and the world!

Catcher in the Rye, best book in American literature, I mean the characterizations were brilliant and there's just some of the images and feeling have stayed with me forever. There aren't many books that I'll read over and over but I've reread The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton more times than I can remember. There was also a really great travel diary called Dreamwhip that I loved and couldn't put down, the way I understood it it was about this guy that wanted to find perfect place... realizing eventually that there is no such place. I've read many books not many stay with me, these have and that makes them my favorites.

I liked all those too! I can't believe I forgot to mention them.

Try Into Thin Air, which is about all kinds of things going wrong while climbing Mount Everest. It was great. Or if you prefer underwater adventure, try Shadow Divers (I think that's the name) about a couple of deep-water scuba divers who discover a sunken German WWII submarine off the coast of New York that isn't supposed to be there.

My #1 favorite is The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. I loved everything about it, the characters, the writing, the plot - we got to read it twice in school. X)

Other favorites -
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
The Handmaid's Tale and The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
Sword of the Guardian by Merry Shannon

We also have this old collection of fairy tales and excerpts from children's novels that I still like to read. It's got some generic name like "Family Collection of Stories" or something like that, don't know it offhand.