Books You Love!

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I have a few model railway books in this catagory. Ones I read and read ad read again and I kinda use them as a comfort item. They are special to me and I do not normally part with them.

What about you?

Too many to name, but these here are some of my favorites:

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Cujo by Stephen King

The Harry Potter Series by JK Rowling

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Great list! My favourite ones are:
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden
Bodega Dreams by Ernesto Quinonez

J.R.R. Tolkien works, every one of them.

The Long Walk by Stephen King (as his alias "Richard Bachmann")

Just a couple that comes to mind

Michelangelo by Romain Rolland
We the Drowned by Carsten Jensen
The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (George Cockcroft)
Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence
The Serious Game by Hjalmar Söderberg
Tjärdalen by Sara Lidman (seems for some reason not to be translated)

/Mats

A few favorites:



England's Dreaming by Jon Savage.

This changed my world when I was thirteen. Very scholarly and stylish.



Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.

Brief, stylish, and full of ideas.



Fragments by Heratlicus.

Very brief, very stylish, and full of all the ideas you need.

I also reread books as comfort items, Mountain Goat. My copy of England's Dreaming is dirty and falling apart, from so many years of use. Also reread a lot of books on Kurt Cobain.

Knots by R.D. Laing.

He describes the games and contradictions of human relationships in very simple poems.



The Divided Self by R.D. Laing.

A wise assessment of how we crush individuals, especially in families, then attempt to treat their consequent mental health issues.

John Berger - Ways of Seeing

A little like visiting the museum with Marshall McLuhan.

Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions

This has all of his short stories. I especially love "On Exactitude in Science" and "Shakespeare's Memory."

A link to "On Exactitude in Science": https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf

"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith
"Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte
The "Harry Potter" series by J.K. Rowling
"Gone With the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell
"Carrie" by Stephen King
"The House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros

The Duke Ellington Reader

An engaging compilation of writing about, and by, Ellington from multiple decades.



Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!

Basically a scrapbook of articles about The Beach Boys' unfinished album Smile. Mostly contemporary articles. A very interesting look into a small window of time, when the band was doing some of its most creative work.

Enid Starkie - Arthur Rimbaud



In college, I would go to the library in between classes to read this, in small chunks. Starkie presents a poetic life which is at least as interesting as the author's writing. It is also published by New Directions, which puts out a lot of great translations in English.

Ted Hughes - Collected Poems



I love his sense of rhythm and language. There are many beautiful nature poems, as well as his Ovid translations, and The Birthday Letters.

The Riverside Chaucer



Indispensable.

The Sagas of Icelanders



A big influence on The Lord of the Rings, full of very intelligent fiction writing. The narration never passes judgment on characters, while individual characters do, for example. These are enlivening stories with insight into people and earlier views of human nature.

Sun-Tzu - The Art of War

Of Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth