Favorite book(s)?

Post Reply New Topic

I'm curious to know what your favorite book is, or what book(s) has impacted you the most, given you a new perspective on life?
For me, it would have to be "A New Earth" and "A Course in Miracles".

Too many to name, but one of my favorites is Fahrenheit 451 because its themes are so similar to what the world is like now especially with the debate over the concept of "fake news", freedom of expression VS censorship, and truth over deception.

Probably A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. I try to read it every year, and it only gets better every time.

1984, as well.

Farhrenheit 451, 1984 and Brave New World are on my list of books to read soon, as they are so eerily relevant to the times. Brave New World was assigned to me to read in high school, but after a few chapters in, I boycotted finishing it.

James Ellroy's American Tabloid. It's two sequels, The Cold Six Thousand, and Death's A Rover were decent enough, but don't compare to the original.

Interesting question but hard to answer because quite many books had an impact on me in quite different ways.
May be Faust I of Goethe because Faust was a little bit the way that I am and wanted to know anything about the world.

Sorry, forgot to answer the second part of the question.
The book(s) helped me to further grasp how America was never innocent, and how it's Golden Age was rather one of tinsel. And how much of what may have occurred in our history had been buried by the worst kind of people. I know, very bleak and cynical.

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, which, in my opinion, must be read in the unabridged version lest the reader fail to understand Scrooge's reasons for being as he was.

As with all Dickens' novels, this book shows Scrooge's life filled with generational poverty, familial and social isolation to the degree of emotional and physical paternal abuse (the parts that are frequently left out of the story), supplanting his failures with stoic concern about things perfected (including his education), not people ... even those with whom he studied in childhood and worked in adulthood. Scrooge had little need for socializing or fame. His days were dictated by schedules which revolved around his meals, his dreaded personal interactions, and his preferred times to avoid being seen, or worse, trapped into a conversation by others.

By the end of his story, he realizes that he and his lifelong behaviors had almost cost him his life itself. I do believe that while Scrooge was probably not autistic owing more likely to differential diagnoses, he certainly came close to it.

My favored version of the book is The Annotated Christmas Carol by Michael Patrick Hearn, which provides the reconstructed original unabridged version as well as its abridged and more popularized version that many read aloud to others in the season. The book is equal parts pure Dickensian drama and collegiate textbook discussing Dickens' own life of perpetual poverty and copyright infringements by others.

It is possible he understood the duality of fortune and famine as well as his characters did.

The works of Franz Kafka.

I have a wide arc from politics, sociology, and political philosophy to existentialism on to mystic/occult topics.

One of the first really influential political philosophy books I read was John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards. It was a 500 page download of a lot of European political history I'd never studied in school and it seemed like with each page I was learning something new. Much more recently I sped through John Gray's Straw Dogs and as far as human behavior and politics I found it to embody a lot of things I'd had to learn the hard way in the last fifteen years and while it's an incredibly important book I also think it could have been too jagged a pill for me at 22 or 23 if I'd read it then.

For the esoteric content, not a rare name, Dion Fortune was a pretty good writer and she wrote one of the first books that really helped me get my head around what the Tree of Life is. Israel Regardie's book by that title was interesting because it seemed to have almost everything I'd learned in about three years of reading various other books on the topic in one place (Abramelin, in-depth philosophy on the 30 Aethyrs, etc.). Manly P Hall also wrote some very good books on traditional occult philosophy, both eastern and western, that did a great job at connecting the dots behind the values that unify the western and western mysteries in their insight into the human endeavor writ large. There are a lot of really good current author/practitioners as well like Nick Farrell, Peregrin Wildoak, and Mark Stavish but its tougher to put their books quite into the same context in that they tend toward praxis more than philosophy.

One book I was able to read this spring that I liked a lot was a collection of short stories by Laszlo Krasznahorkai called The World Goes On. I'm working a heck of a lot right now which has unfortunately slowed down my reading a bit but I do have a 900 page anthology of Nietzche staring back at me from my night stand that I need to complete (still just barely scratched the surface on that) and also Franz Kafka's The Castle that I need to get through.

That's what I hate about the movies, most of them leave out all of my favorite parts (like when Scrooge makes amends with his nephew). The TNT/Patrick Stewart one comes the closest, for me, but it really bothers me that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come looks like he has a cardboard box on his head with a black cloth draped over it.

I think the only abridged version of the book that I've read was the one that Dickens himself abridged for public readings. It doesn't leave out too much, and it didn't take too long to read it aloud.

Is the Stewart version available on DVD/Blu-ray? I own the George C. Scott version and plan to buy the Muppets version when I can find it. The Michael Patrick Hearn book includes the abridged version authorized by Dickens which features what he said and how he said it. I haven't compared to the two versions, but Hearn mentions how Dickens would ad lib depending on his mood.

I don't know about BD, but I have it on DVD, yes.
I've never cared for the George C. Scott one, but I was actually surprised at how good the Muppet version is.

Yep, I found the Patrick Stewart DVD version! I should look for that when I also get the Muppets version.

It's easier for me to say who my favorite authors are.

Douglas Adams
Brian Aldiss
Poul Anderson
Isaac Asimov
Ray Bradbury
David Brin
Edgar Rice Burroughs
John W. Campbell
C. J. Cherryh
Arthur C. Clarke
Philip K. Dick
Harlan Ellison
Dorothy C. Fontana
William Gibson
Harry Harrison
Robert A. Heinlein
Frank Herbert
Madeline L'Engle
Stan Lee
Ursula K. LeGuin
Anne McCaffrey
Michael Moorcock
Larry Niven
Andre Norton
George Orwell
Frederik Pohl
Carl Sagan
Mary Shelley
Robert Silverberg
Clifford D. Simak
Theodore Sturgeon
Jules Verne
Kurt Vonnegut
H. G. Wells
Roger Zelazney

Ah, Harlan Ellison was a friend of my older half-brother. A nice guy IF you get to know him. A friend once stood in line to have a copy of Fantasy and Science Fiction signed by Ellison (whom the friend loathed).