So...what are your favorite books, excluding comics?

I like Lord of the Rings (and other Tolkien books), 'Ender's' series (by Orson Scott Card), and Hitchhiker's GTTG, 'course. You?

Edited by Da_Goat at 06:34 on July, 29th 2003

I'm also a huge Tolkien-fan. I also like the deathgate-series from Weiss and Hickman (one of the best written fantasy I've come across yet) and Terry Goodkind's series called in dutch "de wetten van de magie" (Laws of Magic). I think the English version is called something like the sword of thruth but I'm not that sure about that... Another fantasy/sci-fi series of books which I can recommend is the many-coloured country ("het veelkleurige land" in dutch, can't remember the author at the moment).

Fantasy sucks. Tolkien sucks. So there. As for good books which are actually readable without vomiting, I can recommend 59 of the stories involving Sherlock Holmes written by Conan Doyle and half of "A Study in Scarlet" (which turns into a lame "Western" halfway through). "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is quite a good read, too. And since you didn't say anything about 'novels only', I'll add "A Liar's Authobiography Volume 6" to that list - very entertaining.

Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (all 5 of them) and all the Dune books, all 8 from Frank Herbert and the 3 from Brian Herbert.

I'm interested in reading 'The Man Who Was Thursday' - G. K. Chesterton, is it any good?

Ummm, let's see.

Currently I love to hate the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. I guess I'm a little of a masochist - I hate the author with passion for what he lets his characters go through.

Other fantasy that I like is actually hard to categorize, other than describing it as Jack Vance's Dying Earth clones. Here, it's most of older works by Roger Zelazny, which are hopelessly out of print, but which can be purchased through Amazon for less than $1 a piece.

As for pure sci-fi, there's lots that I like. My favorite authors stick with more science than fiction, and include people like Frederick Pohl and Kim Stanley Robinson. Then there's the golden age of sci-fi, which includes Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg.

As for a more serious literature, I'm hopelessly in love with the works of Jose Saramago. His Journey to Portugal is a masterpiece; his other books are not far behind.

I've been reading memoirs lately, for whatever reason, but I did just finish Dave Barry's first fiction book.

Has anybody read any Orson Scott Card books, like the Ender series?

I also like Mark Twain every now and then. His books get monotonous after a while, though.

Edited by Da_Goat at 20:15 on July, 29th 2003

I've read the whole Ender's Game series, but except of the first book, I didn't really enjoy the rest. Card is great at creating small, closed environments, but when it came to creating a whole universe, he didn't come across as very realistic.

That said, I'd love to see Ender's Game as a strategy game. Imagine that instead of always having better equipment, you instead face growing odds with worse equipment and fewer units. I think it would make a great game.

Did you just read Ender's normal series, or the complimentary series about Bean too? The first one in that series is "Ender's Shadow", which is the same story as Ender's Game, but in Bean's perspective.

Yeah, that would be a cool strategy game.

Just the normal Ender's Game series. In fact, I ended with Xenocide, which I found extremely boring. I guess it's like with the Dune series - the first book is a classic, the second still readable, you've got to push yourself to finish the third and that's when you decide to skip the rest.

I've got his full Ender's Game series and Alvin Maker series in Palm format, and maybe one day I'll get to them.

You may very well be right then. I'm reading them as the author reccomends: Ender's Game, then the Bean series, then the Ender series. I haven't finished the Bean series yet (I'm on the second or third book, I think second, book. The fourth and final book of the Bean series isn't out yet). However, I've heard some say that Speaker for the Dead is one of the greatest books of all-time.

At the moment I'm taking a break from reading books. Last one I finished recently was a book called "Schwarzbuch Markenfirmen" (roughly translated: "Black Book of Companies" ) which is a rather dry analysis of the crimes that well known companies are comitting worldwide. Just some parts of it are interesting (since most of its information isn't really new to me), but at least it does not have the approach of supporting conspiracy theories.

Edit: Uh... I just noticed that I somewhat missed the actual topic. But to get back to the initial question: I can't name any specific favorite books.

Edited by Tapuak at 23:38 on August, 01st 2003

Isac Asimov's "The Foundation" is the last one I read (the whole cycle, of course). Absolutely great. Due to my exams, however, I've been limiting to poetry. Some Romanian poets...if you're interested, I could translate some poems for you.