No comments. By publication date.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, 1844, by Alexandre Dumas
- Crime and Punishment, 1866, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Southern California: An Island on the Land, 1946, by Carey McWilliams
- Youngblood Hawke, 1962, by Herman Wouk
- The Chronicles of Amber (first series), 1970, by Roger Zelazny
- Time Enough for Love, 1973, by Robert Heinlein
- The Power Broker, 1974, by Robert Caro
- Plagues and Peoples, 1976, by William McNeill
- The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever (first trilogy), 1977, by Stephen Donaldson
- A Distant Mirror, 1978, by Barbara Tuchman
- Godel, Escher, Bach, 1979, by Douglas Hofstadter
- The Belgariad, 1982, by David Eddings
- The Quincunx, 1989, by Charles Palliser
- Infinite Jest, 1996, by David Foster Wallace
- The Corner, 1997, by David Simon and Edward Burns
- American Aurora, 1997, by Richard Rosenfeld
- Cryptonomicon, 1999, by Neal Stephenson
- Before the Storm, 2001, by Rick Perlstein
- How Wars End, 2010, by Gideon Rose
- The Broken Earth trilogy, 2015, by N.K. Jemisin
- Chip War, 2022, by Chris Miller
I was with you on 1and 2 but then you lost me.
Try John McPhee's Assembling California. His Control of Nature has some sections on SoCal.
Not many female authors represented on that list.
Not many get published, so his deficit as a reader can be excused.
Isn't it cheating to put in a trilogy? The title of the post is "books", so you've actually put in....21 + 2 + 2 + 4 (wasn't fully sure what counts as "the first series". Why not state favorite 30 and list each book?
What?!? No Colette!?! No Grace Paley???? Kevin, truly, you are a Philistine. I mean, those aren't necessarily in my top authors list.But they've definitely got all of your top picks beat hands down.
I'm surprised to see Thomas Covenant there. I loved the first trilogy, was kind of meh on the second trilogy, and just finished slogging through the last tetralogy a week ago. It was a chore! The final scene was tearful, but I'd had almost enough of the main characters by then.
I also really liked the Broken Earth trilogy (though not so much the end), and am listening to Zelazny series on audiobook read by a really talented reader.
Overall, chuffed to see we share a taste in fantasy novels.
i won't disagree, but the first trilogy was so good and made such an impression I felt obligated to stick with it.
Absolutely. It felt derivative of Tolkien but also gave LOTR a modern sensibility that really worked for me. The giants, the haruchai and the idea of Earthsense were genuinely original, I thought.
The first Thomas Covenant trilogy feels derivative of Tolkien because Donaldson very deliberately mirrored its plot almost entirely. He wrote the trilogy to take the exact opposite stance on many of LotR's thematic elements.
Seriously? Thomas Covenant but NOT Lord of the Rings? Granted it’s been decades since I read TC but after the first one I just said meh and gave up. LotR on the other hand I’ve reread multiple times during those decades, and it still brings almost as much joy as the first time.
I just finished rereading Hobbit/LOTR for the first time in...I dunno....definitely well over 20 years. Still as good as ever.
The Chronicles of Amber taught me everything I needed to know about quantum physics.
I had trouble with the later Thomas Covenant books; too depressive.
Cryptonomicon and Anathem (another Stephenson novel) may be two of the best books ever written.
Read Anne Leckie; The Imperial Radch series. It will help with pronouns.
I never expected Kevin and I would hold so much in common with taste in books!
Whenever I make a new friend, I always get them to read Cryptonomicon. If they like it, I make sure never to let them pick what movie we go see.
The Imperial Radch series is one of those that should have ended after the first book. Ancillary Justice is fucking brilliant, but each successive book had fewer interesting things to say.
I loved them all; they are required to comprehend just how different the Presger aliens are.
Did not expect Infinite Jest, but DELIGHTED BY The Broken Earth trilogy.
I tried The Broken Earth, and gave up about halfway through the first one. It was disappointing, because I loved the Inheritance Trilogy.
And here I thought I was the only one who loved the Amber series and the Thomas Covenant trilogy. No wonder I feel so simpatico with your work here!
My wife and I read the Covenant trilogy on our honeymoon traveling around India, Sri Lanka and Thailand 39 years ago.
Good to see The Power Broker, surprised that none of Caro's LBJ series, particularly the first volume, The Path to Power, made your list.
Oh God, The Quincunx.
Dive in.
https://s1monmorr1s.wordpress.com/quincunxsnarkout/
Donaldson's Gap Cycle and Mordant's Need were far better than Covenant.
I loved the Belgariad too, when I was a tween. I'm sure it hasn't aged well, and probably didn't do much for adult readers even at the time.
I liked Mordant's Need. The Gap Cycle was one too many trips to the well of a deeply problematic use of rape as a narrative device.
I went through a real Heinlein phase many years ago in my youth, but Time Enough For Love was one of his few major novels I never read. I did, however, read the two chapters that are the Notebooks of Lazarus Long multiple times and can, and do, still quote a number of the entries. A favorite being the one about geniuses getting their name the same way the centipede did. Not because it has a hundred legs, but because most people can’t count past ten.
I loved early Heinlein (mainly the juveniles) as a kid. Later Heinlein (including Stranger In a Strange Land) not so much, except maybe The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Even in the '60s, I didn't like SIASL.
But this is a crap list for me. The only thing on it I really liked were the early Amber books, though I haven't read them in decades and my memory is hazy. But no Dickens? No LOTR? No The Left Hand of Darkness (the best SF novel I've ever read and I've read SF for over 60 years)? No Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett? Though obviously this is all a matter of taste and mine runs to SF, high fantasy, and noirish fiction, And, for some reason, David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice.
You've been looking at my bookshelves! Two thumbs up for Chandler and Dickens and Austen. Ross McDonald is good. But really, no classics like Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe (both of which are even better on rereading)? These are books for adults, not just children. London's The Call of the Wild? Twain's Connecticut Yankee? And why the preoccupation with SF? I liked Dune and The Left Hand of Darkness, and LOTR (is this SF? one of my best reading experiences in almost 8 decades), but there are many kinds of books, so why limit your reading experience arbitrarily to one genre? Just a question, not a criticism of anybody. Read what gives you pleasure.
I used to have a rule: Once I started a book, I'd give it until page 100 before I abandoned it.
More than one book kind of looked like a clunker at first, and turned out great and I was glad I stuck with it.
RAH's To Sail Beyond The Sunset was the first book where I grimly held on to page 100 and threw it out when I reached the top of 101.
I almost stopped reading Shipping News as the first pages were so depressing.
I was using this rule when I read H.P.Lovecraft. He is widely lauded as a great author, so I forced myself to read through a 100 page story of his, but couldn't reverse my initial bias.
Great List. Heinlein, Zelazny, yay. If you like these and fantasy novels have you checked out Lois McMaster Bujold? "Curse of Chalion," "Paladin of Souls?" Or her Miles Vorkosigan books which mostly just kept getting better? Also your complex thick novels that I've been meaning to read, or else use for curls: I'm going to pick one at random and try it. I loved "Cloud Atlas," the book - not the movie. After I read it I used it to build my triceps. In a totally different vein, "At Swim Two Boys," graet for bench presses, and "Bewilderment," wrist curls, and "A Soldier of the Great War, one-arm rows, were all books that made life richer, in a world where most books I buy go to the used book store after 3 or 4 chapters because by then, you can just tell. Thanks!
You mean At Swim Two Birds, by Flann O'Brien? As for weight training, I've been lifting book most of my life. But watch your back!
Interesting to see what other people read.
Time Enough For Love was good but I recall it as the start of Heinlein becoming a sex-obsessed old man. I read Stranger In A Strange Land as a teenager and it remained one of my all-time favorites until I read it again 40+ years later. Now I wouldn't rate it in my top 500.
I recommend A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) by Amor Towles.
I didn't like Stranger In a Strange Land even when I read it as a teenager in the '60s.
+10
I second A Gentleman in Moscow.
From that list (which I've mostly read as well - just not the fantasy series [except Thomas Covenant]) I suggest you'd enjoy Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad".
I applaud Kevins reading list but keep in mind it's all a matter of personal taste in books/authors.
I am in the midst of a reading journey myself with my reading books on each of the presidents. Its a fun endeavor and its a constant reminder of just how much I have forgotten about our history. In a related note my mature daughters have all asked that I get physical books - NOT read them on my tablet. Apparently they think this would make a great family inheritance that they could share amongst themselves and their children
Sometimes my kids and grand kids surprise me.............
One and five.
GEB. I lived in Ann Arbor at the time, shopped at what was then the only Borders. Saw a review of GEB in Scientific American. The reviewer sounded like he’d seen the Second Coming. Though to myself I need to remember to look for that when it hits the shelves. A few weeks later I walked into Borders and they had an open case of it lying by the front door.
Later I was reading it and burst out laughing. My wife asked what was so funny. I said it was hard to explain. She said, “Show me.” so I did. It was a page of symbolic logic. And it was hilarious
I've read three of your fiction nominees and thought they all sucked. Further, two of them (the Zelazny and the Heinlein) are by authors capable of doing much better work elsewhere. (Zelazny: Lord of Light, Doorways in the Sand. Heinlein: anything from before about 1960.) As for Donaldson, my god. Eddings is probably even worse, but I never had the nerve to try him. At least you omitted Robert Jordan and Philip Pullman.
While _Creatures of Light and Darkness_, _Lord of Light_, and _Doorways in the Sand_ are favorites of mine, the _Amber_ series is also fantastic. These are all works that I've read more than once. _Creatures of Light and Darkness_ uses a non-traditional story telling style that I just love. And it's short enough to read in an hour or two.
Number 1 is also my number 1. Surprisingly, from someone who reads a lot, I never managed to read any of these others. The Universe of books is large so no shock. Personally any list of mine has to have at least 1 Vonnegut book. I credit him for my lifetime of reading, as a kid who did not read much ( childhood dyslexia that mostly corrected on it’s own contributed), I picked up Breakfast of Champions and was awed by it. Then I read the rest and never stopped reading.
The only one that might make my own faves is also the only one from the canon in literature (although maybe not my favorite Dostoyevski). But I've now started Caro's bio of Moses and already I'm impressed. I figured anything this long would mean no end of details I didn't want to know, but it's vivid as can be and keeps a focus on the obvious question many of us would have: however did he get to have this kind of power and his agenda for what to build?
It's also impressive that, whereas a NY Times reporter lives and dies on cultivating (and echoing) background contacts, Caro mentions his interviews with Moses explicitly in text (as opposed to end notes) almost always to say that the response was somewhat self-serving or biased. He does share his subject's sense of a need for highways, something many of us today would decry, but then the book appeared back in 1974.
Tuchman was a talented writer, but a terrible historian. Caused a generation of readers to get both the late Middle Ages and WWI completely wrong.
Don't forget Stilwell.
You wouldn't know from her account that soldiers had to be restraining from shooting him. For good reason.
Hmmm. I really disliked the Count of Monte Cristo. The Corsican Brothers was okay, but Cheech and Chong made it even better.
You realI'lu read the Hofstadter? I'm. amazed. I'd put Canticle for Leibowitz and Mission of Gravity above any Heinlein.
I prefer The Three Musketeers over The Count of Monte Christo. The latter is a book about meanness and cruelty, the former about joy and courage and good cheer. This begins right at the beginning when father d'Artagnan gives his son instructions about the horse that is to take d'Artagnan to Paris.
There's a new French film trilogy for "The Three Musketeers"; the first two are up on Kanopy. Eva Green as Milady; say no more.
And the new French "Count of Monte Christo" is getting good reviews. as well.
https://youtu.be/8Q6y1waxlTY?si=st-C-wc0mCteoNxk
I've always preferred The Count of Monte Cristo, but I'd give The Three Musketeers now that I understand that, probably due to my autism, I need translations of Dumas that are put into modern English. Which actually makes sense, because French has changed a lot less than English over the last two centuries, so reading Dumas in the original is like reading it in modern French, whereas the use of language is not at all like modern English.
I’ve read three out of the top four but never even heard of most of the rest on the list.
Did no one else posting here read Cryptonomicon? Fantastic book. And, yeah, where's LOTR?
I read it. It was awful. I wouldn't have liked it anyway, but its understanding of World War Two is ridiculously terrible.
Err, I'd rather hit myself in the head with it.
The description of fish jumping in the water as a boat pulls into the Manilla harbor of how they broke the enigma code, based on the hand of the operator are both fantastic.
The only part of Cryptonomicon I remember is the Captain Crunch description: https://akkartik.name/post/capn-crunch
_Snowcrash_ is the reason we started reading Neal Stephenson.
The number one book on my list would be Jon Courtenay Grimwood's End of the World Blues. I'd have to spend time putting the list together after that.
Oof. There's some steaming piles of purple prose and dubious morals in there.