What is your favorite book?

[BUYXRAYS]

What is your favorite book of all time? It could be ANY book.

For me, I think it would be 1984 by George Orwell or It by Stephen King

Edited September 15, 2023 by BUYXRAYS

[Murdoch]

I generally don't like to play absolute favourites because different games, books, movies or whatever do different things. But gun to my head it would be "Mindhunter" by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker. The whole concept blew me away, not least because i have always been very good at reading people. Profiling felt like a more expanded and formalised version of what I had been doing instinctively my whole life, and leveraged to save lives.

Edited September 15, 2023 by Murdoch

[famicommander]

Dune. It's the defining work in the science fiction genre in any medium.

[dasho]

King James Bible.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

I'm more into poetry than full books. I don't really have time to read novels. At least not since I was still in school. I read plenty of scientific and medical journals, though.

[ChaseC7527]

1984, or Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas.

[stridertech]

Just now, ChaseC7527 said:

1984, or Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas.

kickass choice. 1984 is one of my main inspirations for wanting to get into creative writing as a subject. no country for old men is also a really damn good book. currently reading brave new world rn

[Thomased22]

8 hours ago, BUYXRAYS said:

What is your favorite book of all time? It could be ANY book.

For me, I think it would be 1984 by George Orwell or It by Stephen King

Hard choice. I've always had a difficult time with picking a favorite book.

 

For the sake of veriety I'll rule out 1984, it's objectively the best dystopia of all time. However there's one book I enjoy a bit more.

As for my favorite book that isn't a Dystopia I'd have to go with my childhood classic, Holes. It's good, really good. I still have yet to find a copy of the sequel. I live in misery.

 

As for my favorite dystopian novel, it's got to be "The Giver". It's maybe not the most foolproof dystopia but I think it has things going for it beyond being freakishly accurate at predicting the horrors of what was at the time the future. It also shares something in common with Holes, having a nigh perfect movie adaptation. Though the Holes movie not only perfectly adapts the book, it adds to it in many ways. That movie is crazy straight up.

 

I think the Giver is very narratively strong though. Compared to Fahrenheit 451, and especially 1984 (which is really just Fahrenheit but not blatantly rushed if you think about it) The Giver is something I could imagine actually showing to young people. The other two are just a bit too much. Requires a mildly matured brain lol.    

[ChaseC7527]

49 minutes ago, scientifikgenius said:

kickass choice. 1984 is one of my main inspirations for wanting to get into creative writing as a subject. no country for old men is also a really damn good book. currently reading brave new world rn

was gonna cite no country too, as it's my favorite movie of all time, but haven't read it yet. also, nice JTHM PFP.

[smeghammer]

Dune has already been mentioned. So I'll go with my other all time favourite SF story, Eon, by Greg Bear.

[MrFlibble]

I, too, am not a fan of committing to any "all-time" favourites, but if by "book" you mean a work of fiction, I've long held Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad as the most emotionally stirring, and the Dune hexalogy as the most intellectually impactful for me.

 

For non-fiction, Into that Darkness by Gitta Sereny is miles above anything else that I've read.

[Geniraul]

Echoing George Orwell's 1984.

[ducon]

I don’t know.

May it be a full series of books, like Discworld’s?

[Mr. Freeze]

The Bible (New International Version) followed by Into Thin Air by John Krakauer 

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

This one was a real treasure growing up:

 

 

[Mr Masker]

1984 basically got me into reading books, outside of school stuff.

 

I always just assumed books weren't for me, because I didn't care about/disliked most things my schools forced me to read. But books like 1984 just really gripped me in a way those books didn't, and while I still don't read that often, they really did change my perception of books as well as text heavy games and other media.

[gibfrag]

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding. That book changed my life. 

[spineapple tea]

It'd either be The Andromeda Strain or The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. I don't read books very often because I'm like four years old or something but I remember not being able to put either of those down and I ended up reading half the latter in one sitting. Never even realized it was a sequel until I finished it.

Edited September 16, 2023 by spineapple tea

[OniriA]

Wikipedia.

 

Lot's of different topics and stuff, it's like a neverending book you can read and find new things contstantly.

 

Other then that I like listening to middle aged or old British men narrating audio books in my ear while going to sleep. 

Edited September 16, 2023 by OniriA

[Garlichead]

More than a favorite books I have some favorite authors. In no particular order:

 

- Robert Louis Stevenson 

- Julio Cortazar

- Franz Kafka

- Herman Hesse

- Joaquín Gutiérrez 

 

Recently I have been enjoying a lot of the "New Latin American Boom" (Cabezón Camara, Schweblin, Enriquez, etc). 

[elborbahquarama]

i've read very few books but i think it would either be "ubu roi", "exploits and opinions of doctor faustroll, pataphysician" or "les chants de maldoror" (i also really like "the metamorphosis", "madame bovary" and "ficciones"!!)

i think (?) people mention the bible as a joke but i really love that book (edit: i would particularly recommend "ecclesiastes" from it if anyone is interested)

Edited September 17, 2023 by elborbahquarama

[Guff dotD]

Freakonomics (either the first or Super Freakonomics, the second is essentialy more of the first [which is good])

by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt.

 

I find myself re-reading it out of compulsion, and quote it on a regular basis.

[Serum]

LoTR because.... LoTR

[aloysiusfreeman]

My cheat answer is The Dark Tower series, if you consider it one book. 

 

Outside of that, it's always tough to answer this re: favorite books. Personally I think it's difficult to pick a favorite book compared to a movie/album/game, because with the latter I typically revisit them often because they are far quicker(or easier) to finish. Outside of The Dark Tower series, I rarely reread books. 

 

 

[DoomGater]

Bram Stoker's DRACULA is a splendid book. Yes, it's old and a slow burner, but it propagates timeless values and is more modern than you might guess.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/345

[Clippy]

Does Kraft dinner cooking instructions count?

[Marmiteman02]

The six core Dune books by Frank Herbert.

[MrFlibble]

7 hours ago, aloysiusfreeman said:

Personally I think it's difficult to pick a favorite book compared to a movie/album/game, because with the latter I typically revisit them often because they are far quicker(or easier) to finish.

BTW, I quite often pick a book I like and read a bit from it. Usually, a quote springs up in my mind (by way of random lexical association) and look for the passage it's from, to check if my memory is right and to re-read the passage for enjoyment; or I just open on a random page and read from there. I caught myself doing this fairly often with the first Dune book, and with many of Viktor Pelevin's books -- where abundant memorable quotes come from.

On 9/17/2023 at 6:44 PM, elborbahquarama said:

i would particularly recommend "ecclesiastes" from it if anyone is interested

As someone of completely secular upbringing who's been reading the Scriptures from time to time in a random fashion since childhood, I can say that for quite some time, if anyone would ask me which book from the Bible was my favourite, I'd say Ecclesiastes. However, as I re-read it somewhat recent-ish, I came to the conclusion that I probably had been reading too much of my own interpretations into it. I suppose I don't really have enough background knowledge to properly understand that text the way it was intended in the context of Judaism.

6 hours ago, DoomGater said:

Bram Stoker's DRACULA is a splendid book.

Oh yes, I enjoyed my first reading in translation when I was a university student in the 2000s, and recently I picked the English original from Wikisource. His prose is very fluid, and I loved the diary structure of the narrative, switching between viewpoints of different characters. I'm not sure, but I think he was the first to pioneer this idea of science versus supernatural, which feels like it would be a more natural theme for the 20 century.

 

BTW, I also really enjoyed Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Although the main intrigue of the plot was fairly obvious from the start, there's some very good prose there, and the vivid language brings to life the different time periods the story is set in. I also felt that Lovecraft had a lot of love for his home city and its history, which to me is more fascinating than the macabre fantasies of his (although they, too, have some interest and merit).

 

As for non-fiction, another book I'd like to mention is Mirrors in the Brain about the mirror neurons. I think it's the most well-written book on a complex scientific subject that I've ever read.

Edited September 18, 2023 by MrFlibble

[EduardoAndFriends]

Any of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books (favourite author) but I also read Masters of Doom once a year to ride the rollercoaster of emotions as they build something beautiful and then due to egos, things fall apart. Magnificent book. I also like slipping into something nice and easy like some Dan Brown now and then… I read each night before bed, so largely it depends on whatever mood I’m in, lel.

[EduardoAndFriends]

On 9/16/2023 at 10:14 PM, ducon said:

I don’t know.

May it be a full series of books, like Discworld’s?

Right on, man. Pratchett rules. I can’t choose a favourite. Rereading Jingo at the moment.