# Five Books



## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

I've become addicted to the Five Books site, which features interviews with public intellectuals about their five favorite books in random genres and fields: https://fivebooks.com/ I thought it might be nice to do something similar here.

The subjects on the website range from general stuff like 5 favorite novels to specialized scholarly studies. Feel free to be as general or specific as you'd like. For example, you could go with "5 Composer Biographies" or "5 21st-century books about Schubert." It's your call. And no pressure: if you get tired of a list you can always post another one on the same theme later.

Feel free to respond to others' lists and make suggestions-though, as always in the Community Forum, nothing negative. You may explain your choices or simply post them without comment.

I look forward to any replies.


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

I'll kick things off with

*5 20th-Century Plays*

Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Caryl Churchill, A Number
George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan
August Wilson, Joe Turner's Come and Gone
Jean Cocteau, Orpheus


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## josquindesprez (Aug 20, 2017)

*5 Rabelaisian novels:*

François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror
Miguel Ángel Asturias, Mulata
Michel Tournier, Gemini

Brecht also has a Saint Joan play (Saint Joan of the Stockyards), though it's not as good as Caucasian Chalk Circle. I generally like his later plays more than the early ones, but his early theoretical writings on epic theater are great.


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## Dr Johnson (Jun 26, 2015)

*5 novels*

Jonathan Ames - Wake Up, Sir!
Sybille Bedford - A Legacy
J.G. Farrell - Troubles
Penelope Fitzgerald - At Freddie's
Anthony Powell - Afternoon Men


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## Templeton (Dec 20, 2014)

5 Bildungsromans:

Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Martin Eden - Jack London
You Can't Go Home Again - Thomas Wolfe
Native Son - Richard Wright


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## Dr Johnson (Jun 26, 2015)

*5 biographies/autobiographies/memoirs*

James Boswell - Life of Samuel Johnson
Dan Davin - Closing Times
Julian Maclaren-Ross - Memoirs of the Forties
Barbara Skelton - Tears Before Bedtime/Weep No More (published as one volume)
Anthony West - H.G. Wells, Aspects of a Life


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## Templeton (Dec 20, 2014)

*5 Non-fiction*

The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda's Road to 9/11 - Lawrence Wright
The Baader-Meinhof Complex - Stefan Aust
Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men - Elliot Liebow
A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture - Marguerite Feitlowitz
The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So Called Psychopathic Personality - Dr Hervey Cleckley


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## josquindesprez (Aug 20, 2017)

*5 Non-Ancient Epics:*

Dante, Inferno
Luís de Camões, The Lusiads
Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece
Petőfi Sándor, John the Valiant
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh


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## Josquin13 (Nov 7, 2017)

5 funniest novels:

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

Why mention anyone else? (unless you count Don Quixote as a comic novel...)

Okay, honorable mention (but second tier compared to the above):

Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh--who signed 1st edition copies to his alcoholic friends,
"You're next, Evelyn"

Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

Great idea for a thread, by the way.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Five books for the desert island:

Moby Dick--Herman Melville: Language to rival Shakespeare; existential questioning; striking characters; vivid scenes; a great sea story; a treatise on whales and whaling, and so much more. Certain passages make me weep due to the power of the language. A great stew of a book and the Great American Novel.

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.--James Boswell: Wonderful conversation; a vivid description of an eccentric yet central character of 18th century English intellectual life; and so many memorable quotes and sayings. Open it anywhere and begin to read: TC's own Dr. Johnson knows!

The Joys of Yiddish--Leo Rosten: A selective dictionary of a particularly expressive language, with meanings of words illustrated by both gentle and ribald humor; a goldmine of jokes and wise sayings; a window on the human condition; and a somewhat melancholy look back at a marvelous yet dying culture.

The Journals of Lewis and Clark--Bernard DeVoto, Editor: History-making travel and adventure in the American West, told in the contrasting prose of Lewis and Clark; a depiction of the frontier and its denizens both of European and of aboriginal origin; drama and danger, whether initiated by topography, weather, man, or beast. History was made.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb--Richard Rhodes: A brilliant overview of the time when nuclear physics stepped from a few small, idiosyncratic laboratories and a few curious tinkerers and theorists to center-stage in world affairs. We meet a galaxy of brilliant men and another of powerful men; we also see the harnessing of the resources of an entire nation in a convulsive effort to realize the creation of something monstrous from something very tiny.


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

*5 Latin American Works of Fiction*

Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolaño - The Third Reich
César Aira - Shantytown
Alejo Carpentier - The Lost Steps
Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

5 20th Century American Novels

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott FitzGerald
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Beloved - Toni Morrison


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## TurnaboutVox (Sep 22, 2013)

5 favourite British and Irish novels I read in the last 5 years:


To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Dubliners - James Joyce
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
Never Mind - Edward St. Aubyn
In Another Light - Andrew Grieg


I am also a fan of J.G.Farrell, Dr Johnson.


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

5 Whodunits

The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Indians) - Agatha Christie
The Greek Coffin Mystery - Ellery Queen
The Three Coffins (aka The Hollow Man) - John Dickson Carr
The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy - James Anderson


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

Strange Magic said:


> Five books for the desert island:
> 
> Moby Dick--Herman Melville: Language to rival Shakespeare; existential questioning; striking characters; vivid scenes; a great sea story; a treatise on whales and whaling, and so much more. Certain passages make me weep due to the power of the language. A great stew of a book and the Great American Novel.
> 
> ...


The Making of the Atomic Bomb is probably my favorite work of modern non-fiction.


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

Josquin13 said:


> 5 funniest novels:
> 
> A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
> A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
> ...


How about:

Puckoon (Spike Milligan)
Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons)
Riotous Assembly (Tom Sharpe)
The Code of the Woosters (P.G. Wodehouse)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

jegreenwood said:


> 5 Whodunits
> 
> The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
> And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Indians) - Agatha Christie
> ...


Four great choices! (Anderson's book was too much a pastiche, and I tumbled to the murderer early on.)

Avoiding Carr, Christie, and Queen...

*Five detective stories by men*

The Poisoned Chocolates Case (or Trial and Error) - Anthony Berkeley
Lament for a Maker - Michael Innes
The Bishop Murder Case - S.S. Van Dine
Head of a Traveller - Nicholas Blake
The List of Adrian Messenger - Philip MacDonald

(Runner-up choices:
The House of the Arrow - A.E.W. Mason
Trent's Last Case - E.C. Bentley
The Eye of Osiris - R. Austin Freeman
The Cask - Freeman Wills Crofts
Swan Song - Edmund Crispin)

*Five detective stories by women*
Murder Must Advertise - Dorothy L. Sayers
Come Away, Death - Gladys Mitchell
The Fashion in Shrouds - Margery Allingham
Green for Danger - Christianna Brand
The One That Got Away - Helen McCloy

*Five detective short story collections*
The Innocence of Father Brown - G.K. Chesterton
Mr. Fortune Objects - H.C. Bailey
Max Carrados - Ernest Bramah
Prince Zaleski - M.P. Shiel
The Old Man in the Corner - Baroness Orczy

(I've already listed a Sayers, so can't put Lord Peter Views the Body; and you've listed Queen, so I won't put The Adventures of EQ!)

*Five "modern" crime novels*
On Beulah Height - Reginald Hill
A Taste for Death - P.D. James
Wolf to the Slaughter - Ruth Rendell
The Water Room - Christopher Fowler
The Wench is Dead - Colin Dexter


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

*Five fantasy novels that aren't Tolkienesque*
Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
The Neverending Story - Michael Ende
The Once and Future King - T.H. White
The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear - Walter Moers
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell - Susanna Clarke


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Five Great Science Fiction Novels:

Bester: The Stars My Destination
Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Herbert: Dune
Willis: Doomsday Book
Niven: Ringworld


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## Dr Johnson (Jun 26, 2015)

*5 sundry books of interest*

Bruce Chatwin - The Songlines
Jean Gimpel - The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages
Donald R. Morris - The Washing of the Spears
Bill O'Neal - The Pimlico Encyclopedia Of Western Gunfighters
W.G. Sebold - The Rings of Saturn


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## gustavdimitri (Nov 7, 2017)

1. Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
2. Anna Akhmatova: The Real 20th Century
3. Horace Traubel: With Walt Whitman in Camden (all 9 volumes...! )
4. Donald Mitchell, Andrew Nicholson: The Mahler Companion
5. Roberta Reeder, Judith Hemschemeyer: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

Blancrocher said:


> I'll kick things off with
> 
> *5 20th-Century Plays*
> 
> ...


I got to see Sam Shepard performing in "A Number." As highly regarded as she is, I think Caryl Churchill is the most under-appreciated active English language playwright.


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

jegreenwood said:


> I got to see Sam Shepard performing in "A Number." As highly regarded as she is, I think Caryl Churchill is the most under-appreciated active English language playwright.


She's a wonderful playwright. I hesitated whether to pick "A Number" or "The Skriker," btw, going with the former with some misgivings. There is so much variety in her oeuvre. The last play of hers that I was able to see live was "Love and Information," which was showing in NYC a couple years ago-perhaps you saw it at the time as well.


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

Blancrocher said:


> She's a wonderful playwright. I hesitated whether to pick "A Number" or "The Skriker," btw, going with the former with some misgivings. There is so much variety in her oeuvre. The last play of hers that I was able to see live was "Love and Information," which was showing in NYC a couple years ago-perhaps you saw it at the time as well.


I did. Not my favorite - but another example of her curiosity and imagination. The last play of hers I saw was "Escaped Alone." That was earlier this year.

Back in the early 90's I attended a joint reading by Churchill and Tony Kushner. Kushner took the stage first, and in his opening remarks he said (and I paraphrase) that half of what he did as a playwright was stolen from her. And yes, I can see Churchill's influence on "Angels in America." If nothing else, the sheer boldness of it.

I have a copy of "The Skriker," but for some reason I've never read it (or seen it). I shall have to remedy that.


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## josquindesprez (Aug 20, 2017)

Good timing on this post- just up today: The Best Books on Wagner.

And for today,

*5 twentieth-century non-English language novels by women:*

Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
Rosario Castellanos, The Nine Guardians [Balún Canán]
Unica Zürn, The Trumpets of Jericho
Marguerite Duras, L'Amante Anglaise
Margarita Karapanou, Kassandra and the Wolf


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Five science fiction novels from the Golden Age that still hold up: (dates are copyright dates or ranges of dates)

Donovan's Brain: Curt Siodmak, 1942--superb, arresting writing draws you in immediately, as Donovan's brain is removed from his dying body and established in vitro in a remote Arizona desert clinic, following the crash of a small airplane. The whole literary and scientific package stills works like a Swiss watch.

The Martian Chronicles: Ray Bradbury, 1950--again, superb writing and evocative characters populate both Earth and Mars, as a sequence of stories unfold the vanishing of the ethereal aboriginal Martians and the arrival and fluctuating fortunes of colonizing Earthlings. The TV adaptation long ago with Rock Hudson was amazingly good.

City: Clifford Simak, 1952--amazing flow of ideas, all strangely believable: talking dogs, parallel worlds like beads on a string alongside ours (the cobbly worlds), nirvana on Jupiter, Jenkins the ageless robot butler. And the ants. The ants learned about metallurgy, invention, machines--what to do about the ants?

The Demolished Man: Alfred Bester, 1951/1953--Bester's best. Telepaths reading others' minds for good (the Espers Guild) or sometimes for evil (a rogue member of the League of Esper Patriots). Law enforcement pitted against a criminal underground to solve a murder in a time when murder has been rendered almost impossible.

The Foundation Trilogy: Isaac Azimov, 1948-1953--the series that earned economist Paul Krugman the Nobel Prize. Upon reading about psychohistorian Hari Seldon, Krugman wanted to be a psychohistorian also, but settled for economics as the closest he would get. A mutant unforeseen by Seldon takes over most of the galaxy and threatens the very survival of the Foundation, something I find strangely linked to our time.

Most of these tales began as serialized material in SF magazines, then later were refigured into standalone books. Along with several other favorites of mine, they still work today if one allows oneself to enter into their reality without reservation.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

NickFuller said:


> Four great choices! (Anderson's book was too much a pastiche, and I tumbled to the murderer early on.)
> 
> Avoiding Carr, Christie, and Queen...
> 
> ...


Not even a single Raymond Chandler among them! But that's a great list, regardless, whetted the appetite for some reading.

*5 Noir Novel Classics:*

Farewell, My Lovely - Raymond Chandler
The Lady in the Lake - Chandler
Red Harvest - Dashiell hammett
The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M. McCain
The Last Good Kiss - James Crumley


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## SarahNorthman (Nov 19, 2014)

Strange Magic said:


> Five books for the desert island:
> 
> Moby Dick--Herman Melville: Language to rival Shakespeare; existential questioning; striking characters; vivid scenes; a great sea story; a treatise on whales and whaling, and so much more. Certain passages make me weep due to the power of the language. A great stew of a book and the Great American Novel.
> 
> ...


Oh! I'm sad to say I didn't care for Moby Dick (despite it being a part of my family history). I much preferred Melville's short stories. Bartleby the Scrivener is by far my favorite work of his.


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## SarahNorthman (Nov 19, 2014)

Five books:
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984-George Orwell
The 5 Second Rule - Mel Robbins
Utopia - Sir Thomas More
Shooting Stars - VC Andrews


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## Meyerbeer Smith (Mar 25, 2016)

Kieran said:


> Not even a single Raymond Chandler among them! But that's a great list, regardless, whetted the appetite for some reading.
> 
> *5 Noir Novel Classics:*
> 
> ...


I've read most of Chandler and Hammett. Not a noir man.


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## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

jegreenwood said:


> The Making of the Atomic Bomb is probably my favorite work of modern non-fiction.


You probably would enjoy this book because it has a large section on when Richard Feynman worked on the bomb project. Also a fascinating read through and through.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Fritz Kobus said:


> You probably would enjoy this book because it has a large section on when Richard Feynman worked on the bomb project. Also a fascinating read through and through.


A fantastic book! Any book by Richard Feynman is a gem--_What Do You Care What Other People Think?, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out_ are two more. The bio by James Gleick, _Genius_, is revealing. Thanks for reminding us of Feynman .


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## josquindesprez (Aug 20, 2017)

*5 African Novels:*

José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, A Grain of Wheat
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North


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## Tallisman (May 7, 2017)

Essay collections

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays
Montaigne: Essays
Thomas Carlyle: Selected Writings
The Essential Jung
Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

gustavdimitri said:


> 1. Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
> 2. Anna Akhmatova: The Real 20th Century
> 3. Horace Traubel: With Walt Whitman in Camden (all 9 volumes...! )
> 4. Donald Mitchell, Andrew Nicholson: The Mahler Companion
> 5. Roberta Reeder, Judith Hemschemeyer: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova


Very partial to Akhmatova myself!


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## Kivimees (Feb 16, 2013)

Five great Hungarian novels:

Metropole - Ferenc Karinthy
Embers - Sándor Márai
The Melancholy of Resistance - László Krasznahorkai
Journey by Moonlight - Antal Szerb
The Paul Street Boys - Ferenc Molnár


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## josquindesprez (Aug 20, 2017)

Kivimees said:


> Five great Hungarian novels:
> 
> Metropole - Ferenc Karinthy
> Embers - Sándor Márai
> ...


Good choices. I didn't enjoy Embers or Journey by Moonlight very much, and would probably instead include Gold in the Mud, by Zsigmond Móricz (a favorite) and maybe The Adventures of Sinbad, by Gyula Krúdy, but I love, love, love the Krasznahorkai.


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## Kivimees (Feb 16, 2013)

josquindesprez said:


> Good choices. I didn't enjoy Embers or Journey by Moonlight very much, and would probably instead include Gold in the Mud, by Zsigmond Móricz (a favorite) and maybe The Adventures of Sinbad, by Gyula Krúdy, but I love, love, love the Krasznahorkai.


I started my list with Metropole, which is leagues above all the others on my list (in my highly subjective opinion). :tiphat:


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## Josquin13 (Nov 7, 2017)

5 Favorite first novels by authors:

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Roderick Hudson, Henry James

5 favorite novels that were also adapted into a treasured film or television series:

A Room with a View--E.M.Forster (film by Merchant/Ivory)
Brideshead Revisited--Evelyn Waugh (Granada series, starring Jeremy Irons & Anthony Andrews)
Pride and Prejudice--Jane Austen (BBC series, starring Colin Firth & Jennifer Ehle)
The Count of Monte Cristo--Alexandre Dumas (French TV series, starring Gerard Depardieu)
Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring--Marcel Pagnol (film by Claude Chabrol)

Extra mention:

To Kill a Mockingbird--Harper Lee (film by Robert Mulligan, starring Gregory Peck) 
Everything is Illuminated--Jonathan Safran Foer (film by Liev Schreiber)

5 Favorite final literary works, or swan songs:

Shakespeare--The Tempest
Dostoyevsky--The Brothers Karamazov
Chekhov--The Cherry Orchard
Moliere--The Imaginary Invalid (also Moliere's last stage performance)
T.S. Eliot--Four Quartets (his last 4 poems)

Extra mention: Daniel Deronda, George Eliot


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

It would be tough for me to decide between The Melancholy of Resistance and War and War. Krasznahorkai was an amazing find for me not that long ago. Aside from Antal Szerb, I'm unfamiliar with the others on your Hungarian lists--looking forward to Metropole, which I'll try first.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Courtesy of Josquin13:

"5 favorite novels that were also adapted into a treasured film or television series:

A Room with a View--E.M.Forster (film by Merchant/Ivory)
Brideshead Revisited--Evelyn Waugh (Granada series, starring Jeremy Irons & Anthony Andrews)
Pride and Prejudice--Jane Austen (BBC series, starring Colin Firth & Jennifer Ehle)
The Count of Monte Cristo--Alexandre Dumas (French TV series, starring Gerard Depardieu)
Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring--Marcel Pagnol (film by Claude Chabrol)

Extra mention:

To Kill a Mockingbird--Harper Lee (film by Robert Mulligan, starring Gregory Peck) 
Everything is Illuminated--Jonathan Safran Foer (film by Leif Schreiber)"

I will suggest also:

I, Claudius--Robert Graves: What a TV series! An all-time favorite.
An Outcast of the Islands--Joseph Conrad: A great film, and the cast: Robert Morley, Trevor Howard, Wendy Hiller, Ralph Richardson.
The Maltese Falcon--Dashiell Hammett: An almost perfect realization of the book. Bogart, Astor, Lorre, Greenstreet.
The Martian Chronicles--Ray Bradbury: A remarkable recreation in black-and-white TV, with Rock Hudson.
Tom Jones--Henry Fielding: Albert Finney, Hugh Griffith, Susannah York


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

An interesting survey of the books shortlisted for the 2019 Wolfson Prize in History:

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/history-2019-wolfson-prize-shortlist/

I think I'll add that one about Oscar Wilde to my summer reading list.


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## Pat Fairlea (Dec 9, 2015)

This thread convinces me that most TC members have higher-brow tastes than me. I am a man of hidden shallows.

However, I'm a bit surprised that no-one has mentioned Mary Shelley's brilliant 'Frankenstein', or Tove Jansson's 'The Summer Book'. They would both be on my list, alongside Moby Dick.


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

5 books?
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Richard Feynman - Lectures on Physics
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain


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## philoctetes (Jun 15, 2017)

Modern Fiction: 

The Sleepwalkers - Hermann Brock
The Guyana Trilogy - Wilson Harris
From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate - Nathaniel Mackey
The Complete Novels of Jean Rhys - Jean Rhys
Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Books I find insanely funny:

_Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head_, by B. Kliban. This is a book of illustrations/cartoons that I find exquisitely hilarious because they are utterly absurd. Kliban has a series of such books--all absurd--but the one mentioned here is the nuttiest.

_Gamesmanship_, also _Lifemanship_ and _One-Upmanship_: all by Stephen Potter. 1950s British leg-pulling, with perfectly idiotic illustrations. How to excel at games and sports, at driving a car. traveling by train, birdwatching, mountain climbing, enjoying a weekend in the country as a guest, wooing women, being well-spoken about classical music, and life itself.

_N'Heures Souris Rames_, also known as _The Coucy Castle Manuscript_, "Translated & Annotated" by Ormonde de Kay. Medieval French poetry of a distinctly questionable nature. The scholarly footnotes and attempts at translation by Ormonde de Kay will bring tears to the eyes of those who believe in the value of painstaking accuracy and detail.


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## Guest (May 20, 2019)

Books that have most influenced my life:
The Book of Mormon
The Bible
The Hot Zone
The Road to Serfdom by Hayek
Fundamental Immunology by Bill Paul ed.

Favorite Fiction:
The Lord of the Rings
Dune
A Tale of Two Cities
Game of Thrones
Sophocles' Three Theban Plays

Favorite History:
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Band of Brothers
A Stillness at Appomattox
The Guns of August
Witness


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## tortkis (Jul 13, 2013)

Computer programming books

The C Programming Language, Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie (I think everyone has this)
The Little Schemer, Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen (I learned recursion from this book)
ANSI Common LISP, Paul Graham (Practical and usable for actual tasks)
The Unix Programming Environment, Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike (shell scripting)
Programming Perl, Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz (I still use Perl for short text processing scripts)


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Five favorites of various genres:

The Star Thrower by Loren Eiseley
The Seven Mysteries Of Life by Guy Murchie
The Wisdom Of Hercules by Tom Ficek
Perfect Pitch by Nicolas Slonimsky
Confessions by Leo Tolstoy


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Five books that have greatly affected my thinking (there are more):

_The True Believer_, by Eric Hoffer. Hoffer's Montaigne-like exposition of the phenomenon of ideological obsession, whether religious, economic, racial, or Other, and its power to destroy one's ability to think and act as a rational being, and to turn one into a robot or a destructive automaton: think ISIS, Scientology, and other aberrations.

_The Nature of Things_, by Titus Lucretius Carus. The famous Roman Latin prose poem wherein Lucretius expounds upon his mentor Epicurus' philosophy--itself partly derived from Democritus--that the world can be understood by the human mind without recourse to gods or other supernatural phenomena. What a concept!

_The Challenge of Man's Future_, by Harrison Brown. This 1954 inquiry into our future prospects by respected geochemist and scientific polymath Brown was the first serious, cold-eyed look at major trends in population dynamics, fuel and mineral resource use and depletion, agricultural productivity, etc. Brown's findings have been, in some cases, superseded by more recent or sophisticated analyses, but his effort to bring reason and science into a view of humankind's (and the biosphere's) future was a trigger for many of us who read his book to learn more.

_Guns, Germs, and Steel_, by Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond--physiologist, geographer, ornithologist, ecologist, historian--wrote about the basic biological/intellectual equality of human beings and that much of the disparities that distinguished cultures and histories from one another were due to the material advantages that the Eurasian landmass offered over other areas--Africa, the Western Hemisphere. Again, a replacement of ideological/biological "theories" about racial and other inequalities, with carefully gathered facts on the ground. His analysis of which wild animals were capable of domestication is a fascinating study in itself.

_The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers_ (and other anthologies of his work). In the late 1920s-early 1930s, Robinson Jeffers was probably the most famous living poet in America, gracing the cover of TIME Magazine. He then fell into relative obscurity, disdained by academic poets and disliked for his personal though not systematic philosophy of "Inhumanism", a belief Jeffers evolved stressing that humankind needed to realize that its egomania kept it from realizing its proper place in nature. Jeffers' college training in forestry and geology led him to value the insights of science (his only brother became a respected astronomer), and the natural world became a mainspring source of his often despairing and also ecstatic poetry. His reputation has been resurrected as a key figure in the aesthetics of the environmental movement.


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## Guest (May 21, 2019)

Favorite (non-scriptural) books on religion/theology:
Stipulating scripture, here are other books I have enjoyed.

The Screwtape Letters - C. S. Lewis
Jesus the Christ - James E. Talmage
Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years - Diarmaid MacCulloch
Mere Christianity - C. S. Lewis
Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling - Richard Lyman Bushman


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## Guest (May 21, 2019)

Favorite Textbooks:

Fundamental Immunology - William Paul ed.
Fields Virology
Practical Flow Cytometry - Shapiro
Kuby Immunology
Molecular Biology of the Cell


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## philoctetes (Jun 15, 2017)

5 for the illustrations:

https://archive.org/details/acanyonvoyagena01powegoog/page/n58

https://archive.org/details/talesoffishpatro00londrich/page/n7

http://www.tubebooks.org/Books/rider_inside.pdf

https://archive.org/details/SchoenbergArnoldStructuralFunctionsOfHarmony/page/n11

https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Feynman-Diagrams-Many-Body-Problem/dp/0486670473/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=mattuck+feynman&qid=1558460159&s=gateway&sr=8-1


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

The 5 science popularization books 

Kip Thorne - Black Holes and Time Warps
Peter Coveney - The Arrow of Time : A Voyage Through Science to Solve Time's Greatest Mystery
Ed Yong - I Contain Multitudes
Daniel E. Lieberman - The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease
John Derbyshire - Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics


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