The best books you have ever read

For me there are two books that fit into this category.

The Lord of the Flies- William Golding

And

1984- George Orwell

Id have to agree with 1984.

As well as...the Area51 Series...the RedWall Series...the Lord of the Rings and Fahrenheit 451.

[Edited on 25-8-2004 by dreamlandmafia]

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
A Happy Death by Albert Camus
Unified Reality Theory: The Evolution of Existence into Experience by Steven Kaufman
Electric Jesus Corpse by Carl Meliak (sp?)

The Celestine Prophecy

Why God won't go away

Anything on the human bod

Criminal psych-and lifespan development

I forgot about the Celestine Prophecy!

Looking over at my library and in no particular order ...

Books that really had an impact on me (English only ):

1984 - Orwell

Brave New World - Huxley

Manufacturing Consent - Chomsky

Voltair's Bastards - John Ralston Saul

The Unconcious Civilisation - John Ralston Saul

Fingerprints of the Gods - Graham Hancock

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail - Baignant et al.

Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion - Weston La Barre

Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco

A Brief History of Time - Hawking

The Elegant Universe - Brian Green

No Logo - Naomi Klein

The Lucifer Principle - Howard Bloom

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman

The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middel Ages - Norman Cohn

Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians - Chomsky

The Prince - Machiavelli

The Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engles

To Have or to Be - Erich Fromm

The Crystal Sun - Robert Temple

Principles of Social Reconstruction - Bertrand Russell

The Republic of Plato

The Politics of Aristotle

ETC...I could go on!

I have about 300 books on my shelves not counting textbooks!!

No wonder I'm still single :shk:

EDIT: Forgot LOTR trilogy as well as the Otherland series by Tad Williams.

[Edited on 8/25/2004 by Gools]

Hmm....I'm not big into saying something is high art and something else is low art, but in order to prevent being accused of comparing stephen king to voltaire...These aren't in any kind of order by the way:
Literature
"As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner
"Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes
"Catch 22" by Joseph Heller
"Candide" by Francois M. Voltaire
"Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman
"The Tin Drum" by Guenter Grass
"The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka
"LOTR" Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkein
"The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum : Or How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead" by Heinrich Boell
"Life of Pi" by Yann Martel
"The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury
"Counter-Clock World" by Philip K. Dick (In case that gets censored, it's D-I-C-K, as in Dirk Diggler
I could keep going, but you get the picture...

The Rest
"Desperation" by Stephen King
"Bag of Bones" by Stephen King
"Prey" by Michael Crichton
"Sphere" by Michael Crichton
"Kitchen Confidential" by Anthony Bourdain
The whole Star Wars: Short Stories collection, multiple authors
"Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry" by Gail A. Eisnitz
All the Harry Potter books, by J.K. Rowling
This list could potentially get even longer than I was going to make the first one....lol - I think this is a fair representation tho....