Friday, June 12, 2009

Books that stick with you

The challenge: without thinking too hard about it, just doing the first that come to mind, list the 15 books that stick with you. Only I couldn't do 15, I had to do 20, which is a more manageable number. Here's my list, in no particular order:
  • The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein.
  • The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster.
  • Hamlet, William Shakespeare.
  • In Search Of Schroedinger's Cat, John Gribbin.
  • 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, edited by Isaac Asimov.
  • The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins.
  • Stranger In A Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein.
  • Permutation City, Greg Egan.
  • Goedel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter.
  • The Mind's I, edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett.
  • The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche.
  • A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold.
  • AD&D Player's Handbook and AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.
  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll.
  • Against A Dark Background, Iain Banks.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams.

3 comments:

litlfrog said...

I know almost all those books, at least. I wanted to read Goedel, Escher, Bach, but the weight of the thing was just too daunting--I don't think I made it more than 100 pages in. I'm surprised that Nietzsche hasn't stuck with me more (though I can't say I'm disappointed about that).

Hawthorn Thistleberry said...

Bet your first Nietzsche was "Also Sprach Zarathustra," thought. That ruins a lot of people for Nietzsche, especially the Thomas Common translation.

litlfrog said...

No actually, I don't think I've read "Also Sprach Zarathustra." I'm not entirely sure what the first Nietzsche I read was, though "Beyond Good and Evil" seems likely.