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Daft

Your Favourite Book

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Holy shit, look at this old thread. Anyway, half a decade later I'm going to ask the same question (and in the interest of not having massive uber threads I thought I wouldn't dump this in the General Book Thread), what is your favourite book?

 

 

Mine is, without a shadow of a doubt, Michael Herr's Dispatches.

 

dispatches.jpg

 

It's about his experiences of his reporting in Vietnam and his prose are stunning. My copy has so many highlighted sections it looks like it's bleeding.

 

The Puritan belief that Satan dwelt in Nature could have been born here,where even on the coldest, freshest mountaintops you could small jungle and that tension between rot and gensis that all jungles give off.

 

Hunter S Thompson said "We have all spent ten years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived - but Michael Herr's Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade."

 

Don't be put off by it being a book about Vietnam or war, it is so much more.

 

But anyway, if you had to pick just one book, series are not allowed, which would it be?

 

Edit: On a side note I love reading my old posts. I sound like such a fucking retard. What's up with those fucking smilies. Goddamn hippie.

Edited by Daft

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Edit: On a side note I love reading my old posts. I sound like such a fucking retard.

 

This. What the hell was I? I don't even--

 

Anyway I suppose my favourite, in the sense that I come back to it quite a lot, is Norwegian Wood. It's not a great book, but its a pleasing enough story. It's a nice escapism book.

 

Favourite as in 'best book I've read'...don't know. I need to read more.

 

TO THE LIBRARY!

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As if that blind rage has washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, I that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

 

L'Étranger - Albert Camus

 

It taught me life is meaningless but that's ok. :)

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The Way We Live Now - a tragi-comic tale of how lust for gold blinds otherwise sensible folk and the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself is futile.

 

I do enjoy Trollope, but I think this was his finest work.

 

 

Edit: On a side note I love reading my old posts. I sound like such a fucking retard. What's up with those fucking smilies. Goddamn hippie.

 

Just.... just your old posts, yeah?:p

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I have a lot of favourite books (re-reading A Little Princess rn), but my favourite favourite book is:

 

tumblr_l7e2sle8br1qbb01z.jpg

 

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, by David Eagleman.

 

It's forty stories about death and space by a neuroscientist. It's clever and morbid but also interesting and quirky enough to not be fully depressing.

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...Any more details?

 

Just.... just your old posts, yeah?:p

 

Ouch! My 5-year+ self agrees with you.

 

tumblr_l7e2sle8br1qbb01z.jpg

 

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, by David Eagleman.

 

It's forty stories about death and space by a neuroscientist. It's clever and morbid but also interesting and quirky enough to not be fully depressing.

 

Sounds great. Just downloaded it. Sounds a little like Einstein's Dreams which I thought was great.

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Just one book? I don't think I can choose just one, so I'll pick three.

 

TheAndromedaStrain.jpgprey.jpgcover-pirates-us.jpg

 

The Andromeda Strain - A story about a deadly bacteria from a crashed satellite, wiping out a town (many of them committing suicide) and leaving two survivors - an old man and a baby. Everything is explained scientifically, with a lot of background science, and it has some great twists.

 

Prey - It's about an adaptable software program designed to mimic predators being applied to nanomachines. Although it's much better than it sounds and is very different to most "robots rise" kind of stories.

 

Pirate Latitudes - This took my by surprise. I didn't know what to expect as the novel was found on Crichton's computer after his death. It turned out to be an amazing Pirate story which mixes lots of realism with a little bit of supernatural thrown in. Very gripping story and I hope Spielberg does a good job wit the film.

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...Any more details?

Ancient Egypt. Land of the Pharaohs. A kingdom built on gold. A legend shattered by greed... Now the Valley of the Kings lies ravaged by war, drained of its lifeblood, as weak men inherit the cherished crown.

 

City of Thebes. The Festival of Osiris. Loyal subjects of the Pharaoh gather to pay homage to their leader, but Taita – a wise and formidably gifted eunuch slave – sees him only as a symbol of a kingdom's fading glory. Beside Taita stand his protégés: Lostris, daughter of Lord Intef, beautiful beyond her fourteen years; and Tanus, proud young army officer, whose father was betrayed by Lord Intef, Chief Vizier of Egypt whose power is second in wealth only to the Pharaoh...

 

Tanus and Lostris are deeply in love, but unbeknown to them, their union is an impossibility. Taita is the slave of Lord Intef. It was Intef who had Taita gelded as a young boy after he found that he had slept with a young slave girl. Together Taita, Lostris and Tanus share a dream – to restore the majesty of the Pharaoh of Pharaohs on the glittering banks of the Nile.

 

Through the voice of the incomparable Taita, Wilbur Smith draws the reader irresistibly into the daily lives of his characters: their hopes, their fears, their passions.

 

A glorious civilisation. An epic journey. A heroic battle. An enduring love. Here is a magnificent, richly imagined saga that explodes with all the drama, mystery and rage of a bygone time.

 

This book is so immersive, I think I'm going to read it again very soon.

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I'm going to start reading more books, as I've read very few. Although I'd probably say my favourite is HGTTG.

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1984.jpg

 

Bet y'all didn't see that one coming.

 

Great book. Sad truth is, it reads almost exactly like the Chinese Communist Party play book - secret detentions, children informing on parents, sudden disappearances, intense historical revisionism...

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Sad truth tiem.

 

The book I have read the most/recommended to most is The Time Traveller's Wife. Sometimes just the one l in traveller. Traveler.

 

I haven't read many books twice, and I don't really know how to define my favourite book. At least a quarter of teh books I've ever read have in some way changed my perception of life, but I can't promise that all have done it for the better.

 

I don't know any book inside-out, or anything like that.

 

But I have a few favourite plays :P Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Missed the opportunity to see gandalf and picard acting out Godot, which would've been one of the best things ever!

 

But yeh. I have a long list of influential books, but I'm not really sure what's supposed to contribute to a book being my favourite.

 

The Timetraveller's Wife it is!

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Yes. Love that book. Shame about the film.

 

Speaking of which, do you know what happened to my copy?

Edited by Shorty

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But I have a few favourite plays :P Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Missed the opportunity to see gandalf and picard acting out Godot' date=' which would've been one of the best things [i']ever[/i]

 

Godot is good - I recently read a copy which had both French and English side-by-side - but the imagery doesn't attract me as much as my favourite play, No Exit by Sartre! :yay:

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Probably this. It's an amazing book and although a little slow I learnt so much from it about how we view other people. Atticus is one of the only characters that I would actually classify as my hero. Best father ever.

 

recent-cover.jpg

 

 

 

And then there's the book I've read more than once. 3 times probably, which for someone that doesn't really read is epic. Makes me laugh from the first page and right the way through and although not as good, the film is amazingly charming.

 

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Mine remains the same as in that old thread:

 

200px-David_Mitchell_Ghostwritten.jpg

 

I don't see how it could be anything else really, but maybe one day I'll be surprised.

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