What are your "50 Books That Are Books"?

Fifty books - am hard pushed to think of ten!

Confess, Paul, did you actually write this late Saturday evening or delayed posting it so we would see it early Sunday morning when we would be in various states of impairment?

good luck. i doubt if today most people have read 50 books let along remember them. The jewish terrorist [in todays language] Hecht lived in a pre tv age when people read books as today people watch tv shows. so in the modern age 50 tv shows or 50 websites from memory is likely to give the same psychological profile?

indeed look at someone's bookmarks and the cookies on their computer and you will have a good insight into the psychology and what they might think is the highest idea of the mind?

what are your 50 bookmarks from memory paul?

when do we start burning the books? If only the very rich can go to Uni there will be no need for them as we will be an nation of morons.....never mind, eh, as long as Nick thinks he's right....

BOOKS ARE WHAT THE APE CONFUSED BY LANGUAGE USED TO KILL STORYTELLING.

Now there is a lot of fuss (probably justified) about video games, and their effect on the brain/mind.

BUT WHAT OF 'ALPHA-MALE' TV AT THE CORE OF THE 'FAMILY' GROUP?

When TV entered our homes, decades ago, did anyone consider it might be the new Snake of Eden? What part of the Ape does TV ANGER, VIOLENCE, PORN, AVARICE, ENVY, BULLYING, DEGRADATION and SPITE etc talk DIRECTLY to? I suggest the term 'subliminal' is relevant. But we are long gone from 'The Garden' and damnation gathers pace.

I think I'll try to lose myself in a book . . .

I think you should probably have made it ten for this abbreviated medium. I'll have a go later, however.

... I say later, but anything to do with books hooks me. You swine! Off the top of my head, so I got all the way through to fifty before even getting close to politics. Couldn't I have 75?!

Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak
The Tiger Who Came To Tea - Judith Kerr
The Twits - Roald Dahl
Charlotte's Web - EB White
Stig of the Dump - Clive King
Just So Stories - Rudyard Kipling
When the Wind Blows - Raymond Briggs
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats - TS Eliot
The Sword in the Stone - TH White
The Road of Bones - Anne Fine
Call of the Wild - Jack London
Little House in the Big Woods - Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Owl Service - Alan Garner
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
A Kestrel for a Knave - Barry Hines
The Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Tristram Shandy - Lawrence Sterne
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
The Stranger - Albert Camus
Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Leopard - Lampedusa
Over Milk Wood - Dylan Thomas
All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Remarque
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
Fup - Jim Dodge
Owl Creek Bridge - Ambrose Pierce
The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
Silent Spring - Rachel Carson
Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
Empire of the Sun - J G Ballard
The Double Helix - James Watson
Aspects of the Novel - EM Forster
Origin of Species - Charles Dickens
A Time for Machetes - Jean Hatzfeld

"Over Milk Wood" - sigh @ me. "Charles Dickens" - sigh @ me. Typing in the box is not all it's cracked up to be, dontchaknow.

50 films would work too.

Top 50, off the top of my head, although I suspect this is just Paul's ploy to boost his amazon wishlist:

1. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
2. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
3. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
4. Don Quixote - Cervantes
5. The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
6. Don Carlos - Schiller
7. Collected Stories - ETA Hoffmann
8. Germinal - Emile Zola
9. Cousine Bette - Balzac
10. Measuring the World - Daniel Kehlmann
11. Into the Silent Land - Paul Broks
12. The Last Samurai - Helen deWitt
13. Under the Frog - Tibor Fischer
14. Troubles - JG Farrell
15. Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman
16. Liquidation - Imre Kertesz
17. Collected Stories - Maupassant
18. Sentimental Education - Gustave Flaubert
19. The Lord Chandos Letter - Hugo von Hoffmanstahl
20. The Soccer War - Ryszard Kapuscinski
21. Hopeful Monsters - Nicholas Mosley
22. Fiasco - Thomas E Ricks
23. Les Liaisons Dangereuses - Laclos
24. The Man Who Was Thursday - GK Chesterton
25. Babbitt - Sinclair Lewis
26. The Great Crash 1929 - JK Galbraith
27. Independent People - Halldor Laxness
28. Stalingrad - Anthony Beevor
29. The Mortdecai Triology - Kyril Bonfiglioli
30. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
31. Austerlitz - WG Sebald
32. Scarlet and Black - Stendhal
33. Eastern Approaches - Fitzroy Maclean
34. Between Silk and Cyanide - Leo Marks
35. Moby Dick - Hermann Melville
36. Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm
37. Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer
38. Joe Gould's Secret - Joseph Mitchell
39. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
40. The Conscience of a Liberal - Paul Krugman
41. If This is a Man - Primo Levi
42. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa
43. Petersburg - Andrei Biely
44. Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco
45. Maus - Art Speigelman
46. Perfume - Patrick Suskind
47. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
48. An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears
49. The Royal Game - Stefan Zweig
50. Mr Mee - Andrew Crumey

Sunday lunch prep glass of wine 50 books -bliss
Catcher in the Rye John Salinger
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dombey & Son Charles Dickens
Grub Street George Gissing
Hamlet William Shakespeare
Dolls House Henrik Ibsen
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K dick
Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
The Magus John Fowles
Red Harvest Dasheill Hammet
Copenhagen Michael Fryan
A Question of Attribution Alan Bennett
Birthday Letters Ted Hughes
Secret Rapture Donna Tartt
Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak
Collected Stories Dorothy Parker
Collected Stories Saki
War & Peace Tolstoy
Ragged Trousered Philanthropist Robert Tressell
Pride & Prejudice Jane Austen
Animal Farm George Orwell
The Cherry Orchard Chekov
Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh
English History 1914-45 AJP Taylor
Unreliable Memoirs Clive James
Diaries Evelyn Waugh
Waldon Henry Thoreau
Second World War Churchill
Essays Montaigne
God Delusion Richard Dawkins
History of Art Eric Gombrich
Wealth of Nations Adam Smith
Essays George Orwell
The Prince Machiavelli
Greek Myths Robert Graves
What The Dog Saw Malcolm Gladwell
Edward Murrow Sperber
Advantage of Nations Michael Porter
Decline of The Roman Empire Gibbon
Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey
Oscar Wilde Richard Ellman
The Peoples’ War Calder
Adolf Hitler (Hubris) Ian Kershaw
Age of Empires Eric Hobsbawn
Brewers Phrase & Fable
Oxford Book of Quotations
Cambridge book of Literature
Chambers Dictionary
King James Bible

Good idea - a pleasant diversion! This is a list from various times in my life, which i think is the only way to do an 'all time' list :-)

In order of memory:
1. Q - Luther Blisset / Wu Ming (a must)
2. Wobblies & Zapatistas - Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubjac (sic - sorry andrej, i am doing this from memory!)
3. Football in Sun and Sand (can't remember)
4. All Played Out (pete someone? oh dear)
5. Bevan - Michael Foot
6. Throne of Kings - George A A Martin
7. Hyperion - Dan Simmons
8. This Bloody Mary is the last thing i own (*)
9. The Wizard of the Pigeons (*)
10. Great Apes - Will Self
11. Manituana - Wu Ming
12. Goalkeepers are Different - Brian Glanville
13. Our Word is our Weapon - Marcos (and Don Durrito)
14. GB84 - David Peace
15. The Damned United - David Peace
16. Prison Diaries - Gramsci
17. Facing the Enemy - Skirtl (sic?)
18. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain - Open the chest (turn to page 400)
19. Gyles Brandreths Bumper Book of Jokes (still use a few, 30 years later)
20. The Night of the Owl - Sciascia
21. Life: A users manual - Perec
22. name of the rose - umberto eco.
23.

God, my memory is so bad! I'm going to have to retired hurt i'm afraid, or i'm going to start stealing from other people's lists!

So: post your 50 book comments! Uh, okay, I'll give it a try, but I don't think I'm going to get close.
"The Earth Chronicles" by Zechariah Sitchin:
The 12 th Planet,
The Stariway to Heaven,
The Wars of Gods and Men,
The Lost Realms,
When Time Began,
The Cosmic Code and his companion books:
Genesis Revisited,
Divine Encounters,
The Lost Book of Enki
Since then, he has also introduced and edited:
Of Heaven and Earth.
I'm afraid that aside from the Earth Chronicles, I can't think of more titles because I do not read fiction. I am a great fan of ancient history (well before Rome or Greece) and the stark, naked truth about humankind's origins. I tend to remember more facts than titles, except for "The Earth Chronicles", which I'm in the process of re-reading.
But I want to thank you for allowing me the space to pay tribute to a great author, great researcher, and amazing thinker on humankind's origins.
Zecharia Sitchin passed on October 9, 2010. His passing unfortunately was more like a whisper than a bang; yet I believe that this man understood more about humankind's origin than any other person who ever lived.
Maybe Christmas Eve is a great time to make a start on humankind's real beginnings.

Keep going people: if we can't come up with 50 Mr Steve Jobs and also Mr Jeff Bezos are in trouble, because the modern equivalent of Ben Hecht's bookshelf is the Kindle/iPad and I think they are counting on us to buy more than a few books on these platforms.

What I've found working on mine, in this memory based way, is I keep coming up with things I read as a young person. Mine - to be revealed later - is, like Hecht's a product of its time.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

[I have a Kindle but am sulking that there's no way to buy a Kindle book for someone else, or to lend them mine.]

Moby Dick - Melville
A Confederacy of Dunces - O'Toole
Catch 22 - Heller
Collected Short Stories - Flannery O'connor
The Outsider - Camus

Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
Reader's Block - Markson
Vanishing Point - Markson
Big Sleep - Chandler
In Cold Blood - Capote

Billy Bud Sailor - Melville
Common Sense - Paine
Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace
Witches -Dahl
Red Harvest - Hammet

His Dark Materials - Pullman
I, Claudius - Graves
Darkness at Noon - Koestler
1984 - Orwell
Homage to Catalonia - Orwell

Selfish Gene - Dawkins
Ballard of Sad Cafe - McCullers
The Prince - Machiavelli
Dubliners - Joyce
Bear versus Shark - Bachelder

Moneyball - Lewis
Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
Breathing Underwater - Darrieusecq
Loving Sabotage - Nothomb

American Slavery - Kolchin
Roast Chicken and other stories - Hopkinson
Gun Germs and Steel - Diamond
The Unfortunates - Johnson
Ballard of Dingus McGee - Markson

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families - Gourevitch
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail - Thompson
Slaughterhouse 5 - Vonnegut
A Confederate General From Big Sur - Brautigan
Tristram Shandy - Sterne

Terror and Liberalism - Berman
Scoop! - Waugh
Our Man in Havana - Greene
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - Le Carre
Pride & Prejudice - Austen

Fall of Baghdad - Anderson
Naive, Super - Erland
The Progressive Dilema - Marquand
The Damned Utd - Peace
The Road - McCarthy

These are in no order of merit; most are in my personal library. Some people talk of hoarding gold and silver, but I have deliberately built up a large collection of books, as insurance against the possible demise of civilisation as we know it. My list contains volumes which I might want to take on my personal Ark if there were another flood. Hence I had to leave out some favourites: eg I chose Priestley's English Journey rather that Orwell's '...Wigan Pier'), and I allowed no more than two from any author.

1. The Hobbit - J R R Tolkien.
2. Farmer Giles of Ham - ditto.
3. The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling.
4. Just So Stories - ditto.
5. Straight and Crooked Thinking - Robert Thoulless.
6. Eastern Approaches - Fitzroy Maclean.
7. The King James Bible.
8. The life and times of Muhammad - Sir JB Glubb.
9. The Lost Centuries - ditto.
10. Cromwell - Our Chief of Men - Antonia Frazer
11. The Sleepwalkers - Arthur Koestler.
12. The Age Of Uncertainty - JK Galbraith
13. The Importance Of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde.
14. Pygmalion - GB Shaw
15. The Good Companions - JB Priestley
16. English Journey - ditto.
17. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein.
18. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress - ditto.
19. 2010: Odyssey Two - Arthur C Clarke
20. Pears Cyclopedia
21. The Chrysalids - John Wyndham
22. The Day Of The Triffids - ditto
23. The Master And Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov.
24. The White Guard - ditto
25. And Quiet Flows The Don - Mikhail Sholokhov.
26. Dr Zhivago - Boris Pasternak.
27. War And Peace - Leo Tolstoy.
28. Foundation Trilogy - Isaac Asimov.
29. Caves Of Steel - ditto.
30. Maskerade - Terry Pratchett.
31. The Last Hero - ditto.
32. A Writer's Notebook - W. Somerset Maugham.
33. Dune - Frank Herbert.
34. Mist Over Pendle - Robert Neill.
35. Lilliburlerro - ditto.
36. Caesar - Colleen Mc Cullough.
37. Spartacus - Howard Fast.
38. Eyes Of Horus - Joan Grant.
39. Henry Treece - The Green Man
40. The Economic Consequences of The Peace - JM Keynes
41. Archetypes And The Collective Unconscious - CG Jung.
42. Songs Of Innocence And Experience - William Blake.
43. The Graphic Work - MC Escher.
44. Mathematics For The Million - Lancelot Hogben.
45. Founding Fathers - Alfred Duggan.
46. I Claudius - Robert Graves.
47. Funeral Games - Mary Renault.
48. The Stranger From The Sea - Winston Graham.
49. The Complete Works - William Shakespeare
50. Decline And Fall - Evelyn Waugh.

Aargh! I left Shogun off! - Dump Day of the Triffids!

That's tougher than you'd've that it would be.

If, on the assumption that 50 individual books won't get more than a single nomination and so some of your final fifty will be there with just the one vote, you cold include Reader's Block by David Markson, you'll have made the list immeasurably better. He died this year and like Melville a century before he towered over his American contemporaries with minimal recognition.

The Origin of Species, Darwin
Frontiers of Astronomy, Hoyle
Dreams of a Final Theory, Weinberg
The Extended Phenotyple, Dawkins
The Selfish Gene, Dawkins
The Dinosaur Heresies, Bakker
Histories, Herodotus
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon
The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein
Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
Candide, Voltaire
Gulliver's Travels, Swift
Collected Works, Shakespeare
Complete Poems, 1909-65, T S Eliot
The Metaphysical Poets, Helen Gardner
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Ulysses, James Joyce
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
The Collected Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
The Great Crash 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith (not enough people read!)
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
The Fight, Norman Mailer

After that it gets hard. What to leave out gets tougher. I'd like to say, "Green Eggs and Ham" though I don't actually own it, and throw in a bio of Einstein (probably "Subtle is the Lord") as an example of a good bloke, and one of Nixon (perhaps "Nixon and Kissinger" by Robert Dallek) for an example of the banality of evil men.

Paul,and others.

Between us we could probably come up with a really good thousand.

@21 Have you read Banesh Hoffman's bio of Einstein? If we had a "book Ark", I would certainly include Richard Feynman's autobiography too.

I'm glad to see that others have included Koestler and Fitzroy Maclean.

1) Name of the Rose - Eco
2) Foucault's Pendulum - Ec0
3) Bardolino - Eco
4) LOrd of the Flies - Golding
5) The Beach - Garland
6) Catch 22 - Heller
7) Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
8) Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
9) Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
10) Jupiters Travels - Simon
11) Scoop - waugh
12) Barrows Boys - flemming
13) South - Shackleton
14) The white Spider - herrer
15) Dune -Herbert
16 Complicity - Banks
17) Espedair St - Banks
18) The Bridge - Banks
19) The Wasp Factory - Banks
20) Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks - Brookmeyer
21) My Family and other Animals - Durrel
23) Rommel - Gunner Who - Milligan ( and the rest of the trilogy)
24) The Kontiki expidition - Heyerdahl
25) The LOng Way - Moitessier
26) The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst - Tomalin
27) The Rebel - Camus
28) The Plague - Camus
30)Gravity's Rainbow - Pynchon
31) The easy care Garden Expert - Hessayon
32) The crying of Lot 49 - Pynchon
33) Nausea - Satre
34)Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Pirsig
35) Thousand and one Arabian Nights - Classic
36) Greek Myths - R. Graves collected 1&2
37) Chocolat - Harris
38) The Life of Pi - Martel
39) End of Mr Y - Scarlett
40) Twelfth Night - Shakespeare
41) Julius Caesare - Shakespeare
42) A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich-Solzenisyn
43) Das Boot - Bucheim
44) Tractatus -LOgico- Philosophicus Wittgenstein
45) Philosophical Investigations - Wittgenstein
46) Phaedrus -Plato
47) Mirror of Nature - Rorty
48) Contingency Irony Solidarity - Rorty
49) Serendipities : Language and Lunacy - Eco
50) Landrover Workshop Manual - Haynes

unedited and splurged out quickly !

Ulysses - Joyce
The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
War and Peace - Tolstoy
Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
Alcools - Appolinaire
The Birthday Letters - Ted Hughes
Life and Fate - Vassily Grossman
Sabbath's Theatre - Philip Roth
The Time of our Singing - Richard Powers
At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill
Destiny - Tim Parks
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Madame Bovary - Flaubert
A Sentimental Education - Flaubert
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Gibbon
1982 Janine - Alasdair Gray
Dubliners - Joyce
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu - Proust
Tolstoy - Henri Troyat
Everyman - Philip Roth
The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Gulag Archipelago - Solzhenitsyn
Cancer Ward - Solzhenitsyn
Under Milk Wood - Dylan Thomas
The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
The Trial - Kafka
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Citizens - Simon Schama
A People's Tragedy - Orlando Figes
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Short stories of Arthur Schnitzler
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
Crash - JG Ballard
20,000 Streets Under the Sky - Patrick Hamilton
Living/Loving/Party Going - Henry Green
Platform - Michel Houllebecq
The Scarlet Petal and the White - Michel Faber
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
Les Fleurs du Mal - Baudelaire
Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
Molesworth - Geoffrey Willans
Just William - Richmal Crompton
Narnia novels - CS Lewis
Paradise Lost - Milton
Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
Accordion Crimes - Annie Proulx

I could go on - not looking at your bookshelves makes it difficult to remember less obvious choices - don't think I could name 50 TV shows or websites that meant anything to me though...

Very sorry about the spelling.

1)The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark – Jill Tomlinson
2)The Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde
3)The Quangle Wangle's Hat – Edward Lear
4)Animal Farm - Orwell
5)The Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
6)The Hobbit - Tolkien
7)Pale Fire – Nabakov
8)Molloy – Samuel Beckett
9)Murphy – Samuel Beckett
10)Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
11)The Foundation Pit – Platonov
12)Diary of a madman and other collected short stories – Gogol
13)Dead Souls – Gogol
14)Notes from Underground – Dostoevsky
15)Crime and Punishment – Dostoevsky
16)Mysteries – Knut Hamsun
17)Victoria – Knut Hamsun
18)Ulysses – James Joyce
19)The Trial – Kafka
20)Recovery – John Berryman
21)The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
22)Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
23)War and Piece – Leo Tolstoy
24)Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
25)Trout Fishing in America – Richard Brautigan
26)In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
27)The Fall – Albert Camus
28)Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
29)The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reisse – Jose Saramago
30)The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
31)Germinal – Zola
32)Krapp's Last Tape – Samuel Beckett
33)The Outsider – Albert Camus
34)The Leopard – Tomassi De Lampedusa
35)The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
36)Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
37)A Day in the life of someone somethingovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
38)The Pillars of the Community – Henrik Ibsen
39)The Insect Societies – E O Wilson
40)Pan – Knut Hamsun
41)The Dark Materials thing – Phillip Pullman
42)All of the Disc World books – Terry Pratchett
43)The Diary of Adrian Mole – Sue Townsend
44)Candide – Voltaire
45)Aesop's Fables – Aesop
46)The Ilyiad – Homer
47)The Odyssey – Homer
48)First Love and other novellas – Samuel Beckett
49)Nausea – Sartre
50)Rhinoceros – Eugene Ionescu

This is a great thread. I find a lot of the posts on here (and of course the blog itself) very interesting, even if I disagree with many! Threads like this make it one of my favourite blogs. That coupled with the fact that I nearly always choose fiction based on recommendations makes this the perfect thread.

I would add that I'm a kindle owner and absolutely love it. However, my reading list is now so long if I add one of these to the end I'll probably start it in 2020.

I recently read a speed-reading book by Buzan. I have an average reading speed so there is plenty of room for improvement but I'm not convinced speed reading will leave fiction as enjoyable. Any thoughts from our well-read posters?

1 Treasure Island: Stevenson
2 The Fall: Camus
3 Moby Dick: Melville
4 Poems: Du Fu
5 The Outlaw Josey Wales: Forrest Carter
6 Socialism Utopian and Scientific: Engels
7 Crash: Ballard
8 The Remains of the Day: Ishiguro
9 Dombey and Son: Dickens
10 Heart of Darkness: Conrad
11 The Secret Agent: Conrad
12 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: Sillitoe
13 Dune: Herbert
14 The Communist Manifesto: Marx and Engels
15 Silas Marner: Eliot
16 The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: Tressell
17 Private Dancer: Leather
18 Rough Guide to South East Asia: Rough Guides
19 The Sociological Perspective: Burger
20 Ways of Seeing: Berger
21 1984: Orwell
22 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Le Carre
23 Yardie: Headley
24 Pride and Prejudice: Austen
25 My Life: Trotsky *
26 Candide: Voltaire
27 Pele: Pele
28 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Kesey
29 Call of the Wild: London
30 Jaws: Benchley
31 The Beach: Garland
32 To Kill a Mockingbird: Lee
33 Boot Boys: Allen
34 The Boy Looked at Johnny: Parsons / Burchill
35 The Catcher in the Rye: Salinger
36 The Plague: Camus
37 In Cold Blood: Capote
38 Williwaw: Vidal
39 Persuasion: Austen
40 The Jungle Book: Kipling
41 The Satanic Verses: Rushdie *
42 A Clockwork Orange: Burgess
43 A Short History of Nearly Everything: Bryson
44 The Silence of the Lambs: Harris
45 Wheels of Terror: Hassell
46 Legion of the Damned: Hassell
46 The Making of the English Working Class: Thompson
47 The Electric Kool – Aid Acid Test: Wolfe
48 The Fan Man: Kotzwinkle
49 A Journal of the Plague Year: Defoe
50 Three Men in A Boat; Jerome
*These are the Bookends.

Forgot so many, but i've had my turn. The one i can't leave out is "El Diego", maradonna's autobiography. Basically, he comes across as a nice Alan Partridge.

I'd need to get my brother on for the rest, we share different parts of one cultural memory.

Can't you link 2 kindles if you register them as having the same owner? I was reading something about it in the 10,000 page support manual the other day (NOT in my top 50)

Can't believe I forgot to include Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano - should be in my top 10, let alone 50.

Crikey Paul you do set us some unusual homework.
Thought about this during a glorious walk this afternoon, so almost keeping to the key rule.
1 A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
2 Down Under - Bill Bryson
3 Solider - Mike Jackson
4 Storm - Vince Cable
5 The Foxes of Harrow - Frank Yearby
6 Water Babies - Charles Kingsley
7 The Snow Goose - Paul Gallico
8 English Dictionary - Oxford Press
9 Essential France AA
10 Brittany AA
11 New Zealand - Lonely Planet
12 France - Lonely Planet
13 Robinson Crusoe - Danial Defoe
14 Black Beauty - Anna Sewell
15 The Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela
16 A Year in Provence - Peter Mayle
17 Lady Chatterleys Lover - D H Lawrence (banned by school and parents in the 50s, so essential to obtain and the only sex education my class got)
18 Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
19 Bible - Anon
20 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ronal Dahl
21 The Hobbit - J R Tolkien
22 Just so Stories - Ruyard Kipling
23 Tale of Two Horses - Aime Tschiffely (sorry had to research spelling)
24 Moorland Mousie - Golden Gorse
25 Taylor of Gloucester - Beatrix Potter
I could list another 25 off the top of my head, but all would be ones I faied to appreciate eg Dickens, Shakespeare, Austen.
Most of the bookie wookies I have read over the last few years have failed to make any lasting impression on my little grey cells.

One of the late night programmes on Fivelive did the same thing over the course of this year.

Each week they would discuss the top books to have on your book shelf but, bizarrely, they were obsessed with works of fiction and dismissed any non-fiction work.

How you can have a list of the top 50 books and have no non-fiction in it staggers me - what about an Atlas? What about the Concise Oxford English dictionary? You have no words without a dictionary and no books without words.

Other posters have suggested some excellent works of fiction, although I am yet to see 'The Call of the Wild', 'Last of the Mohicans' or 'A Christmas Carol' amongst the lists.

But I think it is lazy, and indeed easy, to simply jot down a list of 50 books supposedly on your book-shelf. How many actually have those books? How many have actually read those books if they do indeed have them?

A BBC newsreader friend is regularly ordering 7 or 8 books per month from Amazon simply to display around the house - yet never gets around to opening them let alone reading them.

Far more difficult in my mind to jot down just one single book and have to give a compelling reason as to why you consider it important. Those who have posted their 50 books above - could they actually narrow their lists down to just one book and give the reason why they feel it should be on a list of top books?

I will go back to my original argument about works of non-fiction.

I have, for several years, been an admirer of the hospice pioneer Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, of the work she did in the concentration camps at the end of World War Two, of the work she has done in the field of hospices and in the work she has done on death and the dying - a subject that most of us refuse to confront.

Her book, 'Life Lessons: How Our Morality Can Teach Us About Life and Living', itself written at a time when Elisabeth was herself coming to the end of her life, is one of the most remarkable, life-affirming and life-changing works I have ever read. Unlike the wonderful works of fiction already listed it deals with real people living real lives facing real death.

For this reason, because I believe that everyone would benefit from reading it, I nominate:

Life Lessons: How Our Morality Can Teach Us About Life and Living by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

only allowed 50 books in a library from memory?

then
Homer
Complete Shakespeare
Complete Plato
Complete Aristotle
Complete Proclus
Plotinus
Complete Psuedo Dionysus [10 Letters etc]
Damascius On First Principles
Taming the Tiger https://www.samyeling.org/index/taming-the-tiger
Cicero On Friendship https://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_cicero_deamic.htm
Mathnawi
Upanishads
Lao Tzu
Sun Tzu
Philosophical Midwifery by Pierre Grimes
Diary of a Nobody
Scoop
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Complete Dictionary/Thesaurus
World Atlas.

[unless they come as single complete volumes its now way over 50]

31

i didn't see your post until i posted mine. :) i did think it a sad day for shakespeare.

these are books i not only read but have most of them although some of the classics are printouts. others, like scoop and diary of a nobody, are talking books

a new translation of Damascius On First Principles is being discussed here

https://academyofplatonicstudies.com/video

he takes the ineffable as the highest principle.

(1) American Tabloid - Elroy
(2) The Third Policeman - O'Brien
(3 The Big Sleep - Chandler
(4) The Elements of Typographic Style - Bringhurst
(5) The Dubliners - Joyce
(6) How to Talk Dirty and Influence People - Bruce
(7) Oliver Twist - Dickens
(8) Great Expectations - Dickens
(9) The Assistant - Malamud
(10) At Swim Two Birds - O'Brien
(11) Seize the Day - Below
(12) My Dark Places - Elroy
(13) The Playboy of the Western World - Synge
(14) The Butcher Boy - McCabe
(15) Farewell My Lovely - Chandler
(16) Remains of the Day - Ishiguro
(17) The Hustler - Tevis
(18) Exotica - Toop
(19) The Third Man - Greene
(20) Paddy's Lament - Gallegher
(21) Humbolt's Gift - Below
(22) A Time of Gifts - Leigh Fermor
(23) The Outsider - Camus
(24) Complete Prose - Woddy Allen
(25) Classic Italian Cookbook - Hazan
(26) Simple French Food - Olney
(27) The Man who ate Everything - Steingarten
(28) The Handmade Loaf - Lepard
(29) Miles Davis - Davis
(30) The Jazz Life - Hentoff

31, Tawse

Always enjoy reading your posts, and I'll definitely be seeking out your recommendation, but you're sounding a bit cynical tonight. I do solmenly swear that I've read every single one of the books on my list, and they've all had a profound effect on me in one way or another. Even the Edward Lear one still really makes me laugh, although I always have to google it if I want to read it since I don't own it anymore. If I was going to recommend one I'd have to say Notes from Underground. I can't explain how in awe I am of the mind that created that book.

29, I acquired a taste for Mezcal after that book that got totally out of hand.

@30 Most Shakespeare is better heard than read. My parents were active in the Middlesbrough Little Theatre, and my father (and ex repertory company actor) used to walk about the house reciting. So having seen and heard a fair amount of Bard, if I do read it, I sort of hear it too! :-)

@31 I have read every single book on my list, (though only about half of the Bible and Complete works of Shakespeare). I have a personal library of about 1000; about 50% of which is non-fiction, and have read many more from the public library in the past. In recent years I've bought a fair few out-of print books sold off by libraries because they were getting a little worn, or unfashionable. Ironically, I had to pay quite alot for some of these library "rejects", like Glubb's books on Arabic History.

I put Pear's Cyclopedia on the list, because it crams a lot of good stuff, including maps, into a single volume; though I do have electronic Britannica and two old sets of encyclopediae as well.

If I had to narrow down to one, it would be Straight and Crooked Thinking by Robert Thoulless. This book changed my life. Here is my review on Amazon about from 2002: I eventually got another second hand copy from an online bookshop.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/0330241273/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

STOP PRESS! At long last it's being republished - due out April next year!!

37,

Maybe a good alternative ? and readily available

A Rule Book for Arguments - Weston :

https://www.amazon.com/Rulebook-Arguments-Anthony-Weston/dp/0872201562

Short and Sweet too !

Thanks for this Paul, reading through the various lists it was like bumping into forgotten friends in the street. There are some great books in the lists, many of which I share and just seeing their names again illicited strong emotions of various kinds.

I am not sure if I willl get to 50 but here goes, please forgive my poor spelling.

1) The Catcher in the rye
2) The seven pillars of wisdom (TE lawrence)
3) Out of Africa - Issac Dinesson
4) Stranger in a strange land - Azimov
5) Wuthering heights
6) The hitch hikers guide to the galaxy
7) The hitch hikers guide to Europe (circa 1986 version)
8) Zen and the Art of motorcycle Maintenance
9) Lila an enquiry into morals
10) The tao of Lau Tsu
11) Long Walk to Freedom (Mandela)
12) Cosmos - carl Sagan
13) Dune - Herbert
14) The Heart of the matter - Graham green
15) The Illiad
16) The Trial
17) The Biggles books (probably considered too non pc to print for kids now)
18)Fear and Loathing in las vegas
19) The quiet American - green
20) Tricks of the Mind - Derren Brown
21) The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
22) 1984
23) Picture of Dorian Grey
24) Tess of Deubervills - hardy
25)Various books on quantum theory and relativity - but none stand out

I really struggled to get to 25 from memory. Not sure If I would want to dilute the above list further by thinking about it too much so here it stands at 25.

How about an 'Anti' book list (books you read under duress because you thought you would get something out of it and wish you hadn't bothered).

Here is my starter for a bit of fun

1) Ullyses - what was all that about ?
2) A brief History of time (ditto above)
3)Thus spake zarathustra - - clever but just too wierd
4)Shakespear (I enjoy the plays greatly but to read them raw is too much like learning another language now)
5)Anything by Charles Dickens .. i just never 'got' him for some reason despite trying a few times.

A great and welcome distraction this, thanks Paul.

Jericoa.

@38 Certainly looks complementary. :-)

@29 I keep on having afterthoughts too. I need at least 100 books, not 50! For example how could I forget Gore Vidal? In particular, his books Julian, Lincoln, 1876, The Smithsonian Institution, inspired me to considerable research of my own on the subjects and main protagonists.

I wasn't having a go at anyone people - just throwing my tuppence in.

Are we allowed to include Erotica? Some of the finest works of literature have been works of Erotica.

'The Story of O' is so over-rated in my personal opinion. Perhaps it loses something in translation?

Anne Rice, when she is not writing about vampires, has penned some of the finest modern-day stuff to get you all hot and bothered. But, of course, no man should be at home without that Victorian classic, 'A Man and his Maid', on his bookshelf.

I wonder what chances I have of anything on my bookshelf making the final list?

Hmmm...

A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens
Across the Barricades (from school, remember?)
All the President's Men Bernstein and Woodward
An Evil Cradling Brian Keenan
Around The World in Eighty Days Jules Verne
Beyond Chutzpa Finkelstein
Biko Donald Woods
Biochemistry - Stryer
Blood River Butcher
Bury the Chains Adam Hockschild (I think)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Dahl
Climbing Mount Improbable Dawkins
Collapse Jared Diamond
Complete Poems and Songs of Rabbie Burns
Disarmed and Dangerous, about the Berrigans
Fairy Tales Hans Christian Andersen
Flat Earth News
Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Freedom Evolves Daniel C Dennett
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Hamlet William Shakespeare
In the Shadow of Man Jane Goodall
Liberty in the Age of Terror A C Grayling
Life On Earth David Attenborough
Life Stories David Attenborough
Little Dorrit Charles Dickens
Little Women Louisa M Alcott
Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell
Roots Alex Haley
Scottish Journey Edwin Muir
Season of Blood Fergal Keane - you really want to put this down because the subject is so awful and so real (I remember so well) and we did nothing but it is such a well written book, you don't put it down, you try to hide from what your are reading as your heart breaks with horror and shame
Tell Me No Lies John Pilger
The Demon-Haunted World Carl Sagan
The Great War for Civilisation Fisk
The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams
The Last of the Mohicans
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy J. R. R. Tolkien
The Loved One Evelyn Waugh
The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire Arundati Roy
The Origin of Species Charles Darwin
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
The Secret Seven Adventure Enid Blyton
The Stand Stephen King
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families Philip (don't remember his surname)
Wild Swans

@ 31 - I've read all the books on my list - I do wonder why anyone would bother typing out a list books they haven't read (and am sure they haven't)! - and I included Call of the Wild. Ner!

@ 38 - I spent many happy hours as a child looking at my mother's Pears Cyclopaedia. I recall being unduly fascinated by the order of precedence. The swottish child's Princess Barbie, perhaps?!

@41 Good Point about the erotica, though the lady @30 mentioned Lady Chatterley. Can anyone who has read it ever forget Leslie Thomas' "Virgin Soldiers"? You also reminded me that my mother gave me an illustrated Folio edition of Ovid's "Art Of Love". That resides on the top shelf of its bookcase to keep it away from children. :-)

@39 Jericoa - several books mentioned here are wholly or partly on my "anti" list, even though I have some of them. I may come back on that one!

Is this a substitute for what is going on in the world?

Is this it till after Christmas?

Does this mean 'no reporting' taking the place of the usual 'pathetic, elitist, responsibility-dodging, miss-the-point and spew govt propaganda' BBC reporting that we get (and pay for) the rest of the year?

Just so's I know

this is a great game

what i jus' flicked through, same as your , recognized (i'm using spellin' ck too) jus' the same old same old.

honest

when i's a kid me parents caught me reading something about 3 score and 10, don't know that just came to me. there was some rabble rousing song. No what it was, was, well ! can't remember. They seemed to think that i 'did'nt know. llad, din't still don't

Love this game

enit blighton . famous five. neah. what tis the first thing i read. ! member me mah. lighting the fire with , well using lastnights newpaper to creat a draghtf... she quoted from an article 'bout holographs. only 'member 'cause the thing caught fire.

for me at that time seemed she believed in fakurs 3D, wow.

fifty books ye want fifty books

me big sister never brought back some book and i thought we's banned from all public libraries for ever. Me mah said she could read before she went to school. she was left handed but ye wrote with the right.

Maybe it was lady chaterlys lover, she read when her parents' betters baned.

Betty byrne walked down the lane, and rubber plastic from china gave off a poision

fifty ways to kill yer liver

she told me to write with me left hand, times had changed. by third grade ( iff'n yr with. 10 yr's old ) some gad damm sadist arrived in the class, we better get our 20 times tables together.

shame shame shame

this goes on today. what do they call it now. some italian city name. zizek know's it.

how many are we upto now !

Some political ones:

The Rights on Man – Tom Paine
Capital – Karl Marx
Value, Price, and Profit - Karl Marx
Socialism: Utopian & Scientific - Engels
Reform or Revolution - Rosa Luxemburg
The Accumulation of Capital – Rosa Luxemburg
The State & Revolution – Lenin
Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
Limits to Capital – David Harvey
The End of Oil – Paul Roberts
The Enemy of Nature – Joel Kovel
The Great War for Civilisation – Robert Fisk

somebody somebody pls ck this out...

if on 07 december 1938 naom chomsky gets an almanak in birthday present from granny in NYC. if this happens is there any referance to Ben Hecht there.

zczc

de me

subject: naom chomsky


imagine it is 07 dec 1938

some kid gets an almanac, it is his birthday : cant find the shit meself

does it have a reference to Ben Hecht



nnnn

This is so dated. Surely the list should be along the lines of:

1) Call of Duty
2) Call of Duty: United Offensive
3) Call of Duty 2
4) Call of Duty 3, 4, 5, 6.... 9 million
5) Doom
6) Doom II
7) Duke Nuke'Em
8) Quake
9) Quake II
10) Quake III to XII
11) World of Warcraft
12) Pacman
13) Donkey Kong
14)
15)
16) The Gamers Guide to Divorce
17) Dummies Guide to 'Why did she leave me?'

I had to get to post 30 - ruralwoman - to find A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson which should be on every list. Also no mention of Micheo Kaku but Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins did get a brief mention. I am astonished that science and technology seems to virtually ignored. Everything around us is science, including the beginning of the multiverse - John Gribbin, Michoe Kaku.

Thanks for the time-wasting diversion Paul, I should stop at 15...
1. Fictions - Borges
2. The Aleph - Borges
3. The Idiot - Dostoevsky
4. Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
5. Philosophical Investigations - Wittgenstein
6. Master and the margarita - Bulgakov
7. Small is beautiful - Schumacher
8. The Castle - Kafka
9. The Trial - Kafka
10. Economic philosophy - Robinson
11. Shock doctrine - Klein
12. Feast of the goat - Llosa
13. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis - Bassani
14. Zeno's Conscience - Svevo
15. The heart of darkness - Conrad

By the way.. for anyone who has a Kindle or other e-book reader, if you didn't know you don't have to pay for books that are past copyright.

Can download many classics for free here:
https://manybooks.net/

Cracking Christmas present Paul (more like a bumper bag that gets bigger with each post), and I was only going to get you a tie :)

Fifty books is not enough and fifty authors isn't either.

If Jobs wants to leave a legacy then he could create a modern Alexandrian Library, accessible at low cost to every person on the planet, I want to see every book in there (even the ones I will never read)

Ben, speed read company statements, press releases and user manuals, noting the relevent details.

An author (of both fiction and non-fiction) creates a rich world with words that you immerse yourself in. A good book stops time.

'what tis the first thing i read'

The first book that I chose and bought myself was a childrens version of Reynard the Fox, possibly an adaptation of Michel Rodange, I'm not sure why I chose that one, perhaps it was the cover, on reading the Wiki description the book may have influenced me in ways I had not thought of.

Every book I've ever read (liked and disliked) has played (and continues to play) its part, a book is for life not just for christmas :).

In my mis-spent young adulthood I had a job (on my own for 10hrs per night, 6 days per week) it was a rubbish job with rubbish pay but it allowed me to read up to 6 books per week (4 to 5 hrs per night), my local library was the county book repository (fortunately).

Two or three sci fi books (my favourite fiction genre) although I had to ration myself, they were getting thin on the ground towards the end but all of Clarke, Assimov, Heinlein etc. I like anthologies of short stories.

One or two other fiction which could be from any genre except romance and westerns (not a fan but Shane was one I did read)

One biography (often political although anything that caught my eye) or autobiography (a life, in your own words)

One textbook on physics, chemistry, psychology, social sciences etc.

When it got difficult to find new books I gave up the job (and the reading) and went and found a proper job.

In another recession in another town (with a smaller library) the summary of modern classic literature in the Pears encyclopedia was invaluable and I gained from reading James, Melville etc.

Talking of the Pears, I had three, one from the 30's, one from the early 70's and a current one, the contrast in the accepted knowledge between the editions is fascinating.
I have on my desk a book called 'The Universal Book of Everything' (which has to be the coolest title ever :) published at the end of 1937, Chamberlain is just walking down the steps of the plane...

My list, sorry I haven't got one although I like reading everybody elses, titles and authors that conjure up memories of books I have read or pictures of others I wished to have read or ones I know I never will read.

Last book I read, Fermats Last Theorem, current book is the Orwell Diaries but it is a bit slow going, I've been reading it for two years now, sometimes not even a page per day :), next book will probably be The point of Departure by Robin Cook.


Merry Christmas to Paul and All.

PS. my favourite short story is Space-time for Springers by Fritz Leiber.

Am I alone in having the 1974 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records on my bookshelf?

Here goes...
1. Germinal - Zola
2. The Age of Extremes - Hobsbawm
3. What a Carve Up - Coe
4. The Redundancy of Courage - Mo
5. Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
6. The Rachel Papers - Amis
7. Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
8. One of Us - Young
9. Why Not Socialism? - Cohen
10. 1984 - Orwell
11. Whoops - Lanchester
12. Heat - Monbiot
13. A Savage War of Peace - Horne
14. A Secret History of the IRA – Moloney
15. The Prince – Machiavelli
16. My Dad - Browne
17. Christmas Carol - Dickens
18. The Road – McCarthy
19. The Rider – Krabbe
20. Football Against the Enemy –Kuper
21. Amsterdam – McEwan
22. The Wild Places – McFarlane
23. A Moment of War – Lee
24. Readers Digest Guide to DIY
25. The Diaries – Clarke
26. Kitchen Diaries – Slater
27. The Conclave – Bracewell
28. GB84 – Peace
29. The White Tiger – Adiga
30. The Year of the Goat – Varga Llosa
31. Bonfire of the Vanities – Wolfe
32. L’Etranger – Camus
33. The World Turned Upside Down – Hill
34. The Constant Gardener – Le Carre
35. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist – Cassell
36. Stig of the Dump – King
37. The Spirit Level – Wilkinson and Pickett
38. Into the Wild – Krakauer
39. Ill Fares the Land – Judt
40. On the Black Hill – Chatwin
41. The Thirty-Nine Steps – Buchan
42. The Line of Beauty – Hollinghurst
43. The English Patient – Ondaatje
44. Animal Farm - Orwell
45. Treasure Island – Stevenson
46. Goodbye to All That – Graves
47. Europe Transformed 1878-1919 - Stone
48. What is History? - Carr
49. Wind in the Willows – Grahame
50. Oxford English Dictionary

"I've been reading it for two years now, sometimes not even a page per day :)"

I used to plow through them no matter how much I hated them. Nowadays I'm still reluctant but will stop if less than halfway through, but it still feels like I ought to try and make the best of it. Yet I have walked out of the odd film, which is far less of a time investment to sit right through. I ought to be more harsh, as I will only read a finite amount before I pop my clogs, so reading something I don't enjoy is a real waste.

#57 Ben, there isn't much that I have started that I haven't finished, only Finnegans Wake by Joyce springs to mind (the last page looks just like the first to me, I just couldn't make head nor tail of it).

The Orwell Diary entries are published on the day George (Eric Blair) wrote them but 70 years late.


'That bastard Chiappe is cold meat. Everyone delighted, as when Balbo died. This war is at any rate killing off a few Fascists.'

this is the entry for 1st Dec 1940 and nothing since. (but he'll be back :)

Bobrocket - "An author (of both fiction and non-fiction) creates a rich world with words that you immerse yourself in. A good book stops time."

Yes, this is my feeling on this too. I feel speed-reading fiction is missing the point. But for academic stuff it's sometimes useful.

I love Orwell but if you are finding it too slow, try Spike Milligan's war diaries. Silly but funny.

Regarding binning books, it's rare that I bail out early. The only one I recall gladly letting go was "Life of Pi".

Interesting lists. I'll cross-reference those that have some I know I enjoyed and add them to my amazon wish list...

#7 - GorlagonUK:

Origin of Species - Charles Dickens

????

don't be so pedantic, tis a word game

1) read various
2) can't remember
3) what was i reading on that train from madrid to gard du nord.

... jeas so long ago, what is that novel where the writer is saying, he is trying to convince his mate, 'bout truth of story, 'bout some old guy 'members saving the body from death, and looses his back, god what is the name of that... i laughed on a midnight train, an my eyes met the only other english speaking passanger,

wont narman mahler, not that high brow, hotel newhamshire guy, think. what the xxxx was that novel ! killing me now. get it in a minute

keep it up boys

#60 - yes! I did sigh @ me at #8. You missed Over Milk Wood, which I also sighed at myself about. It's quite a tricky task this, typing straight into the comments box without a) looking at bookshelves, b) sneaking a look at other webpages and c) not typo-ing. I'm afraid I wasn't quite up to all three!

Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (the whole set)
Aristotle Nicomacean Ethics
Atwood Up in the Tree
Burgess A Clockwork Orange
Carr The Twenty Years Crisis
Carroll Alice in Wonderland & Alice Through the Looking Glass
Chomsky Manufacturing Consent
Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment
Endo Scandal
Fischer The Thought Gang
Fischer Under the Frog
Gregory Eye and Brain
Guevera Bolivian Diary
Hayek The Road to Serfdom
Hegel The Philosophy of Right
Heller Catch 22
Hobbes Leviathan
Holland Dinner with Mugabe
Huxley Brave New World
Ishiguru A Pale View of the Hills
Ishiguru An Artist of the Floating World
Judt Post-War
Kafka The Trial
Kant Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals
Keynes The General Theory
Kipling The Jungle Book
Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Lee To Kill a Mocking Bird
Levi The Periodic Table
Machiavelli The Prince
Mandela The Long Walk to Freedom
Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude
Marx & Engels The Communist Manifesto
Mill On Liberty
Milne The House at Pooh Corner
Orwell 1984
Orwell Animal Farm
Park The Truth Commissioner
Plato The Republic
Popper Open Society and its Enemies (Vols 1& 2)
Reinhart and Rogoff This Time is Different
Roth The Radetsky March
Smith Theory of Moral Sentiments
Smith Wealth of Nations
Solzhenitsyn One Day in the Life…
Swift A Modest Proposal
Voltaire Candide
Wentworth Thinking Aloud
Zauman Modernity and The Holocaust
Zweig The Royal Game

Haven't got around to finishing reading all of these yet (esp Will Shaks). In no particular order....

1. The Complete Works - William Shakespeare
2. Gladstone - Philip Magnus
3. Between Silk and Cyanide - Leo Marks
4. Brief History of time – Stephen Hawking
5. The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
6. The Origin of Species, Darwin
7. Candide - Voltaire
8. L’Etranger - Camus
9. La Peste - Camus
10. The Glassbead Game - Hesse
11. Siddharta - Hesse
12. Nightrunners of Bengal - Masters
13. The UK Economy - Prest & Coppock
14. A textbook of Economics - Lipsey
15. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Pirsig
16. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
17. Love on the Dole - Arthur Greenwood
18. Collected Stories - Saki
19. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - Le Carre
20. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Gibbon
21. I Claudius - Robert Graves.
22. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
23. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
24. Animal Farm - George Orwell
25. Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell
26. Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
27. The Lord of the Rings - J R R Tolkien
28. The Hobbit - J R R Tolkien.
29. Poems of Catullus
30. The Day Of The Triffids - John Wyndham
31. The Long walk to freedom - Mandela
32. A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
33. 2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C Clarke
34. Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
35. Aubrey/Maturin any one or more of the 19 novels - Patrick O’Brien
36. Bevan - Michael Foot
37. La Porte Etroite - Gide
38. Stalingrad - Anthony Beevor
39. The Next Moon - Ewen Southby Tailyour/Andre Hue
40. War diaries of Sir Alan Brooke 1939-45 – Ed. Danchev/Todman
41. Dambusters - Paul Brickhill
42. Empire of the Sun - J G Ballard
43. Pacifist at War, Francis Cammaerts – Ray Jenkins
44. Aristide, The story of Roger Landes - Nicolson
45. Biggles and [the Inca Gold ?title?] - WE Johns
46. Chariots of the Gods – von Daniken
47. Narnia novels - CS Lewis
48. Stig of the Dump - Clive King
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Emile & the Detectives – Erich Kastner

I'll confess to being prompted by the earlier entries, but a selection from over the years.

51# Horace Knight
Thank you for supporting my best ever read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
It explained so much, so well and with great deal of humor.
I will always be grateful to the tourist met on a fishing trip in Marlborough Sound who strongly recommended it only two years ago.
Dickens depressed, Hardy too, Shakespeare failed to inspire ... Bryson lit a fire.

I would like to ask my learned friends can anyone recommend a book on Oliver Cromwell?

#65 Cromwell
'Gods Englishman' by Christopher Hill, but don't forget that CH comes at it from, ahem 'the left'.

@65 Re Cromwell: Antonia Fraser's 'Cromwell - Our Chief Of Men' is on my list. A very interesting pro-Cromwell book from a Roman Catholic.

Her historical stuff is very well researched, and though she makes her personal opinions clear, she presents the facts dispassionately enough for it to be possible to come to a rather different conclusion. I found this with her book 'The Gunpowder Plot'.

@39 Jericoa One on my "anti" list is Karl Popper's 'Logic of Scientific Discovery'. It's not that I disagree with his conclusions, but his style is long winded and bombastic. It seems at times like Monty Python's Miss Ann Elk: "This is my theory which is mine and belongs to me".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=cAYDiPizDIs

Whilst looking for this on YouTube I came across another absolute gem too, about Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crIJvcWkVcs

books that are books...

mots et choses - foucault
war and peace - tolstoy
2666 - bolano
underworld - delillo
frankenstein - shelley
kapital - marx
gravity's rainbow - pynchon
recherche du temps perdu - proust
crime and punishment - dostoyevsky
the past - alan pauls

usa - dos passos
tender is the night - fitzgerald
savage detectives - bolano
pedro paromo - juan rulfo
camera lucida - barthes
collected letters - hunter s thompson
the speed of light - javier cercas
rainy season - jose agualusa
remainder - tom mccarthy
bartleby - vila-matas

great expectations - dickens
paradise lost - milton
don juan - byron
crying of lot 49 - pynchon
moby dick - melville
the outsider - camus
sonnets - shakespeare
snow - pamuk
the sacred book of the werewolf - pelevin
a grain of wheat - ngugi wa thiong'o

leviathan - hobbs
beyond good and evil - nietzsche
simulacra - baudrillard
gatsby - fitzgerald
the plague - camus
narziss and goldmund - hesse
madame bovary - flaubert
the good soldier - ford
confessions - rousseau
madness and civilisation - foucault

No one's mentioned Winnie the Pooh and the House at Pooh Corner - yer ain't lived.

@69 Too right !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pooh_and_the_Philosophers

65

Antonia Fraser's `Our Chief of Men' is the most readable biography on Oliver Comwell. Christopher Hill's `God's Englishman' is a bit wordy and worthy. However, Hill's knowledge of his subject and context is excellent. His various works on the cultural and intellectual origins of the Civil War are second to none.

For a really good taste of the period from all sides I can recommend Diane Purkiss `The English Civil War: A people's history. A heavy tome which looks at the society from both the top and the bottom. It creates a superb context and she likes one of my heroes, Gerrard Winstanley.

I have also recently enjoyed reading Whitney Jones' `Thomas Rainsborowe' a biography of one of the truly wonderful men of the Civil War period. `There is no he that is in England that hath not a life to live as the greatest he'. An early Tom Wintringham if there ever was. The book has some good footnotes for more research. For context of the wider issues then Brailsford's `The Levellers' is a good read; but it is now out of print I believe.

It has taken me twenty years to find the English in my family amongst the Caledonians and the Hibernians but their boots seem to be marching me into Bedfordshire where one district sent a regiment to the New Model. This is a wonderful irony!

I also recommend Willaim Godwin's `Political Justice' which comes directly out of the English puritan culture. Given the context of our times we need to refer back to all those folk: Mr. & Mrs. Lilburne, Mr & Mrs Overton, William Walwyn, John Milton, the amazingly irritating but delightful John Bunyan who served his time in the Parliamentary Army not far from where I now sit, his associate John Gibbs, and so on and so on: the list is long.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach

I don't know why but it suddenly jumped into my head, I've been thinking books since you posted this article Paul :)

No one admitted to 'Men are from Mars Women are from Venus' yet?

In an age of anxiety the lack of books on depression, positive thinking, relationships, divorce and sexual dysfunction are surprisingly lacking.

Someone is buying them but seemingly not the posters who post to this blog.

Hmm...

73# tawse57
I thought we all evolved from monkeys rather than other planets.
Nobody has admitted to the Kama Sutra either.
66, 67 and 71#
Thank you kindly for your recommendations.
I will give Antonia Fraser's `Our Chief of Men' a try.
Actually this blog made me think of a book I really enjoyed as a child "The Children of the New Forest" which in turn reminded me I wanted to read about Cromwell.
I couldn't add it to my list at 30 without the authors name, ditto Winnie the Pooh... ditto Kama Sutra ! Only joking far too complicated for me.

Winnie the Pooh and the Kama Sutra should never be mentioned in the same breath let alone the same sentence.

Judging by the hiruste drawings of a man and his partner in the first editions of 'The Joy of Sex' we did indeed evolve from monkeys ruralwoman.

Oddly, no one on here appears to have that book on their bookshelf either - probably explains why so many of us so frequently post on here.

History teaches us that fools do not learn the lessons from the mistakes of the past... and then, just to compound their stupidity, they go out and repeat the same mistakes again and again.


https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=174358

'This was the prime error made during The Depression. Contrary to Bernanke's claims of being "a student" of The Depression he's really the Fool-in-Chief of that time. FDR's devaluation of the currency trashed the tax base and guaranteed sky-high unemployment for the same reason it's happening now - devaluation of the currency destroys the finances of the middle class and below as their spending on essential commodities (food, fuel, clothing) is not only more-or-less fixed in volume (which means their cost to those people ramps as price rises) but as a percentage of income this expenditure is much higher than it is for upper-income earners.'

Same thing is happening here in the UK.

The Private Sector, especially the small business person, continues to be bled dry. There is very little life blood left in thousands of such businesses up and down the country.

Meanwhile, although there is much talk of Public Sector job cuts to share the pain, few cuts are happening at all in reality in the Public Secor. It is a bluff by the ConLib Government but it is a deadly one as small businesses continue to die.

Talk is cheap.

I think a fundamental problem we have, on both sides of the Atlantic, is that the political class is not economically savvy enough to realise that the so-called financial gurus and self-proclaimed 'students of the Great Depression' havent got a clue and, in many ways, are repeating the same mistakes of the 1930s.

Perhaps we should put some Economic and Great Depression books not just on this list but in the Christmas stockings of every Western politican?

Is there a 'Dummies Guide to What Ben Bernanke Did Wrong' out yet?

@74 The standard wedding present I give is a case of wine and a (suitably tasteful) illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra - there's a cute cartoon one by 'Sherry' available too!

I also read - and really enjoyed - 'The Children Of The New Forest', by Captain Marryat, when I was nine or so. about the same time as I first read 'Treasure Island' for myself - my mum had read it to me when I was younger. A few years later I borrowed Marryat's 'Peter Simple' from the library, which was nowhere near as good.

I did like him, but I'm afraid my favourite Pooh quote is "I'm not being photographed with that bloody bear!" (by Christopher-Robin Milne.)

OK, I give in...

'The Silver Sword', about a brother and sister trying to survive in World War Two Polish ghettos, is a book that I remember with fondness from child-hood. Even now I can recall the sense of fear, the feelings of hunger and the determination to survive that the book evoked.

As this is a blog, surely a more interesting and relative list should have been 50 bloggers that you follow... or 50 links you had clicked on but wished you hadn't... or 50 twitters you would like to throttle?

I ran out of steam at 31. I can remember many more that I wish I hadn't read (step forward Louis Althusser) but without checking my shelves 31 is about it.

Ruth Scurr: Fatal Purity
Mike Davis: City of Quartz
Raymond Williams: Resources of Hope
Jonathan Coe: What A Carve Up
George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia
Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker
Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Armed
Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Unarmed
Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Outcast
Antonio Gramsci: The Prison Notebooks
Mark Mazower: Dark Continent
Derek Sayer: The Violence of Abstraction
Hilary Mantel: A Place of Greater Safety
Tony Judt: The Burden of Responsibility
Claus Offe: Disorganised Capitalism
Raphael Samuel: The Lost World of British Communism
E P Thompson: The Poverty of Theory & Other Essays
David Coates: The Labour Party & the Struggle for Socialism
Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation
Karl Marx: Early Writings
Marx & Engels: The Communist Manifesto
Simon Clarke: The Foundations of Structuralism
Donald Sassoon: One Hundred Years of Socialism
Guy Debord: Society of the Spectacle
Robert Skidelsky: John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946
Ed Moloney: A Secret History of the IRA
Henry Patterson: The Politics of Illusion
Michael Mann: Fascists
Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment
John Gaventa: Power & Powerlessness
Stephen Lukes: Power – a radical view
Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities

Trying to wring these out was an oddly cathartic experience. Something meditative to make time stand still amid the current troubles. Thanks for the opportunity.
Winnie-the-Pooh, A. A. Milne
The Endless Steppe, Esther Hautzig
The Stone Book stories, Alan Garner
The Lantern Bearers, Rosemary Sutcliff
The Rocks of Honey, Patricia Wrightson
The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
Dao De Jing
Oku-no-Hosomichi, Matsuo Basho
The Bible
Essays of Montaigne
Poems of John Donne
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Middlemarch, George Eliot
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Short stories of Henry Lawson, including “The Drover’s Wife”
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Poems of Wilfred Owen
The Slave, Isaac Bashevis Singer
Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Remembering Babylon, David Malouf
Cloudstreet, Tim Winton
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown
A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey
The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey
Renewing Socialism, Leo Panitch
Nemesis, Chalmers Johnson
The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein
The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett
Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky
Unto Others, Sober and Wilson
Hierarchy in the Forest, Christopher Boehm
War and Peace and War, Peter Turchin
Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson
Primates and Philosophers, Frans de Waal
Unschooling Society, Ivan Illich
Introduction to Functional Grammar, Halliday and Matthiessen

A library should be for consulting – about the glories of novels, short stories, poetry, essays but also art and human knowledge. With only 50 books allowed, novels will have to be excluded - which means no Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” or Voltaire’s “Candide” let alone any of the powerful South Americans (Allende, Marquez) or Israeli novels from Oz or Yehoshuova (“The Liberated Bride”). However, some books come in multi-volume collections eg Lewis Crassic Gibbon’s “Sunset Song”; Lawrence Durrell’s “The Alexandrian Quartet”; Olivia Manning’s “Balkan Trilogy”; and Naguib Mahfouz's "Children of the Alley" and therefore give good bangs for bucks. Collections of essays, poetry and short stories also give much more reading per book (unless it’s War and Peace) - so the collected poetry of Brecht, TS Eliot, Norman McCaig and WS Graham would be there; as well as the Collected Short Stories of Nabokov, William Trevor, Carol Shields, Heinrich Boell and Alice Munro; and the essays of Montaigne.
If allowed, I would also have a few collections of painters eg the Russian Itinerants or Scottish colourists. Chuck in a few Etymologies and overviews of intellectual endeavours of recent times such as Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and Peter Watson’s A Terrible Beauty - and I would then have space for about 30 individual titles. My basic criteria would be (a) the light it throws on the last century and (b) the quality of the language.
Robert Michels; Political Parties (1911)
Joseph Schumpeter; Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Reinhold Niebuhr; Moral Man and Immoral Society
Arthur Koestler; early biography
Leopold Kohr; The Breakdown of Nations
JK Galbraith; The Affluent Society
Ivan Illich; Deschooling Society
Robert Greene; 49 laws of power
Tony Judt; History of Post-war Europe
Gerald Brennan; South from Granada
Richard Cobb; Paris and Elswhere
Amos Oz; Tale of Love and Darkness
Claude Magris; Danube
Julian Barnes; Nothing to be Frightened Of
Michael Foley; The Age of Absurdity
Toby Jones; Utopian Dreams
Nassim Taleb; The Black Swan
Roger Deakin; Notes from walnut tree farm
Geert Mak; In Europe – travels through the twentieth century
Donald Sassoon; A Hundred Years of Socialism in Western Europe
And, more classically -
Marcus Aurelius; Meditations
Machiavelli; The Prince

1. Leo Tolstoy “Anna Karenina”
2. Leo Tolstoy “War and Peace”
3. Haruki Murakami “The wind-up bird chronicle”
4. Haruki Murakami “A wild sheep chase”
5. Simone de Beauvoir “The Mandarins”
6. Simone de Beauvoir “She came to stay”
7. Simone de Beavoir “The Second Sex”
8. Simone de Beauvoir “All men are mortal”
9. Jean-Paul Sartre “Words”
10. Fyodor Dostoyevsky “Brothers Karamazovs”
11. Fyodor Dostoyevsky “Crime and Punishment”
12. Ivan Turgenev “Fathers and Children”
13. Mikhail Lermontov “A hero of our time”
14. Aleksandr Sozhenitsyn “One Day in life of Ivan Denisovich”
15. Ken Kesey “Sometimes a great notion”
16. Albert Camus “The outsider”
17. John Steinbeck “Of mice and men”
18. John Steinbeck “East of Eden”
19. Jonh Steinbeck “The grapes of wrath”
20. Herman Hesse “The prodigy”
21. Herman Hesse “Siddhartha”
22. Emile Zola “Earth”
23. Voltaire “Candide”
24. Louis-Ferdinand Celine “Journey to the end of the night”
25. Henry D. Thoreau “Walden”
26. Isabel Allense “The House of Spirits”
27. Salman Rushdie “Shame”
28. Salman Rushdie “The satanic verses”
29. Salman Rushdie “Midnight’s Children”
30. James Baldwin “Giovanni’s room”
31. Julio Cortazar “Hopscotch”
32. Eca de Queiroz “The Relic”
33. Gabriel Garcia Marquez “One hundred years of solitude”
34. Jose Saramago “Blindness”
35. Jose Saramago “The year of death of Ricardo Reis”
36. Fernando Pessoa “The book of disquiet”
37. Homer “Odyssey”
38. Homer “Iliad”
39. Jack Kerouac “On the road”
40. Heinrich Boll “The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum”
41. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov “And quiet flows the Don”
42. Miguel Angel Asturias “The President”
43. Bertrand Russell “History of western philosophy”
44. Isaiah Berlin “Russian Thinkers”
45. Noam Chomsky “Hegemony or Survival”
46. Noam Chomsky “New world of indigenous resistance”
47. Hannah Arendt “Eichmann in Jerusalem”
48. Naomi Klein “The shock doctrine”
49. Stephen Hawking “A brief history of time”
50. James Gleick ‘Genius”

Good grief! I can't do 50, but I couldn't manage without these
1 The Go Between L P Hartley
2 The Whitsun Weddings Philip Larkin
3 A Glass of Blessings Barbara Pym
4 Phillips School Atlas published c.1972 (new countries have since been invented)
5 A moveable feast Ernest Hemingway
6 Delia Smith Complete Cookery Course
7 Found in the Street Patricia Highsmith
8 Sweet William Beryl Bainbridge
9 Summoned by Bells John Betjeman
10 Psychogeography 2 Will Self

Happy New Year!