Name a few of your favorite books ...
2007-12-06 01:21:37 · 34 answers · asked by socmum16 ♪ 5 in Society & Culture ➔ Religion & Spirituality
Start with The Grapes of Wrath-John Steinbeck
2007-12-06 01:24:50 · answer #1 · answered by Maria b 6 · 1⤊ 0⤋
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow
All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral
Philip Roth
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser
Animal Farm
George Orwell
Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume
The Assistant
Bernard Malamud
At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien
Atonement
Ian McEwan
Beloved
Toni Morrison
The Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder
C - D
Call It Sleep
Henry Roth
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon
A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell
The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather
A Death in the Family
James Agee
The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen
Deliverance
James Dickey
Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone
Falconer
John Cheever
The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles
The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin
Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene
Herzog
Saul Bellow
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul
I, Claudius
Robert Graves
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Light in August
William Faulkner
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien
Loving
Henry Green
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Money
Martin Amis
The Moviegoer
Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch
William Burroughs
Native Son
Richard Wright
Neuromancer
William Gibson
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
1984
George Orwell
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski
Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India
E.M. Forster
Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion
Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth
Possession
A.S. Byatt
The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark
Rabbit, Run
John Updike
Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow
The Recognitions
William Gaddis
Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates
The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson
The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
The Sportswriter
Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
John le Carre
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller
Ubik
Philip K. Dick
Under the Net
Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry
Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise
Don DeLillo
White Teeth
Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea
2007-12-06 01:40:28 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 4⤋
Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being
Immanuel Kant, Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Albert Camus, The Plague
Theodore Dostoevsky, Demons, Notes from the Underground, and The Brothers Karamazov
The Notebooks of Leonardo daVinci
Dante Alleghierri, Divina Comedia (all three)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Jowett's translation of The Dialogues of Plato
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
H. G. Wells, The Outline of History
The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu
Confucius, The Analects
Gautama Buddha, The Dhamapada
Miyamato Musashi, The Five Rings of Power
The complete Bible in the 1611 Authorised Version with notes from the translators and Preface
Gerhardt Wendt, In Search of Adam
Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus
James Michener, Sayonara, Hawaii, Tai Pei, and Tales of the South Pacific
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and Tom Sawyer
Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Henry Kissinger, The White House Years
Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha
Aldous Huxley, Brave new World and Island
Herman Hesse, Siddartha and Steppenwolf
Gunter Grasse, The Tin Drum
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time and Don Giovanni's Room
Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams and Civilisation and Its Discontents
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
[In Robert Farrar Capon stick with The Supper of the Lamb, the rest were crap. In C. S. Lewis go for The Pilgrim's Regress, The Great Divorce, and his Space trilogy, especially the first two. Be sure to include some of Alan Watts, late Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco and a Zen master. In Thomas Aquinas go for the Summa Contra Gentiles rather than the Summa Theologica, it's better written and shorter, also read his de Anima, highly regarded by all the scholars of his day Jewish, Christian and Muslim. Better understanding of the Scriptures in Jewish thinking can be tasted from Pirke Avoth, the Sayings of the Fathers, Moses Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed is good reading. I highly agree with the Christian Classics, The Little Flowers of St, Francis, Theresa of Avila's Interior Castles, John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul and Ascent of Mt. Carmel, Julian of Norwich's Showings, Brother Lawrence's Practice of the Presence of God, Augustine of Hippo's Confessions and City of God. The Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Thomas Merton's Ten Story Mountain, John Donne's Spiritual Sonnets,Henri Nouen's The Wounded Healer, With Open Hands and Genessee Diary, John Milton's Paradise Lost, Martin Luther's Table Talks and Small and Large Catechisms, John Wesley's Sermons (as well as all the Hymns written by him and his brothers), the writings of Teilhard de Charden are also profitable reading and Martin Buber's Tales of the Hasidim.]
There's a variety here, some heavier than others, but all should provide a challenge and any prove profitable .
2007-12-06 04:03:11 · answer #3 · answered by Fr. Al 6 · 1⤊ 0⤋
A Complete Shakespeare.
The Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (meaning all the Sherlock Holmes adventures).
Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea".
Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury".
anything by Mark Twain, but especially "The Prince and the Pauper".
St. Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologica". A bit stiff, but the exercise in how to think is well worth the effort.
"The Little Flowers of St. Francis". The best treatise I know on how to love.
Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women", "Little Men" and "Jo's Boys", one of the best biographical trilogies ever written.
Stephen King's "The Tommyknockers". Warning! Do NOT read at night unless you've got an arc light or two or three spotlights handy.
Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land".
Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.
C.S. Lewis. EVERYTHING you can get your hands on.
Robert Farrar Capon. All his books are great reads. A deceased Anglican bishop whose theology is so clear, concise and easily understood it's a blessing. Hard to find as they're out of print, but well worth the effort.
A romance by any or each of the following authors:
Johanna Lindsey, Catherine Coulter, Kathleen Woodiwiss, Sandra Hill, Christine Feehan (especially the earlier 'Dark' series), Hannah Howell or Amanda Quick (stick w/the one-word titles. They're the best).
J.R.R.Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Don't forget "The Hobbit", its prequel. As good as the movie was, the books are far superior!
"The Song of Bernadette" by Franz Werfel. A beautiful biography of a beautiful soul.
Which reminds me: "The Autobiography of a Soul" by St. Therese of Liseiux.
"Interior Castle" by St. Teresa of Avila. One of the best by a mystic. And "Dark Night of the Soul" by St. John of the Cross.
That oughta get ya started.
Hope this helped.
2007-12-06 01:40:01 · answer #4 · answered by Granny Annie 6 · 2⤊ 0⤋
Moody Handbook of Theology.
Major Bible Themes, Chafer and Walvoord.
Romans, Barnhouse.
The Sermons of Charles Spurgeon.
Any John MacArthur book. I liked his Charismatic Chaos. It is a look at the doctrines that charismatics in particular hold to.
And, of course, The Bible. I prefer the King James. The New King James is okay though if you're not into Old English.
2007-12-06 01:34:19 · answer #5 · answered by Jed 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Anything by Christopher Penczak, Laurie Cabot, Scott Cunningham, Raymond Buckland, Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone.
2007-12-06 01:28:16 · answer #6 · answered by wiccanhpp 5 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Rain in the Doorway by Thorne Smith, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, Engines of God by Jack McDevitt, Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.
2007-12-06 01:40:45 · answer #7 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 0⤋
Let's see:
Anything by Charles Dickens, especially A Tale of Two Cities.
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.
The Odd Thomas trilogy by Dean Koontz
Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Divine Comedy by Dante
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Stand by Stephen King
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained by John Milton
Canturbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
The Language of God by Francis Collins
The Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony
The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins
Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe
Confessions by Saint Augustine
And yeah. That should get you started. I own all of the above books...and they're awesome!
Others mentioned 1984, and I highly recommend that one as well.
2007-12-06 01:39:20 · answer #8 · answered by The_Cricket: Thinking Pink! 7 · 2⤊ 0⤋
A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
Anything written by Douglas Adams
Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan
A History of God - Karen Armstrong
The Sentinel - Arthur C Clarke
A Maze of Death - Phillip K Dick
The Age of Consent - George Monbiot
Collapse - Jarred Diamond
2007-12-06 01:29:33 · answer #9 · answered by Sly Phi AM 7 · 2⤊ 0⤋
Moby Dick- Herman Melville
American Psycho- Bret Easton Ellis
Time out of Joint- Phillip K Dick
The Silence of the Lambs- Robert Harris
The Hypothesis of Happiness- various
2007-12-06 01:51:01 · answer #10 · answered by James J Turner esq 3 · 2⤊ 0⤋
Cosmos by Carl Sagan
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
2007-12-06 01:46:43 · answer #11 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋