ShmackBooks

From the thread entitled "Reading" from 12/15/02

-MattBeaumont

• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
• Rule of the Bone by Russel Banks
• All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
• A Farewell to Arms and/or For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway

-Candy (CMC friend of JoseluisEspinosa)

• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
• Curious George meets the Man in the Yellow Hat by H.A.Rey
  • (Riveting account of a primate and his need to assimilate with society)

-NickJohnson

• The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkein
  • (you'll note LotR? is absent from this list)
• Candide by Voltaire
• Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes
• Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams
• Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
• Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevski
• We the Living by Ayn Rand
  • (earliest work, the philosophy is not omnipresent or even well developed and it has the best characters and story, especially since she's writing about a world she grew up in)
• Through the Ice by Piers Anthony and Robert Kornwise
• Three Kingdoms, attributed to Luo Guanzhong Do you mean Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Chinese classic saga?
• Beowulf or any of the icelandic legends.
• The Song of Roland
• Lancelot or Yvain by Chretien de Troyes
  • (probably only one is necessary)
• Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
  • (not because you'd enjoy it, but because you should read it, anything else by him subject to your tolerance for pain)
• Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
• 2nd Treatise on Government by John Locke
  • (should be required reading to be an American citizen)
• Everything Darwin wrote. All of it. The man's a genius.
• Works by St. Augustine
• Stephen Gould. Also a genius.
• 1984 and Animal Farm by GeorgeOrwell?
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Iliad and Odyssey by Homer

-MicahSmukler

• Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
• Illuminatus! by Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson
• Watership Down by Richard Adams
• Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones
• As I Lay Dying by Faulkner
• something by Daniel Pinkwater, it doesn't matter much what
• "About Nothing" and "Sure Thing" by Isaac Asimov
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Charlie Dancey's Encyclopedia of Ball Juggling
  • (well, for loose values of "read")
• The Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula leGuin
• Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

-RachelGabor

• ...and a Hard Rain fell by John Ketwig
• Bridge to Terebithia by Catherine Paterson
• Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther
• The Chosen by Chaim Potok
• The Source by James Michener
• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
• Q-Sqaured by Peter David
  • (I have no good reason...)
• A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller
• some type of mythology by any culture
• A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin
• The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss
• The War Prayer by Mark Twain
• And I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a collection of stuff

-AlexPopkin?

• Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.
  • I've noted that people our age tend to enjoy this one more than adults do, so if you haven't read it yet, hurry up.
• A Passage to India by E. M. Forrester.
• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.
• MacBeth and King Lear by Shakespeare

-EricAngell

• Henry V by Shakespeare
• "Defaults like Ender's Game as well."

-BrieFinger?

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

-AvaniGadani

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Les Miserables (or just about anything else by) by Victor Hugo
• Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• A second vote for Voltaire's Candide.
  • Its the best thing I've read in a long time, and the political commentary is fitting.
• The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
• A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeline L'Engle

-BenjAzose

• Genesis and Exodus
• The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay
• Montagne's Essays

-NickHerman

• The Stranger & The Plague, both by Albert Camus
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• The Oddyssey by Homer
• Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
• A Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
• The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
• Timeline by Michael Crichton
• Hamlet by Shakespeare
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
• Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco
• Maniac Magee by Bruce Coville
• Foundation Series by Isaac Asmiov
• The Metamorphosis (and his other short stories) by Franz Kafka
• Poetry of Robert Frost
• Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong
• Candide by Voltaire

-ClaireSandraLaunay?

• Plays by Tom Stoppard, including Arcadia and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
• Books by Umberto Eco, for instance Name of the Rose
• 1984 by George Orwell
  • (It might be more thought-provoking than enjoyable, but it's worth reading.)
• Jorge Luis Borges' fictional short stories.
• Labyrinths is a pretty good anthology.
• Books by Douglas Hofstadter, such as Godel, Escher, Bach and Le Ton Beau de Marot
• Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel, is a very well written account of the longitude problem.
  • Sobel's also written Galileo's Daughter, which is also good.
• Guns, Sails, and Empires by Carlo M. Cipolla
• The Measure of All Things: The Seven Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World by Ken Alder.
  • I haven't actually read this one yet, but I've heard a lot of good things about it. It's about the history of the meter.

I wrote down this list a while ago as a required reading list to an East Coast Tech School, and it's been floating around on a little piece of paper for years, so I'll transmit it to something more permanent.

-Random Tech School

• The Mathematical Experience
• A Mathematician's Apology
• Godel, Escher, Bach
• The Soul of a New Machine
• Famous Problems of Elementary Geometry
• Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times
• The World of Mathematics
• Science and Hypothesis
• Mathematics and Plausable Reasoning
• Hilbert
• Computer Power and Human Reasoning