Must Read Books: William Faulkner, Robert Musil, Ernesto Sabato, Etc.

[nazarbaz]

Here is some of mine... I wish you'll give me yours.

Novels :
William Faulkner - Sanctuary
Robert Musil - The man without qualities
Ernesto Sabato - Abaddon
Louis Ferdinand Céline - Le voyage au bout de la nuit
F. S. Fitzgerald - Tender is the night

Philosophy :

Baruch Spinoza - Ethics
Martin Heidegger - The letter about humanism, What is metaphysics ?, etc.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer - The dialectic of enlightment.
Michel Foucault - Surveiller et punir. Histoire de la prison.
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari - Mille plateaux.

Weird things :

Miguel Angel Asturias - Three of the four suns
F. Nietzsche - The gay knowledge
Georges Bataille - L'expérience intérieure
Niccolo Machiavelli - The prince.
Antonin Artaud - Le théâtre de la cruauté.

 

[ImaLooser]

Naked Came the Stranger
How to Avoid Probate
Zombie Stripper Apocalypse
I Married a Monkey
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Chicken Soup for the Soul
101 Great Mambos

 

[willbell]

Before I say anything I'm going to mention that I have some great books on my shelf that I'm going through right now, so a few months or a year from now this list would be entirely different (1984, Brave New World, The Windup Girl, Blindness, The Republic, etc).

But for now my list of books is something like this:

Novels
- A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr (my favourite novel of all time)
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Dune by Frank Herbert (all around awesome, but a little dense)
- Golden Compass (Northern Lights to you Europeans) by Philip Pullman (and sequels, unlike some I actually think it gets better the further along you go)
- Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer (his other books are mediocre to good out of the ones I've read)
- Next, Andromeda Strain, Sphere, Congo, State of Fear (guilty pleasure), Timeline by Michael Crichton
- Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (the second is great, the third is a let down)
- The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett (Just all-around awesome)
- The Pendragon Series by D.J. MacHale (10 books, my favourite youth series)
- World War Z by Max Brooks
- On the Beach by Neville Shute
- The Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
- The Giver by Lois Lowry (I'm so excited for the sequel!)

Non-Fiction
- The Greatest Show on Earth, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins (unimaginably dry most of the time, but not always)
- Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould (inspired me to think about Alternate History, my current obsession)
- Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne (well written, interesting and simple to understand)
- The World without Us by Alan Weisman
- American Fascists by Chris Hedges
- On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Given enough time and an examination of my shelves I could probably think of a ton of other ones but this is a mostly comprehensive list.