Some of my favorite books

This list is by no means comprehensive; they're just the ones I could think of off the top of my head. these are books that I've either enjoyed so much I had to list them, or just books that I reread when I lack the energy to start something new.

Years ago I saw a place on the Web where some guy actually made a list of all his CDs. I'd like to do that with my books, but since I have over twelve hundred or so, it would be quite a bit of work. I don't think I want to do it, especially since I'd constantly have to update the list if I wanted it to be accurate.

In no particular order...

Fiction:

• East of Eden, John Steinbeck
• Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
• Sweet Thursday, John Steinbeck
• Middle-earth books, J. R. R. Tolkien
• Dune, Frank Herbert
• Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein
• Glory Road, Robert Heinlein
• Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
• Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
• A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain
• All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Remarque
• Sherlock Holmes stories/novels, Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Merlin Trilogy (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment), Mary Stewart
• The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco; a monk is a sort of medieval Sherlock Holmes
• Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card; a little kid is trained to become an interstellar military commander
• The Big Sleep, et al, Raymond Chandler
• Pern novels, Anne McAffrey
• The High Crusade, Poul Anderson; medieval English invade the stars :-)
• M*A*S*H, Richard Hooker
• A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess; classic story about brainwashing and free will
• The Turing Option, Harry Harrison & Marvin Minsky; artificial intelligence
• Dragon's Egg, Starquake, Robert L. Forward; life on a neutron star!
• Time's Arrow, Martin Amis; a man's life, told backwards
• Star Trek novels (rarely, anymore)
• Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson; wonderfully entertaining, and does a lot to explain why computers are so much fun (see The Hacker's Dictionary, which recommended this book to me)

Non-fiction:

• I, Asimov, Isaac Asimov, and his earlier autobiographies, too (had to special-order them, as they were out of print).
• The Ancient Engineers, L. Sprague de Camp
• Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck
• Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas R. Hofstadter
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
• The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson; subtitled "English and How it Got That Way"
• Made in America, Bill Bryson; American English (all his books are wonderfully witty)
• 1, 2, 3, Infinity, George Gamow
• Marriage and Morals, Bertrand Russell; written in the 1920s, but still largely relevant
• Why I Am Not a Christian, Bertrand Russell
• Broca's Brain, Carl Sagan
• The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
• The Discoverers, Daniel J. Boorstin
• The Backyard Astronomer's Guide, Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer (IIRC)
• Stephen J. Gould's books, especially the collections of essays
• Connections and The Day the Universe Changed, James Burke
• Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles MacKay; still in print, even though it was first published in 1842
• The Hacker's Dictionary, edited and compiled by Eric S. Raymond
• Fads and Fallacies, Martin Gardner; one of the first books of modern skepticism, still worth reading after almost 50 years, because crackpot ideas die slowly, if at all

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