Top 5 Favorite Books
Following up on our Top 5 Favorite Movies, the Fools here share with you their Top 5 Favorite Books of all time. I knew The Bible would make the list several times, so I asked them to think of five favorites besides The Bible.
In alphabetical order, we are…
Casey
- The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis – One of C.S. Lewis’s lesser known works, but excellent nonetheless. Theology + Science-fiction = Total Awesomeness!
- Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Including the Hobbit) by J.R.R. Tolkien – Tolkien was a genius! The movies were favorites as well.
- David Copperfield by Dickens - I love to despise Uriah Heep.
- The Chronciles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis – The part with Aslan on the stone table gets me every time.
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families by Stephen Covey – This book has had a great impact on our family’s mission.
David
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov – Both touching and deeply disturbing, witty and brilliantly composed.
- The Body: An Essay by Jenny Boully – This clever, book-length essay is composed entirely of footnotes.
- White Noise by Don Delillo – A professor of Hitler Studies grapples with his fear of death.
- Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger – A thought-provoking novel composed almost entirely of dialogue.
- The Best of Roald Dahl by Roald Dahl – A collection of fascinating, shocking, and very disturbing short stories.
Honorable Mentions: The Road by Cormac McCarthy, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Kris
- Cinderella, all versions, though I grew up on Charles Perrault’s with the pumpkin and glass slipper. I haven’t read it in a while but read Perrault’s version enough in my first twelve years of life to make up for the last sixteen.
- Phantastes: A Faerie Romance by George MacDonald
- The Hobbit. First read in 5th grade and, oh, I still live and taste it.
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- 101 Famous Poems Edited by Roy Cook. This is my “bathroom book” and I have read each poem dozens of times; both in and out of the privy
Lou
- The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks. An awesome series of 21 fantasy novels. All of which I read in about 6 months, twice, before I read #2 below.
- The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien. No other comments needed here. Obviously, the Lord of the Rings closely followed…my precious!
- War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells. Terrific book, terrible 2005 Tom Cruise movie!
- The Time Machine, H. G. Wells. Are you starting to see a pattern here?
- Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, Richard Carlson. Simple ways to keep the little things from taking over your life. The anti-OCD!
Honorable Mention: Rules of The Red Rubber Ball, Kevin Carroll. Kevin was the creative catalyst for Nike. What a job!! This guy could make Archie Bunker cheer.
Luke
In order of publication:
- Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hard to choose only one, but Self-Reliance is a good place to start.
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce. What style!
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald. A great story, well told.
- The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis. A surprising little book that might blow your mind.
- Hyperion, Dan Simmons. Technically Sci-fi but as terrible and awe-inspiring as anything in the Bible.
Honorable Mention: Not a book, but Barry Hannah’s story “Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa” (Airships) is the finest short study of voice and human complexity in the English language.
Nicole
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess — Questions of free will; beautifully written with unique forms of speech created by Burgess: Nadsat!
- Stiff by Mary Roach — Wonderful Non-fiction regarding cadavers and science! Mary Roach writes science wonderfully with humor.
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov — Comically narrated by Humbert Humbert and VERY controversial.
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley — He seriously wrote this in 1931!! Amazingly written and some SCARY science fiction.
- The Hanged Man by Francesca Lia Block – I am a huge fan on FLB and I adore her style of writing; you can feel her words.
You
Our favorite Fool of all. What are your favorite books?
Forget What They Taught You About Essays
[Ed. note: Another guest post from the inestimable David.]
(cc) Flickr user Pleuntje
I’m currently taking a class called “The Art of the Essay.” Sounds fun, right? Essays. Woo-hoo. The word in itself evokes the ever-hammered-in high school template of five paragraphs: Intro, three main points, conclusion. Many of us might even remember the shape: upside down triangle, rectangle, rectangle, rectangle, regular triangle.
And so we spend years of our scholastic lives pouring our ideas into the essaic mold and—tada!—creating the most boring and predictable pieces of writing known to mankind. Well, the class I’m currently taking has led me to dust off—and rediscover—a book I purchased last year called The Next American Essay. Edited by John D’Agata, this collection of essays shows how tossing the old high school method out the window has led to some of the most non-traditional and brilliant pieces of short literature to appear in the past few decades.
The forms of essay featured in this book span from traditional prose, to numbered lists, streams of consciousness, to what D’Agata refers to as simply “something else.” The writers featured in this collection push the boundaries and redefine what we think of as literature. A carefully arranged to do list becomes literary; another essay is composed entirely of footnotes. All in all, these essays offer compelling glimpses of reality and vivid revelations of what it just might mean to be human.
I highly recommend this book to anyone: aspiring writers who are searching for a way to break out of their academic shells, artists searching for inspiration, those seeking to forget what they learned in high school. As D’Agata writes in his introduction to one essay, an encounter with this book just might leave you “with the suspicion that there are essays somewhere to love.”
DISCLAIMER: This book breaks every rule your teachers ever taught you. If you are in high school, don’t read this book unless you’re prepared to fail English.
