It would have to be my Ayn Rand... Just kidding, unless I found a possessed copy of atlas shrugged with her dark soul in it, then I'd keep that for a bonfire some halloween.
I'm a gonna have to do five non-fiction and five fiction, I know I'm probably breaking rules with this but well, its impossible otherwise, its near impossible with that provisio but anyway.
- Bring The Jubilee, Ward Moore, its an alt history in which the southern/confederate states won the US civil war, its also one of the best time travel books I've read and its a book with personal importance to me too for when I read it and what was happening with me at that time.
- Replay, Ken Grimwood, its a good book about the transmigration of the soul or some similar idea from physics or philosophy about eternal recurrence.
- Iron Dragons Daughter, I love this book, its a fantasy masterworks rather than a sci fi masterworks, so far as I know, its a bizarre book and a lot of it is ambiguous content, is this the real life or is this just fantasy?
- Drawing of The Dark, Tim Powers, I love Tim Powers, its a tie between this and Anubis Gates, which I was recommended as the archetypical steampunk novel, it is, although I liked this one as its got some fantastic fantasy themes, some themes about wizards in the west and east whose struggle is the real battle underlying that between western and eastern powers in the siege of vienna, loads of stuff about Finn Macool, King Arthur, The Fisher King and a micro brewery which produces a dark beer/porter, the west has "nothing to fear, so long as we have our beer"
- The Divine Invasion, Philip K Dick, this is a book which I think deserves to become canon as great religiously themed literature, along with Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, its not in that league, but it is a great story of God returning from exile, a splitting in the cosmic personality which explains the existence of evil/satan, whose manifestation as a goat is one of the most memorable in fiction I've ever read
Non-fiction
- The Fear of Freedom, Revision of Psycho-analysis, Man for himself, three books by Erich Fromm tied for first place, the first I thought was the best, outlining what he thought had gone wrong with the society of the Weimer Republic which generated fascism, these features are alive and well today, the revision of psychoanalysis was probably his latest book, describing his differences with the Herbert Marcuse et al, finally man for himself was his sort of counter argument to Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents, which is largely Freud's attack on the idea of "love others as you do yourself", which he thought was absurd, Fromm persuasively argues the opposite, its the people who deviate too far from that who're absurd
- Essays and Journalism, George Orwell, I dont know if this is still in print, possibly not in the format I read it, there's lots of observations of the mundane but brilliant, like raunchy postcards at the pier, views on salvadore dali (or moral panics), a good essay on the english murder story which is largely about whether or not media was just becoming more sadistic and readers desensitized (I think in part prompted by visiting a "crimes of Germany in the last war" wax works exhibit which was sort of like the SAW movies of its day), plus his diaries from war time, which were pretty surprising, Orwell was a guy who was very honest and I dont think, despite his frequent u-turns, had an ounce of bad faith/bad conscience about him
- The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell, I read it after his history of western philosophy, which was recommended to me by a member of an orienteering society, echoing their posters which read "Need to know the meaning of life? Try the bible or Bertrand Russell's history of western philosophy, want an excuse to go for a drink on a Sunday, join us", Conquest is better, I try to read it annually as it has true wisdom. It reminds me of who I was at a former time and in a very different context, which on the one hand I really like but on the other makes me cringe, too soon old, too late wise.
- The importance of living, Lin Yutang, I've read this book many times, though strangely never from beginning to end, you dont have to read it that way I think but it is full of a distillation in a way of all of Asian-Chinese culture and philosophy, which I have a lot of time for and its one of the few, really, really biophilious reads that I can think of
I read all the time though, very widely, the good, the bad and indifferent, sacred and profane, I enjoy it all and the humanity its a byproduct of.
)...I could really go on for a while here but I'll stop. I'm never, ever without a book to read.
