Your favorite book, and why?

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"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." - Alexander Pope

The Pillars of The Earth by Ken Follett. If you've read it, you'll know why.

WOW.

I've read it 16 times.

But there are so many others!! Oooohhh so many.... I don't think there's enough of a word-count in this thread to handle the numbers...

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We've got rules and maps and guns in our backs, but we still can't just behave ourselves. Even if to save our own lives, we are a brutal kind. The Shins

Common, why didn't you answer your own question?

Fiction - "To Kill A Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. I love everything about it, the characters, the story, the narrative of Scout, but mostly the atmosphere. You can smell summer by the end of the first page.

Nonfiction - "The Hiding Place" by Corrie ten Boom. This is a true story that is extraordinarily well-told. My favorite part: the author's sister insists on thanking God for the fleas they find infesting the building they sleep in while in a concentration camp. The author can thank God for many things, but she draws the line at fleas until she finds out what a true blessing they actually are. An amazing story.

Honorable mention - "The Dog Who Wouldn't Be" by Farley Mowat.

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Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive. - Theodore Roosevelt

That's quite a long book to read 16 times!!

16???

Sounds obsessive-compulsive!

Lol! Yes, I've been accused of that before. I take it as a compliment!!

I used to be a terrible re-reader. There's something very comforting about a familiar story. I haven't read it in years now - but wow, what a story!

I see you know the book - have you read it or just seen it on a shelf?

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We've got rules and maps and guns in our backs, but we still can't just behave ourselves. Even if to save our own lives, we are a brutal kind. The Shins

I tend to read the sorts of things which would put the average person in a coma...Locke, Tocqueville, Paine, Machiavelli, the kind of historical political philosophy which so succumbs to me.

I would recommend as a must read on politics - Blessed Among Nations by Eric Rauchway, it puts globalization in perspective. (I actually had a A&M/Oklahoma ticket from 06 marking my place, shows you how long since that one's been read)

And for the novels - The Great Gatsby has always been my favorite.

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"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." - Alexander Pope

I'll have to look at this one, is it similar to James Michener's historical novels - if you've read any of those?

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"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." - Alexander Pope

I've almost bought it about five times. I have a problem with buying books faster than I can read them -- but have been doing better lately. I think there are literally 60 or 70 behind me in my office that I still have to get to (and four on the way from Amazon) -- I have a little personality disorder of my own

No I haven't read any, but yes this would be in a similar vein. It spans about 50 years or the central characters' lives, and is a true epic - greed, deception, love, betrayal, war, redemption - you name it. It's magnificent. The main antagonist is one of the most emotionally provocative characters I've read - he's just so evil.

And the book inspired in me my lasting obsession with and love for cathedrals. Some might find the details of this in the book tiresome (it's essentially about the building of a cathedral at a monastery in the 12th century) but I loved all the nitty gritty of the architecture, the sheer volume and scope of the work, the fact that working on a cathedral could provide a family with a lifetime's employment and a good prospect of wealth, the way it enriches and grows a township - it was just amazing to me.

Plus even though it's a fictional novel, it includes real historical events in the story. Just wonderful.

In fact, I really, really want to go and read it again now!!

I think we might share that disorder. The Chesboy has recently banned me from entering bookshops unsupervised.

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We've got rules and maps and guns in our backs, but we still can't just behave ourselves. Even if to save our own lives, we are a brutal kind. The Shins

let's see,
"Too Loud a Solitude" by Bohumil Hrabal
"The Trial" by Franz Kafka
"Thus Spoke Zarathustra" by Nietzsche