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mylescorcoran at 09:18am on 05/05/2005 under books
mylescorcoran at 09:18am on 05/05/2005 under booksLifted from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mikegentry, a simple meme for booklovers (and bookhaters).
What is the best book you have ever read?
What is the worst book you have ever read?
I'm certain my answers will change with the weather and the passing of time, but I'll say now that the best book I've ever read is A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. The language and the subject matter mesh perfectly. I came to it at an impressionable age and was marked by it, and it's one of the few books I'll re-read again and again.
I find it harder to choose my worst book. In recent memory I'd have to say Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle. I simply could not finish it, and deeply regret the time I wasted on reading as far as I did. It's a very dull and unsatisfying book, and lacking in any sense of wonder that the reviews and opinions I trusted to recommend it to me said it might have.
How about you?
mikegentry, a simple meme for booklovers (and bookhaters).What is the best book you have ever read?
What is the worst book you have ever read?
I'm certain my answers will change with the weather and the passing of time, but I'll say now that the best book I've ever read is A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. The language and the subject matter mesh perfectly. I came to it at an impressionable age and was marked by it, and it's one of the few books I'll re-read again and again.
I find it harder to choose my worst book. In recent memory I'd have to say Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle. I simply could not finish it, and deeply regret the time I wasted on reading as far as I did. It's a very dull and unsatisfying book, and lacking in any sense of wonder that the reviews and opinions I trusted to recommend it to me said it might have.
How about you?
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I’ve had a number of favourite books over the years, but these seem to ebb and flow as I’ve become older, and now I’m at the state where I have no “best book” to offer you. I’m not certain also what I mean by the term ‘best’ any more. Most read and re-read? Most fun? Most important? Most moving?
Some books or series that may have fit your list in the past for me at various times; don’t ask me to rank them now:
Amber series by Jack Zelazney
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Bandy Papers by Donald Jack
The Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart
The Children of Green Knowe by L. M. Boston
Conan series by Robert E. Howard
Death is a Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury
Doc Savage series by Lester Dent
Dune by Frank Herbert.
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
The Eyes of the Overworld by Jack Vance
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Freddy the Pig series by Walter M. Brooks
Gideon Fell/Sir Henry Merrivale series by John Dickson Carr
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid Douglas R. Hofstadter
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens
Judge Dee series by Van Gulik
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Lost Empires by J. B. Priestley
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
Narnia series by C.S. Lewis
Night of the Jabberwock by Fredric Brown
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
Riverworld by Philip Jose Farmer
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe
Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death by Daniel Pinkwater
Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by H. P. Lovecraft
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome.
Time and Again by Jack Finney
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Whole Earth Review by Stewart Brand
The Witches of Karres by James Schmitz
The Worlds Most Dangerous Places by Robert Young Pelton
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
The Zero Stone by Andre Norton
The category of “worst book” is also hard to answer, as a book that I truly loathed would not be finished. The first Dragonlance Book comes to mind, as I recalled chucking it across the room after the first chapter. However, some strange reason, there are a few terrible books I read completely through (I think I was trapped on an airplane or sick or something). Such titles would include Kinky Friedman’s "Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola", and Kathy Reich’s “Deja Dead.”
::B::
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More seriously, there's quite a few books on your list that I'd think of as important to me, or ones I greatly enjoyed. I listed A Wizard of Earthsea as my best book as it's the one that means the most to me. It's tied up with my life in many ways and I'll always come back to it. I hardly re-read books at all, so that I've read AWoE more than a dozen times says something about the book and my relationship with it.
Clearly as we grow older the books that made great impressions on us lose their ability to thrill and affect us as before. Or rather, we change and are never in the position to be so affected again.
This meme has at least made me think about the changes in my tastes, and those preferences that have stayed the same over the decades. Better than I might have hoped from your average LJ meme.
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The worst book I ever read was that Paul Coelho piece of tat about the desert boy who found hisself somewhere, can't remember the name. Or The Da Vinci Code. Or The Celestine Prophecy.
Queenie