Surprise, surprise; a recent poll found that the most popular book in America is the Bible. Gone With the Wind, the Lord of the Rings series, The Stand, To Kill a Mockingbird, Atlas Shrugged, and Catcher in the Rye all wound up in the top 10, as well, but what was truly disconcerting was that Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons landed near the top of the list.
As stated on The Colbert Report, I'm of the opinion that ten monkeys typing for three days would produce a work of Dan Brown, and why his books are as popular as they are I'll never comprehend. I guess I should just be thankful that The Secret or Your Best Life Now didn't show up in the top 10...
My list of top 10 books bears no resemblance to those mentioned above, though, and since we're on the topic I might as well ask what your top ten favorite books are (which includes both fiction and non-fiction, of course). I'll post my own later tonight as I'll need to be looking at my bookshelf to figure out my favorites.
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Just off the top of my head and with the specific limitation of only one book by any author. I make no claims of all of them being "the best" books or even very good, they're just my favorites for various reasons.
1) Small Gods, Terry Pratchett (were I to be totally honest my top 10 books would be mostly of his)
2) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (hey..my copy has all the books between two covers...it counts)
3)The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Robert Heinlein
4)Watchmen, Alan Moore
5)The Last Command, Timothy Zahn (If I could somehow get the whole Thrawn Trilogy in one book, I'd take that)
6)The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
7)Wizard and Glass, Stephen King
8)Darksaber, Kevin J. Anderson
9)Sphere, Michael Crichton
10) Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare
Dan Brown writes excellent thrillers with lots of puzzles. They may not be "great literature", but both books are really fun reads, and that's all there is to it.
Now, how did The Catcher in the Rye get on the list? Yuck!
Whenever stories like this come out, I always think it would be more precise to say that we are talking about not the Bible but translations of the Bible. The Bible can't be the most popular book in America, because so few Americans bother to learn the Hebrew and Greek necessary to read the actual Bible.
In the first or second paragraph of The Da Vinci Code, the main character heaves a picture frame "toward" himself. Forget about bad writing, that seems to show a lack of understanding of the word "heave." I persevered through the book, past my astonishment that the head of French cryptography couldn't recognize the Fibonacci sequence. That said, maybe these should be lessons rather than criticisms given the number of books Dan Brown has sold.
I think there is confusion among those taking the poll, I think they thought it said "what is the your favorite book that you never actually read."
I hear you on the Dan Brown front, but TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is one of my all-time favorite books. I've read it several times. Genius.
I was sure that America's favorite book would be "Swedish-made Penis Enlarger Pumps and Me: This Sort of Thing is My Bag, Baby," by Austin Powers.
My favorites, in no particular order (and others rotate in and out):
-The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
-The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien (does this count as one, three, or six?)
-The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, David Quammen
-The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
-Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
-Shakespeare's historical/War of the Roses plays (I know, not technically books and they make my list more than ten)
Hmm... just off the top of my head, in no order:
Lord of the Rings, Tolkien (is there a pattern here?)
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Dune, Frank Herbert
the Harry Potter series, JK Rowling
the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series, various (up to about 14 books now)
On The Road, Jack Kerouac
Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
Ham on Rye, Charles Bukowski
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter Thompson
Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond
Okay...here goes (in no particular order):
His Dark Materials, Phillip Pullman
Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Digging Dinosaurs, Jack Horner
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
Any of Stephen Jay Gould's essay compilations
I've owned, read and loved too many books to make picking a "top ten" an easy job, but here goes. As several people have said before, this list is in no particular order:
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
Hamlet, Wm. Shaxspear
The Giver, Lois Lowry
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
The collected short stories of Jorge Luis Borges
Sandman: Brief Lives, Neil Gaiman
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Murder at the ABA, Isaac Asimov
I haven't read The DaVinci Code, but Geoff Pullum's review of it is one of the funniest blog posts I have ever seen.
I'm a frequent lurker around here, but I'm too much of a humanities grad to really contribute anything of note on most topics. This seems like it's hit my level, though:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Daniel Clowes, David Boring
Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare At Goats
Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
Francis Wheen, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
Comte du Lautreamont, Les Chants du Maldoror
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand
Yes indeed, I post so infrequently that I have absolutely no idea about how tags work. D'oh!
Der Bruno Stroszek:
It's OK. Post too much and you'll have nightmares that your favorite blogs have been taken over by lawyers and every comment thread is infested with trolls. . . not that that's happened to me. . . two nights ago. . . .
I've had The Master and Margarita recommended to me by several people, now; I'll have to look into that.
(Oh, I forgot: just about everything by Pynchon and Vonnegut is good, and Geoff Pullum's review of Dan Brown is best read aloud.)
At least none of the Left Behind series books made the list.
My list:
Lord of the Rings, Tolkien (3)
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Dune, Frank Herbert
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter Thompson
Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond
The Alienist, Caleb Carr
The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris
Ghost Story, Peter Straub
Most of it is light reading, true, but I HAVE to read heavy stuff for work so I try not to for enjoyment.
Not in order:
One by Sheri S Tepper, but i'll have a heck of a time picking just one. Family Tree, maybe, or Rise and Fall of Gibbon
Song of Kali, Dan Simmons
Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge
Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley, Alison Weis
Tad Williams' Otherland Series
Peter F Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction Series
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
That's only 9 but some are series.
Lots of shared authors, if not titles... I love seeing other people's lists, gives me things to add to my wish list!
Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams
Song of the Dodo, David Quammen
The Stand, Stephen King (conformist!!!)
Books of Magic, Neil Gaiman
Only Begotten Daughter, James Morrow
Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchet
Pastwatch, Orson Scott Card
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Shake Hands With The Devil by Romeo Dallaire
The Ancestor's Take by Richard Dawkins
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman
Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman
Why I Am Not A Christian by Bertrand Russell
Collapse by Jared Diamond
In no particular order:
Terry Pratchett's discworld novels (it would be hard to single out
one of them)
The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit, or There And Back Again, Tolkien
The Dinosaur Heresies, Bakker
After Man, Dougal Dixon
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond (Yes, its materialist, some
might say vulgar-materialist. But in an age that considers Naomi Klein an authority on political economy, 19th century-style materialism stands out as the voice of reason)
Dinosaurs, Holtz & Rey
Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould (Many of its interpretations of
the Burgess Shale organisms are obsolete now, but it's still a
good read - and an excellent introduction to arthropod anatomy)
Lovecraft's short stories (not technically books)
Smells like Niederlage, Linus Volkmann (sadly not translated into
English, but the funniest book I have ever read)
The Stand would have actually made it onto that list, if not for its anti-Bacon and anti-science twist.
The worst mainstream book I have ever read was Frank Sch�tzing's "The Swarm". Maximilian Schell and his noble savage native American friends save the world from well-poisoning by people with names like Rubin and a Chinese Condoleeza Rice (Women, leave alone non-white women, in positions of leadership, how simply frightful), and genocide is just a way to say "let's talk". Oh man...