What is the best book you've ever read (beside the WOT series)?

[Mashiara Sedai]

A "fantasy" literary fiction novel by Haruki Murakai, called 1Q84, is the best book outside WoT that I've ever read. Murakami is a wonderful author to begin with, but this is his masterpiece. The characters are so pefectly complex and compelling. Typical of Murakami, the plot has some strange and "fantasy-ish" twists, but are so gripping. I've never read anything quite like it. It's perfection.

 

Peacesells, I also really enjoyed the Apprentice Adept series. I loved the mix of magic and technology.

[Suttree]

A "fantasy" literary fiction novel by Haruki Murakai, called 1Q84, is the best book outside WoT that I've ever read. Murakami is a wonderful author to begin with, but this is his masterpiece. The characters are so pefectly complex and compelling. Typical of Murakami, the plot has some strange and "fantasy-ish" twists, but are so gripping. I've never read anything quite like it. It's perfection.

 

+1

 

Great call Mashiara.

[Ozzie_aiel]

Lois Bujolds Vorkosigan saga, especially A Civil Campaign. Its got the funniest dinner party ever!

[Darksmoon]

First three books of a song of ice and fire. Memory, Sorrow and Thorn by Tad Williams. Dragon Prince series by Melanie Rawn.

[Darksmoon]

I also enjoyed the Mistborn books.

[Hagazussa]

That is hard to choose, but I think that my two favorite fiction books other than the Wheel of Time books are Wizards First Rule the first book in Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series and Dracula by Bram Stoker. My favorite non fiction book is Modern Magick by Donald Michael Kraig.

[coldestcaress]

The Lord of the Rings is my favourite book, and has been since I was a kid. I read it every year and I love it more every time. There are plenty of other favourites, but LotR is my number one.

[SirTownsend]

Well the only fantasy I've read is WoT...well I read a lot of it as a kid, but only ones I remember is Redwall and The Merlin series, but those were not favorites.

 

Sci-fi would be any Michael Crichton, haven't read much else here. Wait! Enders game...loved that one.

 

Classics. Easy. The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Three Musketeers (original)

 

Thrillers Any John Grisham or James Patterson.

 

Horror. Steven King. Favorite book by him would be the Tommyknockers.

 

I read anything and everything, but my favorite of all time is WoT. Nothing beats it in y book. Those one top are what would come close...and thats not even the tip of the iceburg.

[coldestcaress]

Tommyknockers is really good. Never thought I could enjoy a story about aliens that much. I love Stephen King.

[Benganza]

In no particular order:

Neverwhere, Anansi Boys, American Gods - Neil Gaiman

ASoIaF - G.R.R. Martin

Pretty much everything - Peter F. Hamilton

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

Perfume - Patrick Süskind

Forever War - Joe Haldeman

Dune - Frank Herbert

 

The worst books I've read in the past 15 years are:

Sword of Truth - Terry Goodkind

Harry Potter - J.K Rowling

Elminster - Ed Greenwood

Dexter - Jeff Lindsay

[Wolf505]

Hard to say an overall favorite, so I'll break it down into categories:

Fantasy- Faith of the Fallen by Terry Goodkind- Sixth book in the Sword of Truth series, but it was by far one of the best fantasy books I've ever read. The ending truly moved me, and that's a first for me when it comes to fantasy. Runner up: Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. Can't wait for book 2!!

 

Sci-Fi- Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein- No question. I'm a former infantryman and paratrooper myself and the Mobile Infantry is modeled heavily on the Airborne. I've read this book like four or five times. I rarely re-read books (WoT being an exception). Runner up: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card Second runner up: Dune by Frank Herbert

 

Modern Thriller- Without Remorse by Tom Clancy- The origin story of his recurring character CIA field operative John Clark. Takes place just after the Vietnam War and alternates between Clark (whose name was John Kelly before he joined the CIA) getting revenge on a group of Baltimore drug dealers that killed his girlfriend and running a black op in Vietnam to rescue a POW. Runner up: Term Limits by Vince Flynn

 

Classics: Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas- The classic revenge tale. The movie with Jim Cavizel as Edmond Dantes was really good too, though they had to simplify some of the plot to make it fit into a two hour movie. A direct translation of the book would be more like a mini-series. Runner up: Moby Dick by Herman Melville

[Red2111]

Ben i have to ask. why Harry Potter??

[Turin Turambar]

Tolkien is my fave and The Silmarillion is my favourite book.

 

Others in the shelf of reread books:

 

Recluse Saga

Dune (up to God Emperor)

Sword of Truth (some are much better than others)

Dragon Prince series

Dragonriders of Pern

[Lady Beslan]

I really enjoyed The Black Magician Trilogy by Trudi Canavan. I think I read this immediately before WoT, and I think it's what really drew me towards Fantasy as a genre. I also really love the Dragonlance books, but I've only read the first 3. I was about 9 when I read them and began to read the fourth one but got confused with the shift of characters and stopped immediately. I've re-read those 3 many times though; they're really enjoyable.

 

Outside of fantasy, I would have to say Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses series is an odd, but nice, read. Again, I read it when I was very young but I contiinue to read them still.

[Apple Scruff]

Anything and everything by Kurt Vonnegut, but especially Breakfast of Champions.

 

The books that made me a SciFi/Fantasy nut, the Madeline L'Engle A Wrinkle in Time series. Read them in 5th grade and was never the same.

 

Great book is The Handmaid's Tale. Feminist distopian lit.

 

And Little Women! What! What!

[elric]

hard question and i will probably give diffrent answe if i answer it tomarrow (or 2 hours from now :) ).

 

in no particular order:

 

Amber serie (1-5 ONLY) by roger zelazny

Lord of light by Roger Zelazney

Old man war by jhon scalzy (a modern day and UPGRADED heinlin)

watersheep dawn by Adams

duncton wood by william horwood

hobbit+ Lord of The Ring by J.r.r Tolkien

Ender Game by orson scott card

Earthsea trilogy by Ursula K Le Guin

Pern serie by Anne Mcaffrey

Holmes short stories by Sir Arthur Conen Doyle

Broadway short stories by Daymon Ranion

Dengerous vision anthology by Harlen Elison (best sci fi short story writer EVER !!!! )

[Benganza]

Ben i have to ask. why Harry Potter??

Rowling is just a bad writer and has very flat, one-dimensional characters ( Dursley's, Malfoy, Crabbe, Goyle etc) and the Story, while ok if your 10 years old, couldn't save the books for me as an adult reader.

There were many more things that I didn't like but I don't want to derail this thread.

[Suttree]

Ben i have to ask. why Harry Potter??

Rowling is just a bad writer and has very flat, one-dimensional characters ( Dursley's, Malfoy, Crabbe, Goyle etc) and the Story, while ok if your 10 years old, couldn't save the books for me as an adult reader.

There were many more things that I didn't like but I don't want to derail this thread.

 

I was somewhat surprised anyone asked you to explain. I nodded as if at a self evident truth, as it should be to any DMer.

[Saken]

I would have to say, Magician's Apprentice by Raymond E. Feist.

[Benganza]

I would have to say, Magician's Apprentice by Raymond E. Feist.

The Magician's Apprentice is by Trudi Canavan.

 

Magician: Apprentice is by Raymond E. Feist

[Treebeard]

Fantasy ( and my absolute favourites)

Sillmarilion/ Lord of the rings /Harry Potter ( cant decide )

 

Non fantasy ( the thing a read most)

uh now its hard the first that pop in my brain is :

The Remorseful Day - Colin Dexter

Heat- Ian McEwan

Antikens Historier ( The history of Antiquity)- Alf Henriksson

[Sagacious Lu]

This question is almost to big to answser so I'll try to break it down into pieces.

 

Fantasy:

The Elric Saga

A Song of Ice and Fire

 

Sci fi:

Ringworld

Dune

 

Not sure whether they're sci fi or fantasy:

The Illuminatus Trilogy

American Gods

 

Mystery:

Gorky Park and anything else with Arkady Renko

Any of the Travis McGee books

 

Classics:

War and Peace

The Power and the Glory

The Outlaws of the Marsh

 

Spiritual:

The Tao Te Ching

On the Road ;)

 

 

Ahhhh crap, I knew rthis thread was a bad idea. I still haven't mentioned anything by China Mieville, W.B. Yeats, Charles Bukowski, Livy, Ray Bradbury or Hunter S. Thompson. I give up, the question is just too big :(

[Cody Windle]

I think my favorite book outside of the WoT series would probably be The Redemption of Althalus. For Sci-fi it would be anything in the Ender Series. I love those books. Also I'd have to say that A Brave New World was much better than I would have guessed, I ended up reading it on a whim around my senior year of high school.

 

Another book that I enjoyed was one of the Tom Clancy books. I can't remember which one it was but it made me reach out of the fantasy genre and dive into Mysteries and the like.

[Veracohr]

If I can chose another series as a whole: The Dark Tower.

 

Otherwise, maybe The Mists of Avalon. Or VALIS. Or Ender's Game.

[batcaver]

Sci-Fi/Fantasy - Hmm....maybe "Stranger In A Strange Land", by Robert Heinlein I'm hardly a sci-fi or fantasy junkie, but I guess I've read a fair amount. I can't really think of one I enjoyed reading more than this. Maybe it was the time in my life that I read it.

 

Literature/General Fiction - Probably "White Noise", by Don Delillo. I don't see how anyone could fail to enjoy this book. Well, I guess I do. No, I don't. "The Castle", by Franz Kafka would actually dethrone it for me in terms of sheer awe, but in terms of sheer enjoyment, nothing beats "White Noise" for me. Of the ones people have mentioned, "Blood Meridian" and "The Catcher In The Rye" were simply amazing, and so were lots of others. It's very difficult to pick; I feel like I'm choosing based on my mood as much as anything.

 

Drama/Theater - Beckett is King, but "Night Mother", by Marsha Norman affected me more than any other play I've ever seen or read.

 

Nonfiction - "Amusing Ourselves To Death", by Neil Postman had a big impact on me when I first read it, and it changed the way I looked at a lot of things. Somewhere back there I saw someone talking about a comparison between "1984" and "A Brave New World" and that's essentially what this book is about. He's of the opinion that both were powerful books, but that as far as our current society is concerned, Huxley's vision proved much closer to what's come to pass. A society saturated with entertainment, convenience and technology is far more docile and subdued than one seething beneath an oppressive government regime, and it's a far more subtle form of propaganda at that. "Understanding Media", by Marshall McLuhan and "Straw Dogs", by John Gray were also powerful

 

Journalism - "We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live", by Joan Didion. Her sentences pretty much put to shame anything I've ever tried to write. She has this insightful way of getting at the core of whatever she's writing about that simply impresses the hell out of me. I also like some of David Foster Wallace's pieces.

 

Hey Suttree, since I can see you're a McCarthy fan, have you ever read or seen that play he wrote. "The Sunset Limited"? Next to BM it's by far my favorite thing he's done. HBO's production of it with Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel Jackson was terrific. It's super dark, but I can watch it over and over again.

 

Fun thread. Enjoyed reading everyone's picks so far.