xkcd's favourite 100 books - vote now!

tms · Postby **tms** » Fri Sep 21, 2012 6:01 pm UTC

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said - Philip K. Dick
Prelude to Foundation - Isaac Asimov
A Second Chance at Eden - Peter F. Hamilton
Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C. Clarke
Gateway - Frederik Pohl
Dune - Frank Herbert
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin

UniqueScreenname · Postby **UniqueScreenname** » Sat Sep 22, 2012 1:07 am UTC

UniqueScreenname wrote:
UniqueScreenname wrote:I'm gonna have to trickle them in as I remember.
2. Uglies series - Scott Westerfeld. Best sci-fi series I've ever read.
3. The Giver - Lois Lowry. Probably the first book to make me think while I wasw reading.
4. A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket. Only series where I own all of them. Completely obsessed as a child.
5. The Firm - John Grisham. Love the way it builds.
6. The Client - John Grisham. Usually I hate adult books centered around kids, but I loved this one.
7. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury. I love the way this book builds too.

8. The BFG - Roald Dahl. Best children's book ever.
9. Stargirl - Jerry Spinelli. Nonconformist manifesto.
10. Maniac Magee - Jerry Spinelli. Pro-integration tale through the works of one kid.

11. Thirteen Reasons Why - Jay Asher. This probably should be higher on the list. Read if you want your heart broken.

mathmannix · Postby **mathmannix** » Thu Jan 03, 2013 7:57 pm UTC

1. HGTTG trilogy
2. Tom Clancy's "Jack Ryan"verse series (especially Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, and Rainbow Six)
3. The Call of the Wild / White Fang by Jack London (you can count those separately or together)
4. The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
5. Hercule Poirot series by Agatha Christie
6. I, Robot by Asimov
7. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
8. Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain
9. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
10. Rascal by Sterling North

ahammel · Postby **ahammel** » Thu Jan 03, 2013 8:58 pm UTC

mathmannix wrote:5. Hercule Poirot series by Agatha Christie

Miss Marple 4 Life

XTCamus · Postby **XTCamus** » Fri Jan 18, 2013 6:28 am UTC

serutan wrote:Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
Fountains of Paradise by Arthur c. Clarke.
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Sunset Warrior Trilogy by Eric van Lustbader
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Revelation Space Trilogy by Alastair Reynolds
Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.
Dune (first book ONLY) by Frank Herbert.
Ringworld by Larry Niven

Wow, the correlation here makes me think we were born within about a year of each other.. 1960 - 1962? I would add A Scanner Darkly by Phillip K. Dick, The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, Be Here Now by Ram Dass, Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke's, The Cyberiad by Stanislow Lem, and The Dispossesed by Ursala K. LeGuin.

teenidle · Postby **teenidle** » Sat Jun 22, 2013 1:54 pm UTC

hmm let's see if i have 20 favorite books.

series
1. Foundation by Isaac Asimov¹
2. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman²
3. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling³
4. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin⁴
5. The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny⁵
6. Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle⁶
7. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (and Through the Looking-Glass) by Lewis Carroll⁷
8. Robot series by Isaac Asimov⁸
9. ⁹
10. ¹⁰

not series
11. Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut¹¹
12. Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder¹²
13. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand¹³
14. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro¹⁴
15. Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz¹⁵
16. ¹⁶
17. ¹⁷
18. ¹⁸
Notes

Spoiler:

Adacore · Postby **Adacore** » Mon Jun 24, 2013 12:51 am UTC

Updated list! Currently runs to 564 books, 92 with three or more votes. teenidle - I didn't add any of the books mentioned in your footnotes (The Hunger Games, Lolita, e.g.), if you want me to, let me know. I think you're correct on the series-ness of Alice in Wonderland / Looking Glass, so I'll probably go through the thread again to tally votes for both of them as if they're a series at some point soon.

Spoiler:

freakish777 · Postby **freakish777** » Thu Dec 19, 2013 4:11 pm UTC

Some notes on your list:

2 of the William Gibson books with 1 vote each both belong to his Modern Trilogy (Pattern Recoginition, Spook Country, Zero History). They should be combined to get into the 2 vote category for the Trilogy.

The following 2 books are NON Fiction:
Head First Design Patterns by Eric Freeman, et. al. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_First_(book_series)
Freakonomics by Stephen Levitt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freakonomics

The list is supposed to be Fiction only, yes?

Adacore · Postby **Adacore** » Thu Dec 19, 2013 11:14 pm UTC

Thanks, I'll fix that the next time I redo the list (if anyone new ever adds more votes).

cemper93 · Postby **cemper93** » Sat Dec 28, 2013 1:58 am UTC

In no particular order:

Walter Moers - Zamonia series
Haruki Murakami - Hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world
Hermann Hesse - Der Steppenwolf
Joseph Heller - Catch-22
Arthur Clarke - The city and the stars
Georg Büchner - Woyzeck
Nancy Farmer - The house of the scorpion
Oscar Wilde - The picture of Dorian Gray

You also have two novels from Orson Scott Card's Ender series listed as separate entries (Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead).

Envelope Generator · Postby **Envelope Generator** » Sat Dec 28, 2013 10:46 am UTC

Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil
Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber
Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Fedor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
William Gaddis, The Recognitions
Kawabata Yasunari, The Old Capital

Aiwendil · Postby **Aiwendil** » Sat Dec 28, 2013 11:49 pm UTC

You also have two novels from Orson Scott Card's Ender series listed as separate entries (Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead).

That's intentional. There are a bunch of people (including me) who wanted to vote for Ender's Game, but not the series as a whole.

robstevson · Postby **robstevson** » Wed Feb 19, 2014 6:47 am UTC

Two suggestions the Culture books of Iain M Banks, Baroque cycle, Neal Stephenson. And Earthsea, Ursula K Leguin + plus her Left hand of darkness. Oh, more than two.

DireKobold · Postby **DireKobold** » Thu Feb 27, 2014 12:04 am UTC

Ender's Game
The Diamond Age Stephenson
Dune
Lolita
Mother Night Vonnegut
Silmarillion
Catch-22
Graveyard Book Gaiman
American Gods
To Kill a Mockingbird
Good Omens
Lord of the Rings
Hamlet
Starship Troopers
The Man in the High Castle
Earthsea Series
The Worthing Saga OSC
Zones of Thought Series Vernor Vinge
Mistborn Trilogy
Once and Future King T.H. White

I may have missed this answer, but it looks like this list is restricted to fiction?

Yablo · Postby **Yablo** » Thu Mar 27, 2014 6:00 pm UTC

Lemme see if I have twenty favorites (in no particular order):

1. The Three Musketeers - Dumas
2. Catch-22 - Heller
3. The Sun Also Rises - Hemmingway
4. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series) - Adams
5. Breakfast of Champions - Vonnegut
6. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Wilde
7. Brave New World - Huxley
8. Les Liaisons Dangereuses - de Laclos
9. The Chronicles of Narnia - Lewis
10. Watership Down - Adams
11. Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
12. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Kesey
13. Oliver Twist - Dickens
14. Food of the Gods - Wells
15. Dragonlance Chronicles - Weis & Hickman
16. Illuminatus! Trilogy - Shea & Wilson
17. The Symposium - Plato
18. The Pickwick Papers - Dickens
19. Candide - Voltaire
20. The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald

Ilyo · Postby **Ilyo** » Mon May 26, 2014 8:58 pm UTC

Gonna just toss out the top ten books on my mind at the moment. No particular order, unless the order that I recall them matters.

1. Dead souls, Gogol (Part 1 and 2, though 2 is unfinished it is a great lesson in why editors are needed)
2. Electronic communication, Shrader (This list needs more outdated textbooks)
3. Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
4. The idiot, Dostoevsky
5. dessert solitaire, Edward Abbey
6. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
7. Das Kapital, Karl Marx
8. Deathworld, Harry Harrison
9. Lord of the Rings, Tolkein
10. The places you will go, Dr.Seuss

RabbitWho · Postby **RabbitWho** » Mon Dec 15, 2014 1:01 pm UTC

We can vote for 20! and here I was trying to narrow it down to 10, all that pain for no reason. Limit of one book per author imposed.
In no order (except the first 10 are the first 10)

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
The Call of the Wild - Jack London
The Plague - Albert Camus
Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Dark - John McGahern
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthonre

We - Yevgeny Zamyatin (if 1984 is on your list you have to read We, without which there would be no 1984)
Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell
The Happy Prince and other tales - Oscar Wilde
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
The Butcher Boy - Patrick McCabe
Old School - Tobiass Wolff
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse

I have a goodreads account! https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/8 ... ng&order=d
Edit: Oh jee... Watership Down.. which book do I delete to make space for Watership Down?

Adacore · Postby **Adacore** » Tue Dec 16, 2014 12:25 am UTC

List update time. And big news, everyone - this update neatly provides us for (I think) the first time with an actual top 100! In that there are exactly 100 books with three or more votes. Also, there are exactly 50 books with five or more votes, and exactly 30 books with seven or more votes. It all worked out remarkably neatly, which has made me irrationally happy.

I'm certain there are at least a couple of non-fiction books still in the 1-vote section, maybe I'll excise them later.

Spoiler:

The Fantasist · Postby **The Fantasist** » Tue Apr 28, 2015 1:07 am UTC

DireKobold wrote:Zones of Thought Series Vernor Vinge

Somebody else read them! Somebody else read them! Best books ever and so ignored!

nicklikesfire · Postby **nicklikesfire** » Sat Jun 13, 2015 8:22 pm UTC

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
American Psycho - Brett Easton Ellis
Mars Trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson

suriya · Postby **suriya** » Tue Nov 10, 2015 9:28 pm UTC

Not in order of preference:
Robot Series, Isaac Asimov.
The Gods Themselves, ditto.
Black Widowers Series, ditto.
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman.
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien.
Rama Series, Arhur C. Clarke.
The Fountains of Paradise, ditto.
Harry Potter Series, Joanne K. Rowling.
Hitchhiker Series, Douglas Adams.
In Death Series, J.D. Robb.
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein.
Future History Series, ditto.
Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder.
Biting the Sun, Tanith Lee.
Father Brown Series, Gilbert K. Chesterton.
Hercule Poirot Series, Agatha Christie.
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell.
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes.
The Stone and the Flute, Hans Bemmann.
Thursday Next Series, Jasper Fforde.

ian · Postby **ian** » Fri Nov 20, 2015 9:33 am UTC

That moment when you think about replying to a thread and then realise you actually started it five years ago (though it looks like I never actually submitted my own list)

Thanks Adacore for actually putting in the work!

dclxvi · Postby **dclxvi** » Tue Feb 21, 2017 2:51 am UTC

Anatomy of Melancholy - Robert Burton
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
Dubliners - James Joyce
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon
Ill Fares the Land - Tony Judt
History of Madness - Michel Foucault
The Histories - Herodotus

Just some that come to mind.

Soupspoon · Postby **Soupspoon** » Tue Feb 21, 2017 1:34 pm UTC

Took far too long on the first page to get Discworld mentioned (and then mixed up Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, long before Small Gods was mentioned).

I decided I shall alternate series and single books. And not overvote Pratchett.

But because I think it needs it voting up Discworld series (Pratchett), and not touching Potter (modern upstart!) or Xanth (good in parts, and also high in my younger self's library borrowing, but not considered votable).

Single book: Anathem (Neal Stephenson) as a wildcard in the Stephenson oevre.

Series: Mission Earth (Hubbard) - that's ten books, different from Battlefield Earth (and I'm also not a $¢i€nt€o£ogi$t) and... questionable in its internal moralities... but quite a work of imagination.

Wheelers (Jack Cohen/Ian Stewart) - their Science Of Discworld series collaboration with Pterry (though I notice as mentioned elsewhere) is really either non-Fiction (their parts) or actually an upvote for Discworld (his parts), but I'll happily mention their own SF novels.

The Foundation series (Asimov) and maybe his successor authors, but that's arguable.

Heaven (Cohen/Stewart) - Maybe a sequel to Wheelers, but really the squid central hero and overwhelmingly non-anthropocentric cast-list makes it something else.

The Ancillary series (Ann Leckie) - (Ancillary) Sword, Justice and Mercy. Interesting concepts.

Too much SF&F... Red Storm Rising (Tom Clancy) not a Ryanverse (haven't decided whether to upvote that yet... maybe yet to come on this list, maybe not), but an "alternative present" novel, at least back when it was published. The same 'massive thinking' that it appears I like in my books, but "in real life" this time.

So... go on then, the Ryanverse set (Clancy). That was a quicker decision than I thought it might be.

Single book, single book... Darnit, my resolution to alternate. The ones I remember were generally good enough to be the starter of series (that I shall then painfully have to decline to mention here)... Family Bites (Lisa Williams)... You've never heard of it, no doubt, but it was written by someone I know (called Lisa Williams, obviously; at least IRL) and I'm gonna mention it even though you're never going to be reading it yourselves, if you haven't already.

Series, coming back to Pratchett, The Nomes trilogy (Pterry), children's/fantasy/modern/hints-of-scifi thing.

Strata (Pratchett again) - standalone. Not "Discworld series" but the proto-Discworld 'original'.

Red/Green/Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson) - it appears I'm back in the "world designer" rut, and back to SF again.

(13... room for some more, but only three full series from the long queue of candidates, and my need for solo books is hard to dredge up, for aforementioned reasons)

The Difference Engine (Sterling/Gibson) Alt-history steampunk, and partly to obliquely make up for no mention of Neal Stephensons book The Diamond Age because I can't work out whether that groups with Snow Crash and perhaps even Cryptonomicon as a semi-series (honourable mentions to these three, even if they aren't getting the votes I think they deserve).

Dirk Gently set (Adams), whilst noting that H2G2 already has enough love already, and doesn't need my special recommendation quite so much.

Nation (Pratchett) - ITMA! But totally poignant. (And I shall refrain from putting The Carpet People, Dark Side Of The Sun, even Dodger, into this list. No, I haven't forgotten The Unadulterated Cat, with whossisname Joliffe.)

The Survivalist series (Jerry Ahern) - Seriously, a strange mix, for me, but almost thirty pulp-style novels that combine attention-to-detail gun/militaria-porn (a sort of poor-man's Clancy) with an increasingly outrageous alternate-present-and-into-the-future thing that must have been Adamsian in its "what next? Well, how about..." nature, in the for want of a better term) 'story arc'.

Oh, go on, then. I have to honour Good Omens (Pratchett/Gaiman), and I would have instead honoured Gaiman for Neverwhere had I ever read it rather than only experienced it as TV version, Radio play(s!), Radio reading instead.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/Great Glass Elevator (Roald Dahl) - making me wonder why I didn't include any other Dahl books as singulars, only these two as a 'series'.

Microserfs (Douglas Coupland) was very influential to me at one point in my career, so deserves a mention, though I haven't reread it for over a decade... It's over there on my shelves, regardless.

Some of the serieseseses not voted for because they didn't quite make it are Narnia (good fun, but I'm no longer as enamoured; as a rather strange contrast to Mission Earth's inclusion!), Arthur C's 2001+ books, Asimov's Susan Calvin/Caves/Spacers/Empire/etc pre-Foundation sets, the Pratchett/Baxter Long {Earth/Mars/War/Utopia} set (because Sir Terrence, OBE, being mentioned yet again seems even to me to be stalker-level obsession), Tolkien (confusing what to group, and dare I say that I didn't get on with the Silmarillian), Alice {Wonderland/Looking-Glass} (I actually used to be able to quote verbatim but have not touched for too long), a number of the Stephen Baxter trilogies, Enid Blyton (various, but Magic Faraway Tree books prominently, as childhood staples)...

I will, of course recall others, once I actually go and have a glance at my extensive bookshelves, but for some reason I'm driven to make a snap decision straight from memory (surely meaning something more important than analysing dust-depths in a Holmesian (Conan Doyle! Argh!) fashion), with all its inherent faults.

Pre-posting edit: Bear/Brin/Bradbury should have been mentioned, and for some reason now I'm recalling authors alliteratively, but I can't work out which (Eon, Earth, Fahrenheit 451, ..?) would supplant which already listed.

trpmb6 · Postby **trpmb6** » Tue Jul 18, 2017 2:03 pm UTC

It saddens me that the Sword of Truth series never made it to the list. That book series shaped my morals like none other could when I was in my teens. Kept me out of trouble for sure. I've probably re-read the whole series 6 or 7 times now. And Terry Goodkind is still putting books out for it.

In no particular order;

Sword of Truth Series
Sword of Shannara Series
Atlas Shrugged
The Martian
The Foundation Series
The Hatchet (and the follow on sequels) by Gary Paulsen
A Song of Ice and Fire Series

LaserGuy · Postby **LaserGuy** » Wed Aug 02, 2017 6:58 pm UTC

Sword of Truth makes a couple of appearances over in the Worst/Overrated thread.

They're definitely books that don't improve with age. I had liked them as a teenager well enough, but rereading them as an adult, they're really quite spectacularly bad--both the writing and the philosophy.

trpmb6 · Postby **trpmb6** » Thu Aug 03, 2017 8:05 pm UTC

LaserGuy wrote:Sword of Truth makes a couple of appearances over in the Worst/Overrated thread.

They're definitely books that don't improve with age. I had liked them as a teenager well enough, but rereading them as an adult, they're really quite spectacularly bad--both the writing and the philosophy.

Perhaps that's because Goodkind has a conservative leaning viewpoint? (clearly from my list I have conservative leanings)

I can't put them down at any rate. My wife knows I'll be incognito for a day when i get a new one. (bought the newest one earlier this year with the expectation I'd read it on a business trip I was heading on. Ended up finishing it before I even got to the airport)

I'll admit it's written more for that mid to late teens age group but that's what makes it such an easy speed read.

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