What is the best book you ever read?

Def top 3 for me.

Along with "Grapes Of Wraith" and "Cry, The Beloved Country".

Henry Ford - The International jewish

Oh yeah, "The Kybalion" by Three Initiates is on the short list, this book resonated with me more than any other, like I had read it in another lifetime.

Watchers - Dean Koontz
The Hot Zone - Richard Preston

Anything by Franz Kafka, Sartre and Camus

tempted to say the bible but i don't really like trolling.

Bruce Lee - Tao of Jeet Kune Do.

The aphorisms in the first section are boss.

also, the majority of Nietzsche's work.

Yeah that was good too.

Sometimes a work of fiction can have a mighty influence on your life. The novel "The Penitent" by Isaac Singer influenced me to become a vegetarian.

Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

Anything by JD Salinger

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand (holy shit)

The Stranger - Albert Camus

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

For Whom The Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Animal Farm - George Orwell

"Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury.

A series of books actually. The Dark Tower series by Stephen King

Speaker for the Dead was better.

cosmic trigger by RAW

I just read BEN HUR. There is an interesting history regarding the author Lew Wallace. He was a civil war general who saved Washington from invasion by Gen. Early at the battle of Monancy in Maryland, Gov. of New Mexico involved with Billy the Kid/Lincoln County wars (watch Young Guns 1 and 2), and Ambassador to Turkey.

BEN HUR was the first novel that many households in the US owned in the 1870s. It was a stage play and was made in a movie twice before the version everyone knows starring Charleton Heston.

Wallace said he wrote the book in order to learn more about his Christian faith. I really enjoyed the story and his version of the quest of the Magi starts the book. It was written in the Victorian style very formal. I enjoyed it.

lol, I've always felt that way about fiction. Totally get it.

However, I like poetry and Shakespeare.

I have read a handful of fiction books. I like anything Mark Twain.

James Herriot was good too.

you are one messed up dude. Been there done that.

Find God.

Best book: the holy Quran!

try reading zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
it is mind expanding
a great read

I have resolved myself to reading this and have just started.

Why didn't people "understand" it? Is it symbolic of something? Or is it like how people don't understand Shakespeare or the King James Version of the Bible - the craftiness of the words is too much for 'em?

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Well, yes, there's TONS of symbolism through out the book, but that's not what I meant. People certainly understood symbolism back when it was written, that was nothing new, though they may not have gotten it all or realized just how deep he was going with it at the time.

Melville is very loose with structure, it's very experimental in that regard, very modern. There are chapters within the novel that are rendered in the form of a play with characters, dialogue and stage directions. Some chapters run barely a page, while others can be quite long. One of the longer chapters, Cetology, a digression coming right in the middle of the narrative, is mostly just an essay discussing all of the then extent knowledge biologists had about the various whale species. In the 1850's when the book came out, people weren't used to such extravagances in form and structure, or lack there of. I think a lot of people just disregarded it as sloppy or strange. The deeper you get into the novel, the more you'll understand what I mean that it feels very modern in a lot of ways for a book that is more than 160 years old. In its own time I think most people just didn't know what to make of it.

The Tales of Alvin Maker by Orson Scott Card.

The Ringing Cedars of Russia: Anastasia.

The Underground Empire

true story about three different smuggling groups one of which was right here in ft laud and this guy donald steinberg made the cover of time magazine back in the mid to late seventies and was bringing one third of all the pot being smuggled into the US.

they made so much money they couldn't count it, they had to weigh it.

this book is over a thousand pages.

Atlas Shrugged, The Odyssey, The Art of War

The series A Song of Ice and Fire is pretty good too.

Earth Abides

The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh - Mark Roskill

Whispers From The Other Shore - Ravi Ravindra