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List your favourite books or the books you wish you could burn

PostPosted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 3:51 pm
by kat-su-chan
So I read a lot of classics and old books. But oh well. here she goes!
1984(LOVED)
life of pie(LOVED)
the sound and the fury
anything by jane austen....
emma
pride and prejudice
sense and sensibility
Mansfield park
persuasion (LOVED)
Northanger abbey
The Picture of Dorian Grey (LOVED)
Middle March - george elliot maybe???
Gone with the Wind
Oryx and Crake - margaret atwood
And old wive's tale

and that's all I can think of off the top of my head :P
So, tell me yours! ^^

PostPosted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 11:04 pm
by Fish and Chips
Image

PostPosted: Fri Jan 04, 2008 1:38 pm
by mitsuki lover
Books I love:
Huckleberry Finn
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
The Innocent's Abroad
The Union Reader
The Confederate Reader
An Illustrated Biography of Abraham Lincoln
Custer And The Battle of the Little Bighorn
Maureen Birnbaum,Barbarian Swordsperson
Mathemagics
A Princess of Mars and the entire Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Creed or Chaos
Mornings on Horseback
A Treasury of Royal Scandals
The Lives of Dax
M.Y.T.H.Inc. series
Beowulf
The Song of Hiawatha
Pardon My Blooper
Kids Say The Darnedst Things
Kids Still Say The Darnedst Things
The Cartoon History of the Universe vol. 1
The Pre-History of the Far Side
The Gospel According To Peanuts
The Parables of Peanuts
Snoopy vs. The Red Baron
Happiness is a Warm Puppy
Out of Boneville
The Great Cow Race
The Death And Life of Superman
Knightfall

PostPosted: Sat Jan 05, 2008 7:35 am
by Etoh*the*Greato
Books I wish I could burn? Here: The Color Purple and The Secret. Or anything by Sylvia Brown.

PostPosted: Sun Jan 06, 2008 7:37 pm
by USSRGirl
Blackrose, I'd hate to say this but... I don't think anime has been legally classified as literature yet. :P Though many of us are prayin' on it.

Oooh! A 1984 fan! :grin:

Lessee... here's a few that come to mind at the moment...

Books I loved:

C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy (especially That Hideous Strength)

Neverending Story

1984

Farenheit 451

Animal Farm

Mirror in the Mirror

Till We Have Faces

Pilgrim's Regress

Narnia (okay, yes, my whole stinkin' list is dictator books and Lewis books... geez)

Howl's Moving Castle

Lord of the Rings

Books that I wish I could burn (Disclaimer: The following literary blacklist is spoiler tagged for the possibility of inciting violent sentiments, undying rage, and overall poutyness on random occassion. Not reccomended to those with a series of heart related problems, pregnant women, children under the age of 12, or those who easily sensitive to dry sarcasm and/or uncuth literary bashing unworthy of sophisticated critics or bleeding heart fans.)

[spoiler]

Alice in Wonderland (Gaaah... my brain... it hurts)

To Kill a Mockingbird (Ee gads! 300+ pages of southern drawl!)

The Hobbit (... 'Nuff said)

A Wizard of Earthsea (Can't speak for the whole series here, but this seemed to be one of those rare, mystifying books lacking villains, supporting characters, climax, battles, romance, mystery, and... well... plot... of any kind)

Left Behind (It made me wish to go puke in a trash can)

Gone With the Wind (Ee gads! Not again!!!)

Outcast of Redwall (Mixed feelings here since it's been ages since I read it and I did actually like the others in the series, but at the time the pessimistic message bugged me)

Aesop's Fables (Moralistic bane of my third grade existence)

The Collective Poetic Miseries of Mr. Shel Silverstein (Maddening bane of my fourth grade existence)

Any and all westerns/southern fiction and the works of Johnathan Wesley (hated with irrational predjudice... because I can.)
[/spoiler]

PostPosted: Sun Jan 06, 2008 11:04 pm
by Sheenar
I also love a lot of classic literature (and others):
Schindler's List
1984 (didn't quite finish it though)
A Tale of Two Cities
Great Expectations
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Black Beauty
A Dog Called Kitty
"A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift
The Odyssey
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
James Herriot's books about his veterinary practice in England: (All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Things Wise and Wonderful, etc.)
Old Yeller (Yes, I cried.)
Snot Stew
Amelia Bedelia
Kitten's First Full Moon
Hank the Cow Dog
A Cricket in Times Square
The Chronicles of Narnia
Mere Christianity
The Lord of the Rings series
The Silmarillion (also one I didn't quite finish -but I plan to)
The Harry Potter series
The Call of the Wild
Where the Red Fern Grows
Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
And there are probably quite a few others...

Books I wish I could burn:
my Chemistry textbook (but I sold it back for money):lol:
Absalom, Absalom and As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (had to read these for American lit. --wound up using ENotes for these --just couldn't finish.)
Bless Me Ultima (another book I had to read for class in high school --hated it --sacriligeous and lots of cursing/bad content).
The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy (another book I had to read in college --one of the most depressing things ever)
This book I found when I worked at the library --"Survival of the Unfittest" --saying basically that people with disabilities/special needs should be culled from the genetic pool of the country --made me pretty angry

PostPosted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 1:09 am
by Warrior 4 Jesus
The Oath
The Visitation
This Present Darkness/Piercing the Darkness
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Dark Tower and other stories
Heaven's Wager
Blessed Child
Blink
Obsessed
Thr3e
Black
Red
White
Showdown
Saint
Various Star Wars novels
Various Stephen Lawhead novels
Northern Lights
Notes from the Underground
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Big Four
Murder on the Orient Express
The Harry Potter series
The Great Divorce
The Screwtape Letters
The Face
Odd Thomas
The BFG

and many, many others.

PostPosted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 2:55 pm
by Monkey J. Luffy
I'll let you guess if ti's burn or love: His dark materials

PostPosted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 4:47 pm
by Warrior 4 Jesus
Wouldn't have much of an idea. You may have enjoyed the first two books, but I doubt you enjoyed the third book. Burn?

PostPosted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 4:58 pm
by kat-su-chan
anybody read secret life of bees?

PostPosted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 3:30 pm
by Taliesin
I want to burn The Heart of Darkness. Evil book. Evil.

PostPosted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 4:05 pm
by Nate
I wouldn't want to burn any book as it makes me think, would I want anyone to burn the Bible, even if they didn't agree with the message? No, I wouldn't, and as this is true, I would extend the same respect to any written work even if I didn't agree with it.

Censorship is never good, ever.

This post brought to you by the "Nate taking a semi-serious thread way too seriously" foundation.

PostPosted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 6:06 am
by Technomancer
Great Books
Cosmos by Carl Sagan
Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
Civilization by Sir Kenneth Clark
The Ascent of Man by Jacob Brownoski

Loathsome Books
Left Behind by Lahaye and Jenkins
Night of January 16th by Ayn Rand
anything by Terry Goodkind

PostPosted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 9:14 am
by Sheenar
Taliesin (post: 1191115) wrote:I want to burn The Heart of Darkness. Evil book. Evil.


Amen to that! It has good themes in it (corruption of man, the "emissary of light", etc.), but it's still a hard book to read. I've had to read it twice for school...Yuck.

PostPosted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 3:49 am
by the_wolfs_howl
Blanks denote the books I can't remember the author of.

Favourite Books
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling (all seven - especially the second and seventh)
Abhorsen/Old Kingdom trilogy by Garth Nix (Sabriel, Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr, Abhorsen)
almost anything written by Garth Nix
anything written by Annie Dillard
anything written by Avi
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Bridge to Terabithia by ______
The Indian in the Cupboard by ______
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Detectives in Togas by _____
Matilda by Roald Dahl
any short story written by Roald Dahl


Books I Wish I Could Burn
His Dark Materials: The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
The Flames of Rome by ______ (fufufu...the irony)
parts of Eldest by Christopher Paolini
parts of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan

PostPosted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 9:53 am
by kat-su-chan
I'd like to burn the wars by timothy findley. or at least get it out of the Canadian cirriculum. Definately not high school reading material.
I just don't get education systems these days...
We can read about homosexual acts in great detail, and every possible curse word in existance. About a girl getting high a lot and drinking and her disfunctional life. About how terrible Mennonite communities are, but we can't watch 'The Burning Bed' (really old movie about spousal abuse/abuse to women) because it's unnacceptable...
Ugh.

PostPosted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 12:16 pm
by Mr. SmartyPants
Book burning is stupid. Anyone one of you who wants to burn a book should then tolerate someone burning the Bible.

PostPosted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 1:47 pm
by kat-su-chan
I'd juuust like to let everyone know I was joking about the book burning in the title, and in general too. Uhm, yeh. It was more of a joke. To me it's more like, oh I hate this book so much it's about to spontaneously combust (thats extreme hatred right there I tell you...true story true story ;))

PostPosted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 2:06 pm
by Ashley
Why is everyone assuming that book burning = Bible burning? Can't you just hate a book enough to want to see it burn without implying you want to burn every single copy and destroy the record of its existance?

Anyway, having said that:

Ashley's List of Loathsome Literature
Anthem by Ayn Rand
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellis
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Introduction to Attic Greek XD
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant

PostPosted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 2:35 pm
by USSRGirl
-____O Eh... yeah seriously. I don't think anyone here was moved enough by the funny title to join the Farenheit fire patrol just yet, MSP. The Bible is not synonymous with burned books either. o.0;; But perhaps one should really find something else to do... other than analyze threads in such great... eh... detail? *shrugs*

That being said... Left Behind and Mockingbird loathers unite! But the worst are those books that start out really good and then go ka-poof after you already built up the anticipation for like 300 pages.

PostPosted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 6:45 pm
by kat-su-chan
Ashley (post: 1191621) wrote:Why is everyone assuming that book burning = Bible burning? Can't you just hate a book enough to want to see it burn without implying you want to burn every single copy and destroy the record of its existance?


precisely

PostPosted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 6:57 pm
by Htom Sirveaux
Books that are Awesome:
-The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King
-The Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett
-An Inconvenient Book by Glenn Beck
-[color="Blue"]House[/color] of Leaves and [color="Orange"]O[/color]nly Rev[color="Orange"]o[/color]luti[color="orange"]o[/color]ns by Mark Z. Danielewski

Books that need to die:
-The Dragonlance books by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
-My Life by Bill Clinton (simply because it's the worst autobiography title ever)
-Everything Stephen King has written post-Dark Tower (he poured his last few ounces of talent into finishing that series)
-Hannibal and Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris

PostPosted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 8:27 am
by Ashley
Oh I forgot: The Da Vinci Code. NOT because I was terrified of it as a conservative evangelical, but because the writing was ATROCIOUS. C'mon. Every other sentence was "oh look, I've been to Paris, ha ha!" and I was like, "yes, I've been there, too. Get on with it." And then the end...what a let down. </rant>

PostPosted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 9:36 am
by Kkun
Mr. SmartyPants (post: 1191590) wrote:Book burning is stupid. Anyone one of you who wants to burn a book should then tolerate someone burning the Bible.



HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Ryan, you're so funny. You should go into comedy.

Ashley, your list also makes me cry. Great Expectations and David Copperfield? ._. Why are there so many people who find Dickens intolerable? I adore his writing.

As for books I loved, the usuals like Chronicles of Narnia (and Lewis' non-fiction works as well), Lord of the Rings (and Tolkien's pre and post LotR novels), Ender's Game, make the cut. Dickens' Great Expectations is up there. G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. Donald Miller's theological (ish) writings such as Blue Like Jazz and Searching for God Knows What are some of my favorites. Also, I enjoy many of the post-film Star Wars novels greatly. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is a fascinating look at the Vietnam War told in a fractured, postmodernist style. Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Andrew Murray's Humility. Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, though that's a short story more than a book.

Books I'd Like to Set Fire To:
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth is essentially the near-pr0nographic ranting of a neurotic Jew in literary form...there is a great deal more to it than that, but I don't consider the extreme perversity of it worth slogging through to get to its message...and if you're wondering why I read it, it was for a class.
Regeneration by Pat Barker. I can't stand this book. At all. Maybe if I read the sequel and the final part, it will reveal itself as more enjoyable to me as I will understand the whole but until that time, I don't think so.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. This book needs to fall apart.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.

This post is littered with horrible grammar and punctuation, but I am in a hurry. There are other books that I adore and others that I despise, but those are the freshest in my mind. I'll come up with more later.

PostPosted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 1:10 pm
by EricTheFred
Taliesin (post: 1191115) wrote:I want to burn The Heart of Darkness. Evil book. Evil.


Is this the great literary classic by Joseph Conrad, or some other book? I found it heart-rending (and some one else found it good enough to re-set in the Vietnam War and call "Apocalypse Now") but Evil?

PostPosted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 1:52 pm
by Kkun
EricTheFred (post: 1192098) wrote:Is this the great literary classic by Joseph Conrad, or some other book? I found it heart-rending (and some one else found it good enough to re-set in the Vietnam War and call "Apocalypse Now") but Evil?


Heart of Darkness is not evil, I agree.

EDIT: I re-read my post and that could cause trouble. I took it down out of the interest of not starting anything. I was kind of shooting my mouth off (or my fingers, as it were) as I am often guilty of doing.

PostPosted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 2:30 pm
by Ashley
People think Heart of Darkness is racist because people think the British Empire/impericism was racist.

KKun wrote:Ashley, your list also makes me cry. Great Expectations and David Copperfield? ._. Why are there so many people who find Dickens intolerable? I adore his writing.

That last sentence makes me want to cry. I\'ve never liked Charles Dickens and never understood why anyone else did. But to be fair, I don\'t care for Tolkien, Scott, or anyone else who takes 50 million years to write a paragraph (except maybe Jane Austen).

PostPosted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 4:11 pm
by Kkun
Ashley wrote:That last sentence makes me want to cry. I\'ve never liked Charles Dickens and never understood why anyone else did. But to be fair, I don\'t care for Tolkien, Scott, or anyone else who takes 50 million years to write a paragraph (except maybe Jane Austen).


Well, that's fair, I guess. Different strokes and all that...but I still love Dickens.

PostPosted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 4:43 pm
by Warrior 4 Jesus
I'm not big on the 'too many words used to write something' authors either Ashley. But Jane Austen over Tolkien? Austen is heavy and sickeningly polite, Tolkien is a difficult read at times but never as verbose as Austen.
Interesting...

PostPosted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 4:53 pm
by Radical Dreamer
Kkun (post: 1192044) wrote:Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. This book needs to fall apart.


Oh my gosh, I agree so much. XD I had to read that book in my senior year of high school. Didn't like a single page (that I read--the last half all blurred together while I skimmed it. XD).

As for my own list:

Books I love:

The Giver by Lois Lowry
Peter Pan by JM Barrie
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Books I hated:

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (I'm sorry. This man bored me to death. XD)
Across Five Aprils (I forget the author. I was so bored with this book, though. XD)
The Red Badge of Courage (I forget the author here, too.)
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway (Bored to tears. XD)
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (...Well actually, I didn't make it past page 13. XD)
The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (I don't know what happened. I guess I'm just such a huge fan of the movie that the book was a huge letdown for me. XD)

Books I've enjoyed, but have yet to finish:

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern
The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (...and the rest XD) by J.K. Rowling