David Vella - Favorite Literature
One more comment; in order to save space I have refrained from including on the following list mathematical or other scientific treatises & textbooks, though I may include other works related to those fields.
J.R.R.Tolkien
(The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit)
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(The Brothers Karamazov) Another Dostoevsky link.
Herman Hesse
(Narcissus & Goldmund, Steppenwolf, Magister Ludi, Demian)
Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)
Aldous Huxley
(Island, The Doors of Perception)
Issac Asimov
(Fantastic Voyage)
Philip Jose Farmer (To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat,
The Dark Design, The Magic Labyrinth, Gods of Riverworld)
Robert
Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress)
Kurt Vonnegut
(Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions)
Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)
Jack Kerouac (On the Road)
Another Kerouac Link.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test)
Arthur C.
Clarke (2001 - A Space Oddysey, Against the Fall of Night)
Colin Wilson
(The Philosopher's Stone)
Raymond Chandler
(The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely)
H.G.Wells
(The Time Machine, The Invisible Man)
Michael Crichton
(Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain)
Agatha Christie
(Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None)
H.P.Lovecraft
(From Beyond, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath)
Another HPL link.
Olaf Stapleton (Starmaker - thanks to Jamie MacCalman, wherever you are!) Not too
much exists on the web about Stapleton, but try here
or here.
Ram Dass (Be Here Now, The Only Dance There Is)
Lewis Carroll
(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass)
Fritz Capra (The Tao of Physics)
John Casti (Paradigms Lost, Five Golden Rules)
Most Over-rated: Robert James Waller, the guy that wrote
The Bridges of Madison County. It's hard to believe that Clint Eastwood
would associate himself with a movie based on this mediocre book.
The following authors (and my choices for their best works, based on my in many cases incomplete sampling of their work) deserve mention as runners-up to my list of first choices above.
Sue Grafton (G is for Gumshoe,
F is for Fugitive, B is for Burglar, A is for Alibi, J is for Judgement)
Robert Pirsig
(Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
Alan Watts
(The Book)
Douglas Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, & Bach)
Larry Niven
(Ringworld, The Integral Trees)
Ray
Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man)
Henry David Thoreau
(Walden, On Civil Disobediance)
Patricia
Cornwell (Body of Evidence)
Frank Herbert (Dune, Dune Messiah But
they made a real hack job out of the movie, though!)
William Gibson (The Burning Crome collection, including Johnny Mnemonic,
The Belonging Kind, Red Star Winter Orbit, Dogfight, & Burning Chrome and a couple of others that
made less of an impression on me. Thanks to Rebecca Bilbro for introducing me to this essential cyberpunk
writer. After reading Gibson's work, one can understand where movies like "Terminator" came from.)
Richard Adams (
Watership Down)
Robert Ludlum (The Bourne Identitiy, the Matarese Circle)
Emmet Grogan (Ringolevio - thanks to Blaise Heltai, wherever you are!)
Sidney Sheldon (If Tomorrow Comes)
T.S.Eliot
(Favorite Poem: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
Allen Ginsberg
(Favorite Poem: Howl,
A Supermarket in California)
Edgar Allen Poe (Favorite Poem: The Raven)
