What are your 5 favorite books of all time?

[Pyperkub]

3. The List of 7 - Mark Frost

That one doesn't make my list but I remember it as surprisingly good.

I have read that as well. The strange thing is Mark Frost made his name writing books about golf. At least one of which has been made into a movie. The Greatest Game Ever Played.

Well, actually he made his name writing for Twin Peaks as co-creator, as well as Hill Street Blues. The golf books were much, much later.

[Scuzz]

The Civil War by Shelby Foote
I have read a lot of Civil War books, and this is special.

I'd heard of Shelby Foote, but never read his books on the Civil War. A few hours into Vol. 1 now, and greatly enjoying the detail provided and writing style.

Thanks for the recommendation.

I can't say he is the greatest Civil War historian, and I know others have said he leans to far to the south, but his writing style and story telling are excellent.

[Scuzz]

3. The List of 7 - Mark Frost

That one doesn't make my list but I remember it as surprisingly good.

I have read that as well. The strange thing is Mark Frost made his name writing books about golf. At least one of which has been made into a movie. The Greatest Game Ever Played.

Well, actually he made his name writing for Twin Peaks as co-creator, as well as Hill Street Blues. The golf books were much, much later.

I didn't know that, or at least if I did I had forgotten it.

[Jeff V]

The Civil War by Shelby Foote
I have read a lot of Civil War books, and this is special.

I'd heard of Shelby Foote, but never read his books on the Civil War. A few hours into Vol. 1 now, and greatly enjoying the detail provided and writing style.

Thanks for the recommendation.

I can't say he is the greatest Civil War historian, and I know others have said he leans to far to the south, but his writing style and story telling are excellent.

I had a teacher in college who would say he is the greatest Civil War historian. He used to say the discussion started and ended with Foote, there was no reason to look elsewhere. I'm not so fanboish with any author though, particular historians who can, as a lot, be quite disagreeable in their interpretation of the historical record.

[Scuzz]

The Civil War by Shelby Foote
I have read a lot of Civil War books, and this is special.

I'd heard of Shelby Foote, but never read his books on the Civil War. A few hours into Vol. 1 now, and greatly enjoying the detail provided and writing style.

Thanks for the recommendation.

I can't say he is the greatest Civil War historian, and I know others have said he leans to far to the south, but his writing style and story telling are excellent.

I had a teacher in college who would say he is the greatest Civil War historian. He used to say the discussion started and ended with Foote, there was no reason to look elsewhere. I'm not so fanboish with any author though, particular historians who can, as a lot, be quite disagreeable in their interpretation of the historical record.

I never found Foote one sided, but I can remember when Burn's Civil War was replayed there where a lot of people who thought Foote represented the South to much. I can't actually think of another historical subject I have read which would lend itself to such varying degrees of intrepration as the Civil War. Biographies do, and social history writes such as Diamond and Mann do. But reading WW2 or WW1 books rarely do in my memory.

[Sepiche]

The Civil War by Shelby Foote
I have read a lot of Civil War books, and this is special.

I'd heard of Shelby Foote, but never read his books on the Civil War. A few hours into Vol. 1 now, and greatly enjoying the detail provided and writing style.

Thanks for the recommendation.

I can't say he is the greatest Civil War historian, and I know others have said he leans to far to the south, but his writing style and story telling are excellent.

I had a teacher in college who would say he is the greatest Civil War historian. He used to say the discussion started and ended with Foote, there was no reason to look elsewhere. I'm not so fanboish with any author though, particular historians who can, as a lot, be quite disagreeable in their interpretation of the historical record.

I never found Foote one sided, but I can remember when Burn's Civil War was replayed there where a lot of people who thought Foote represented the South to much. I can't actually think of another historical subject I have read which would lend itself to such varying degrees of intrepration as the Civil War. Biographies do, and social history writes such as Diamond and Mann do. But reading WW2 or WW1 books rarely do in my memory.

Previous to this I mostly knew Foote from Ken Burn's Civil War, and he's definitely an unrepentant Southerner with a lot of biases I think he was oblivious to, but his writing is good, and the level of detail in his books is amazing. If nothing else it does an excellent job of putting you in the shoes of various historical figures at different points of the war which gives a ground level view of the day to day events I think it missing in a lot of works.

On the whole though I think Ta-Nehisi Coates said it best about Shelby Foote...
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/ar ... ef/240318/

He gave twenty years of his life, and three volumes of important and significant words to the Civil War, but he could never see himself in the slave. He could not get that the promise of free bread can not cope with the promise of free hands. Shelby Foote wrote The Civil War, but he never understood it. Understanding the Civil War was a luxury his whiteness could ill-afford.

[El Guapo]

The Civil War by Shelby Foote
I have read a lot of Civil War books, and this is special.

I'd heard of Shelby Foote, but never read his books on the Civil War. A few hours into Vol. 1 now, and greatly enjoying the detail provided and writing style.

Thanks for the recommendation.

I can't say he is the greatest Civil War historian, and I know others have said he leans to far to the south, but his writing style and story telling are excellent.

I had a teacher in college who would say he is the greatest Civil War historian. He used to say the discussion started and ended with Foote, there was no reason to look elsewhere. I'm not so fanboish with any author though, particular historians who can, as a lot, be quite disagreeable in their interpretation of the historical record.

I never found Foote one sided, but I can remember when Burn's Civil War was replayed there where a lot of people who thought Foote represented the South to much. I can't actually think of another historical subject I have read which would lend itself to such varying degrees of intrepration as the Civil War. Biographies do, and social history writes such as Diamond and Mann do. But reading WW2 or WW1 books rarely do in my memory.

Previous to this I mostly knew Foote from Ken Burn's Civil War, and he's definitely an unrepentant Southerner with a lot of biases I think he was oblivious to, but his writing is good, and the level of detail in his books is amazing. If nothing else it does an excellent job of putting you in the shoes of various historical figures at different points of the war which gives a ground level view of the day to day events I think it missing in a lot of works.

On the whole though I think Ta-Nehisi Coates said it best about Shelby Foote...
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/ar ... ef/240318/

He gave twenty years of his life, and three volumes of important and significant words to the Civil War, but he could never see himself in the slave. He could not get that the promise of free bread can not cope with the promise of free hands. Shelby Foote wrote The Civil War, but he never understood it. Understanding the Civil War was a luxury his whiteness could ill-afford.

Yeah, he gives too much credence to the "Confederate leaders were just patriots fighting for their country who didn't care that much about slavery" type arguments.

[Scuzz]

How many white authors could see themselves in the place of the slave? I think his complaint could be made (by a black man) about almost any white author. I do think (especially in listening to him in Burn's documentary) you get a feel of a southerner telling his version of the war. But in reading him you don't necessarily get that. He makes no apologies for the South, no excuses.

[Holman]

Foote is an *amazing* prose stylist. He's one of the very few historical writers whose sentences you'll read twice just because they sound so good.

But as a historian he is lacking. His Civil War is entirely a history of battles, with just enough wartime politics included to provide bare context. Slavery barely exists in this account of America's greatest crisis, and the most minor uniformed officer is more important than any cabinet official or other civilian figure, from key abolitionists or newspapermen to either president's cabinet members.

Heck, I'm just going to quote something I wrote back when I thought I might be a blogger:

Big Books I Have Read: The Civil War: a Narrative, Shelby Foote

It’s now the 150th anniversary of Fort Sumter, and I’ve just finished Shelby Foote’s three-volume history The Civil War. I think I went through it in real time.

I decided to read the whole trilogy about four years ago, and I was slow getting started. About the same time, I started reading James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. McPherson’s book is straight history: political and military but also economic and cultural; McPherson is rightly praised for giving us the best and most rigorous single-volume history of the war and its era. It’s excellent. I plowed through it in just a couple of weeks, reading in bed.

Foote takes much longer.

For some people I know, Shelby Foote is something close to scripture. This is not just because of the word count. Growing up down South—and this was the suburban 70’s and 80’s South—I knew these books were important. A set of all three, usually boxed, held honored shelf space in most of my friends’ parents’ houses, and mine too. Not an ambitious reader as a kid, I classed them as “big, important, and too long to read.” I don’t think most people who owned them read them either.

But I’ve always weirdly loved the Civil War. I know this is an odd thing to say—I’m not Gary Brecher here. I know the Civil War was a miserable time for everyone concerned. In its essence it was suffering and starvation, destruction of property, fear and burning, blisters and blindness and gangrene. These are things that can’t really be hidden by the thick oil of heroic paintings or the bug-spattered idiocy of bumper stickers.

But what’s compelling about the Civil War is the sheer narrative power of it all. That’s where Foote comes in.

When Edward Gibbon wrote his meticulously researched and objectively analyzed Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he never allowed facts to get in the way of his essential pessimism. Foote does history much the same way. There’s a barely disguised Southern bias in his reporting of military and political affairs. Southern retreats are cast as the unfortunate price of war while Northern routs are delineated in loving detail. What is bold manliness in a Southern commander like Jackson or Hill (standing up under fire, leading from the front) is cast as foolhardiness when Hancock or Reynolds does it. Grant is a blunt calculator, Lee a bold strategist. The latter never appears without a tragic, stainless aura.

Of course this is history by a novelist. No pains are taken to avoid (or indicate) speculation or to separate known facts from imaginative descriptions. Moods are boldly inferred. Character and characters are depicted with authoritative, fictive certainty. Compared to most modern academic history, this is kind of refreshing, but it also makes for double-shotted partiality. History makes a good story, but stories don’t always make good history. You have to know what you’re in for.

Despite the awesome scope and impressive length of this history, there’s a lot that doesn’t make it in. This is strictly a battlefield understanding of the war. As such, it is superb—but there is no war that demands more attention to contexts and causes than this one. When events outside the fighting appear, they come in mainly for satire, but only on the Northern side. The Southern way of life is somehow cast as aristocracy and democracy simultaneously, its graciousness covering a multitude of sins. While slaves are occasionally mentioned, Slavery is not an issue.

A focus on personalities to the exclusion of other causes makes a good story but an unstable history. Jeff Davis opens and closes the whole trilogy, as if his tragedy somehow outweighs all others. (Who today thinks of Jefferson Davis at all?) At times it all comes perilously close to suggesting that secession was right because Lincoln was homely.

Most of all, one wants a sense that both sides actually believed in something. Foote’s haloed descriptions of Southern arms make it easy to picture an army of idealistic heroes fighting a horde of invading stumblebums. It should be remembered that both of these armies endured tremendous hardship. Both thought much of their purposes. Both sustained themselves by heroic verses.

So why read it?

The answer is Shelby Foote’s writing. I’m someone who works at it (though never hard enough or long enough), and for me it’s an astonishing pleasure to read such a tremendous voice sustained at such great length. While Foote’s treatment of history off the battlefield is shallow, his prose itself is never anything but deep. There’s an achievement here that is not only one of historical writing, but of Writing.

Such a comprehensive embrace of the entire scope of the war, battle by battle, makes sameness seem almost inevitable, but somehow it never arises here. Foote finds the language for each turn of moment, the right tone for each stage of the war. Never pretentious and never overreaching, he nevertheless sometimes gets whole passages that must be read again, immediately, because they are so musical. He stands well behind his subject, never forcing his own person onto the scene. (I counted three references to contemporary events, all of them relevant.) His weariness in the latter half of volume 3 is apparent, but it is a weariness of war, never a weariness of telling.

It’s impossible to think that anything less would keep a reader—this reader, anyway—going through all those three thousand pages, all those 1.2 million words. It’s compelling, it is somehow urgent, it fills four years, and it’s difficult to imagine that it will ever be achieved again.

[Hrothgar]

I wanted to add my list with the usual caveats. It's not that I think mine is so great, but that I've been inspired to do some more reading by yours. I wanted to pitch in and perhaps help inspire someone else.

The Light Fantastic -- Terry Pratchett It isn't the best Discworld novel or the first. It was the first I read. I loved it and read all of them since. U.K. folklore combined with humor and social commentary shouldn't work at all. The best part is the series kept getting better.

Shogun -- James Clavell I'm pretty sure that some combination of the mini series and JRPG's (plus Nobunaga's Ambition) got me to read this in the first place. It's amazing in scope, character building, dramatic arc and as a deep dive into a culture clash. Each time I've read it I'm shocked at how quickly it ends, but it does so without leaving the reader feeling cheated.

Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges If I could write anything that could be favorably compared to even one of these stories, I would be thrilled beyond belief. The images he paints are like four dimentional hyperreality, but still quite human. Some of them made my brain hurt, but it was worth it.

The Screwtape Letters -- C.S. Lewis It's hard to choose one by Lewis. Mere Christianity, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, That Hideous Strength or even Till We Have Faces all challenge you with that fierce intellect and clear writing. I think Screwtape is the most universal though. It doesn't ask you to believe in literal demons to understand the struggle with temptation we all fight. It doesn't hurt that it's fun and funny.

Red Dragon -- Thomas Harris I tore through this when I first got it. It has a breathless pacing that I almost literally could not put down. It's dark. It's a thriller. It gave us Hanibal Lecter.

[dbt1949]

I've always liked Bruce Catton 's Civil War books better than Foote's.

[Jaymann]

I got my copy of The Twelve Chairs, the first book I am reading based on this thread. That is one thick tome! Those Ruskies don't mess around.

[Lorini]

I've always liked Bruce Catton 's Civil War books better than Foote's.

He is a verified historian with degrees. Foote is not. Therefore I'd probably go with him instead.

[Jaddison]

Anyone read Gettysburg by Stephen Sears? Completely changed how I viewed the battle.

[Pyperkub]

Anyone read Gettysburg by Stephen Sears? Completely changed how I viewed the battle.

More than The Killer Angels?

[Jaddison]

Killer Angels is historical fiction that focuses on one area of the battle.

Sears dissects every area and provides details that blew me away. He details how the egos of Hill, Lee and Longstreet made Picket's charge a lost cause before it kicked off. How Confederate artillery was poorly lead- they moved the ammo train on Day 3 but no one knew where for instance.
How a sea captain turned artillery colonel saved the day for the Union on day 3 by refusing a direct order from a general to start firing - Union artillery was under central command and ordered to hold back fire and not get in an artillery duel.

There is much more.

Have read/listened to it 3 times and will probably do so again.

[Reemul]

Liege KIller - Chris Hinz
It - Stephen king
The Stand - Stephen King
Necroscope - Brian Lumley
David Gemmell

[Unagi]

Kept meaning to reply to this...
I would absolutely re-list a few that others listed: Killer Angels, Watership Down, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Lord of the Rings for sure.

Some others I don't think were listed:

non-fiction:
-Undaunted Courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
by Stephen Ambrose

-Guns, Germs, and Steel :The Fates of Human Societies
by Jared Diamond

fiction:
-Henderson the Rain King
by Saul Bellow

-A Prayer for Owen Meany
by John Irving


A few Richard Dawkins titles

Spoiler:

-The Selfish Gene
-The Extended Phenotype
-The Blind Watchmaker

a few Bill Bryson titles

Spoiler:

-The Mother Tounge
- Walk in the Woods
- A Short History of Nearly Everything
- In a Sunburned Country
- others

Others:
-TSR Games: Adv D&D Monster Manual (4th Edition, 1979)
-TSR Games: Adv D&D Deities and Demi-Gods (1980 edition)