bastard you beat me to creating my favorite thread
I'm currently rereading
The Grapes of Wrath. I've been a huge Steinbeck fan since I was teen and rereading has actually been a bit of a rebirth after years of literary haze. It's brilliant and is without a doubt my favorite book.
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Originally Posted by wiki
The Grapes of Wrath is a classic novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes. A celebrated Hollywood film version, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, was made in 1940; however, the endings differ greatly.
Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath at his home, 16250 Greenwood Lane, in what is now Monte Sereno, California. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry. In a nearly hopeless situation, they set out for California's Central Valley along with thousands of other "Okies" in search of land, jobs, and dignity. The novel is meant to emphasize the need for cooperative, as opposed to individualistic, solutions to social problems brought about by the mechanization of agriculture and the Dust Bowl drought.
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Atlas Shrugged for a few years was at the number one spot and is a truly incredible read, although a tad lengthy. Quotes on every page, and the characters are wonderfully strong and resilient.
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Originally Posted by Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature
Novel by Ayn Rand, published in 1957. The book's female protagonist, Dagny Taggart, struggles to manage a transcontinental railroad amid the pressures and restrictions of massive bureaucracy. Her antagonistic reaction to a libertarian group seeking an end to government regulation is later echoed and modified in her encounter with a utopian community, Galt's Gulch, whose members regard self-determination rather than collective responsibility as the highest ideal. The novel contains the most complete presentation of Rand's personal philosophy, known as objectivism, in fictional form
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another great Ayn Rand book is We the Living, which is far more a more typical story than a philosophical journey.
A book that i recommend everyone read is
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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Originally Posted by wiki
Set in 1968 Prague, the novel details the circumstances of life for artists and intellectuals in Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Prague Spring and the subsequent invasion by the USSR. The story's main character is Tomas, a well-known, successful surgeon, who criticizes the Czech Communists and as a result loses his position. Other important characters (who, together with Tomas, make up the group known as Kundera's Quartet) include his wife Tereza (a photographer), his lover Sabina (a painter), and Sabina's lover Franz (a university professor).
According to Kundera, "being" is full of "unbearable lightness" because each of us has only one life to live: "Einmal ist keinmal" ("once is nonce", i.e., "what happened once might as well have never happened at all"). Therefore, each life is ultimately insignificant; every decision ultimately does not matter. Since decisions do not matter, they are "light": they do not tie us down. But at the same time, the insignificance of our decisions - our lives, or being - is unbearable. Hence, "the unbearable lightness of being". The subject matter causes some critics to label this novel as a modernist work, while others see it as a celebratory explosion of post-modernism.
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The other lot on top of my list are 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Godfather of the Kremlin, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Immortality