Ask HN: Which one is your favourite book?

[buzzwr]

Hello,

I would like to know about your favorite book belonging to any genre. I have just developed my reading habit. I want to read more books which will increase my knowledge. I like biographies as well. Right now I am reading losing my virginity by Richard Branson.

[0_gravitas]

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, because it was my introduction to the Culture Novels as a whole. I have yet to find another world with such personality and richness, a close second would be Surface Detail of the same series, mainly because it hosts one of my favorite fictional characters of all time. Not everyone likes Banks' writing style, I personally love it, and his humor too, which is why I also purchased his collection of poems published with Ken McLeod's.

[sgillen]

The book of the new sun - Gene Wolfe.

[auslegung]

- Memoirs of Jacques Casanova - 1984 - Catcher in the Rye - Autobiography of Benvenuto Cillini - Catch-22 - CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy

[zeristor]

- The Extended Organism, J. Scott Turner

[liv2hak]

Power of now by Eckhart Tolle

[dwarfstartup]

My reading habits are kind of eclectic. A favorite book I love to reread is Werner Herzog's A Guide for the Perplexed.

some random excerpts to get a feel.

-- "For a while I have contemplated writing a book about battles that never took place because the armies missed each other."

-- "They have a beautiful expression in Peru: 'Perseverance is where the gods dwell.'"

-- "In 1964 we all went to a [Rolling Stones] concert in Pittsburgh. When it had finished, I noticed that rows of plastic seats were steaming: many of the teenage girls had peed themselves. That's when I knew this was something big."

---- "When you find one midget you find several."

-- "Joseph Plateau was a Belgian physicist, the first person to study the principle of persistence of vision. the afterglow of light on the retina, which is the fundamental principle of moving images in cinema. I consider Plateau to be one of the most significant explorers who ever lived. His tests rendered him blind because he stared directly into the sun for too long. He's a hero; the man sacrificed his eyes for cinema. Was it worth it? Perhaps, because he helped give meaning to our existence. There is nothing wrong with perishing in the travails and tribulations of life."

-- "There is a beautiful saying: 'The best description of hunger is a description of bread.'"

-- "I explained to him I would a pay him well, more than what he would earn in ten years sitting [at the square] and playing [pan flute] for people. At first he refused, saying that if he were to stop playing in the square, everyone in Cusco would die."

--"My first choice for the role [in Aguirre] was actually Algerian president Houari Boumediene."

--"Chickens in some forms--roasted for example--are perfectly acceptable to me, but look into their eyes while they are alive and bear witness to genuine, bottomless stupidity."

--"No one thought of himself as an artist until maybe the late fifteenth century. Before that they were master craftsmen with apprentices who produced work on commission for popes. Once, after snow had fallen in Florence, a particular idiotic member of the Medici family asked Michelangelo to build a snowman in the courtyard of the family villa. He had no qualms about stepping outside, without a word, and completing this task. I like this attitude of absolute defiance."

-- "Be wary of praise offered on someone else's terms."

-- "I would never trust a man who has had multiple helmets by the age of five."

-- "No one wants to interfere with a man in the middle of a fight. Philippe pointed out that the opposite also works, that people won't bother you when you're laughing your heart out."

-- "When people take not of how far you have come on foot, they tell you stories they have bottle up for years."

-- "A carpenter doesn't sit on his shavings."

-- "What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? Like sleep without dreams."

-- "In the film he talks about 'living your dash', the dash between the dates on your gravestone, everything from the time you're born to the moment of your death."

-- "There is work to be done and we will do it well. Outside we will look like gangsters. On the inside we will where the gowns of priests"