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Top 10 books you love

arnuld

Member
Hi all,

I have just started this thread to have a list of top 10 books love most or that changed the way of your thinking and the ones that will remain on your mind all of your life bcause you read thme once and never forgot them. These are the books that you will want to gift-wrap to your best friend on his Birth-Day :)

Please also include a brief or a very brief description of these 3 things:

1.) what was the book about ?
2.) what you liked in it ?
3.) what did you learn from it ?

or just include the relavent links like I did down here. Though it is about top 10 but you can post a list of 20 books if you love them so much :D . Hers is my list:


Zen and the Art of MotorCycle Maintenance - Rober M. Pirsig
Free Software, Free Society - Richard M. Stallman
The Man Who Sold the Moon - Robert A. Heinlein

Sorry for a small list but I have just developed the habit of reading books. All these 3 books did not change my life, they just had a lot of impact on way I think about life. Richard M. Stallman's books changed my way of thinking about doing my present job as a computer programmer. There is some common-pattern between first and last books. Both books have shown me my death, like I was lying on my Earthy [1] and many other people were stood around me and I did not know who they were and they were just looking at me and were just ready to burn me [2]. At some specific page, my throat was choked for some seconds when I read that page, for I felt the death first time. How will it feel when I will carry my Father's or Mother's dead body and after 5 years of that I will be forgetting about it and living my life the way I am living. I will have a back account, I will be posting questions on Book & Reader Forums - Powered by vBulletin. I will be alone, just doing a 9 AM to 8 PM job that I am doing now. Is this what we people call life ?


I have put this post into the recommendation forum becase this post will act as a base of some high-quality books so that newbies and experienced users alike will have something important to read. They will just need to look at this post before they ask for any recommendation, as this post, if it grows like the way I am thinking, will become the extract of many years of reading experience by folks from different cultures and of different ages, which again will put light onto the large amount of facts people use to ignore in their everday lives. I hope my mission of gathering collective-knowledge and a desire to help people will make folks of this thread to put their precious time and valuable skill here. I hope everyone here will help me.


Thanks to all those who are still reading my post :)


[1] A thing made of bamboo-sticks, which looks like a long stool without legs. This is what Indians use to carry the dead body from the dead person's home to the cremation-site.

[2] In Hindu religions, we do not have graveyards, we burn the dead body because ancient intellectual people of our religion thought that a dead body must not take any piece of land. It was their belief that that piece of land can be used by a poor man as his home or can be used to build some place like non-profit hospital where hundreds and millions of people will be medicated for the good. They even donated their body organs, an important thing that my cullture has forgotten :(
 
all the books i love are mostly all scifi or fantasy.. i read them as they provide an escape from the ordinary world, and altho i do not learn anything from them, they provide relaxation, and exercise my imagination.. listing them all would not really be of any benefit to anyone reading this.. :)
 
all the books i love are mostly all scifi or fantasy.. i read them as they provide an escape from the ordinary world, and altho i do not learn anything from them, they provide relaxation, and exercise my imagination.. listing them all would not really be of any benefit to anyone reading this.. :)

I can generally agree to that. I read a lot of scifi and for the most part do it for entertainment and not change my life. That being said, Dune forever changed how I looked at interpersonal communications.
 
I can generally agree to that. I read a lot of scifi and for the most part do it for entertainment and not change my life.

I don't think books change lives (except in some minor cases) and I do think that they change one's views and the way one thinks about some things like women, general life, job, governments, corporations, schooling etc. and while doing that they give you some skills too that you can expand on further if you want.

That being said, Dune forever changed how I looked at interpersonal communications.

I got 1 book added onto my fresh list :)
 
I don't think books change lives (except in some minor cases) and I do think that they change one's views and the way one thinks about some things like women, general life, job, governments, corporations, schooling etc. and while doing that they give you some skills too that you can expand on further if you want.

I think books expand experience, that they allow me to live in different times and places, to inhabit different bodies and personalities. This may or may not change my thinking in the sense of logical, linear thinking but certainly expands my range of sympathy and understanding.
 
WOW, Things got different than what I expected. I never ever thought that entertainment and escapism will pull-in here.

I don't do any entertainment. Whenever my friends send me some funny pics in email or show some funny videos at YouTube. I just open Firefox and start searching for books like The Hacker Crackdown, The Road to Serfdom and The Conscience of a Liberal etc. and then they get angry and ask me why I don't want to watch those funny videos. I say I need to focus on changing the government. Then they reply you can not change the government. The only solution is to kill all of the 400 MPs (Member of Parliament) as all of them are corrupt and they not gonna change


I reply to them that The government is not a physical entity so you can not kill it. The Chief-Ministers of different states and the Finance minister, Prime-Minister,President etc all are physical representations of some concepts. If you kill all of the men in government but the rational-thought, those concepts and ideas that produced the government remain then they will produce another group of physical representation which will will be as corrupt as their originals. Its the foundational concepts that are important, not the people. People form the 2nd stage of change, which we can do later and is the easier part than 1st stage .

Then they say I should stay away from them and should seek some psychiatry help. I have lost nearly all of my oldest and best friendships over this just because I don't understand fun and all of the people to whom I talk say I am a madman but in the deep corner of my heart I know I am right because people like F. A. Hayek, Joseph A. Schumpeter and Karl Marx do understand me. In their books I see I am right while realizing that I still need to learn a lot. I never knew about them but they already knew what I know from my experience at this age. The only difference is they have mastered their skills beyond anyone's imagination.
 
I know I am right because people like F. A. Hayek, Joseph A. Schumpeter and Karl Marx do understand me.

You do realise that Marx and Hayek are just about as far away from each other as two economists can possibly get, right?
 
You do realise that Marx and Hayek are just about as far away from each other as two economists can possibly get, right?

It does not matter in context of what I am saying. Also The Brief History of Time and Origin of Species have nothing to do with both Hayek and Marx. The point is most people ( at least here in India and I have traveled from North to South India) don't understand the ideas underlying these works. People get bored, frustrated when I talk about them. Till now, in last 8 years, I have found only 2 persons who are willing to listen to the what I read in the books, in their free time, its a different case one of them does not understand it but they were quite happy to read the books and using their intelligence to ask questions. Rest want to enjoy and have fun.

I read about Darwin from this forum actually, someone gave me online links to his material
 
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