Recommended Reading - What are your favorite books?

[LibertyEagle]

We have started and recreated so many of these book threads, it sure would be nice if we had a place to put it where we could easily refer to and add to it.

[CMoore]

In addition to Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell has written a number of books all of which are useful reading. He is a real idea man and has introduced me to a number of things that I had never thought about.

[Zydeco]

Free to Choose by Milton Friedman

[mport1]

In addition to Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell has written a number of books all of which are useful reading. He is a real idea man and has introduced me to a number of things that I had never thought about.

Yeah, I really think Basic Economics is a great starting point for reading.

[ItsTime]

Albert Camus "The Stranger"

[mtmedlin]

" It aint nobody's business if I do" by Peter McWilliams

[sylvania]

I liked Waiting for the Barbarians by J M Coetzee. It's a small book, only 176 pages long, but I found it to be very interesting. It deals with a magistrate living on the edge of a dying empire and explores the idea that the most intimate way to know someone is through torture, which made me think a lot about power struggles and the abuse of power and such. It had a lot of impact on me. I'm not sure I would recommend it for light bedtime reading, but...it was interesting. A lot of my favorite books have already been listed here.

From an Amazon review:

"Coetzee is a master of putting very complex stories into simple packagings. This book is very deep, yet the story is simple: a magistrate of a wild outpost of an empire leads an easy life in peace until a colonel in the army comes by, which set off a number of events that ultimately put the magistrate against the empire.

Coetzee writes in a very unique manner. Aside from the colonel (Joll), no one has a name in the book, he just refers to everyone as "the girl" or "the magistrate". As soon as the colonel visits the city with an obsession about an impending barbarian invasion, the entire town becomes paranoid with these barbarians. The barbarians in fact are just simple nomads that live in the adjacent mountains, but the obsession grows so quickly that the magistrate, when he tries to reach out to barbarians and understand who they are, he gets misunderstood as a barbarian helper and so is put in jail.

Some of the best writing is the description of his time in prison and the abuse he underwent. Coetzee plays with metaphors relating to the body and its conditions in ways that leaving interesting impressions and provokes much thought. I am still grappling to get the right message out of the book, but conclude that there are many.

Overall, this is an enjoyable and very short book. It is true literature, so not a very light reading if you are looking for a passtime. I needed to stop a couple of times to reflect on it, and was highly impressed by Coetzee. He definitely deserved the Nobel Prize. " Denis Benchimol Minev

[Jared Callanan]

Someone mentions Chuck Palahniuk but not Bret Easton Ellis? I can't let that go by as Palahniuk is a poor mans author when compared to Ellis. Anything by Ellis will outshine Palahniuk, notably American Psycho, Glamorama, Less Than Zero.

As for political oriented books; "A Republic Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong" by Pat Buchanan are both outstanding books.

[krott5333]

If you're a gun-nut like myself, a few good books about what happens in a disarmed society are:

"Unintended Consequences" by John Ross

"Enemies Foreign and Domestic" by Matthew Bracken

[constituent]

tolstoy- resurection

[Jared Callanan]

I forgot a great one; A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick