Ask HN: What is your favorite fiction book?

44 points by zerojames ↗ HN
There are many threads that discuss one’s favorite programming or technology or startup related books. I’d love to hear from the community what fiction books they enjoy!

86 comments

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- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

- The Aubrey-Maturin Series by Patrick O'Brian

- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

- Watchmen by various

- Star Trek: Doctor's Orders by Diane Duane

- The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

- Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

- Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean

- The Cthulhu Casebooks - Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea-Devils by James Lovegrove

- Contact by Carl Sagan

- 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

Top 11? :-)

“Destination: Void” and it’s sequel “The Jesus Incident” (I didn’t read the two other books of the serie) by Frank Herbert.

“We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Insane to think this book has been written in 1920.

World War Z

Roadside picnic

Roadside Picnic is an excellent book. For those who don’t know, it’s the book that inspired the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series.
And Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979).
- A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. - Anathem by Neal Stephenson
I'm so glad you mentioned this. When I was a teenager, I was given a big box of classic 1950s/1960s scifi books.

A Canticle for Leibowitz was one of them.

The Master and Margarita
Pretty much anything by Neal Stephenson but especially:

The Baroque Cycle trilogy

Anathem

Cannery Row, Tortilla Flats - Steinbeck Smillas sense of Snow-Hoeg Currently reading The Expanse series and it's great.
Huh... tough call. If you use "number of times read" as a metric that approximates how much I enjoy a particular book, then my favorite is almost certainly one of:

- Neuromancer by William Gibson

- The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

- False Memory by Dean Koontz

I think a good case could be made for a handful of others also. Specifically:

- Nineteen Eighty Four by Orwell

- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

- Foundation by Asimov

- The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien

are all strong contenders as well.

The Mysterious Island - is this the one where they invent civilization from scratch after baloon incident ? If yes then I loved it as a child (it was one of my first "serious" fiction books that I read and somehow I imagine that it sparked my intrest in technology)
Anything by Douglas Adams, but especially his Dirk Gently books. If I have to pick one, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.
Anything by Liu Cixin - Three Body Problem and the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy specifically
Ah, I tried to like the books, didn't succeed. Maybe just not for me.
I feel the same. Maybe 'it doesn't translate'. Or the translation was bad. Though the concepts were interesting enough to let me read them to the end. Left unsatisfied...
Messiah, by Boris Starling

Red Storm Rising, by Tom Clancy

First Among Equals, by Jeffrey Archer

The River Why by David James Duncan. A coming of age, meaning of life book with fishing as the central metaphor.
Dune, book 1. You can take away so much from this book. The Bene Gesserit's "Litany Against Fear" and its application makes the book worth reading, and that's just the tip of the iceberg! My favorite part of the book but involves reunion. friendship and loyalty. The audiobook version of Dune, book 1, is also excellent. It includes dramatic acting and ambient music.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman dramatic audiobook (part I) is so good. I feel so lucky that while looking up the link to the book that I just discovered Part II was published in 9/2021. Highly recommend: https://www.amazon.com/The-Sandman/dp/B086WQ7J62

So many good books to recommend. Here's a selection

- Diaspora by Greg Egan

- Pushing Ice by Alastair Raynolds

- Watership Down by Richard Adams

- The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

- The Price of Nothing by R. Scott Baker

- Blindsight by Peter Watts

In no particular order, except that #1 is #1.

1. Adventures of Huckelberry Finn

2. Little, Big

3. Winter's Tale

4. Titus Groan

5. Gormenghast

6. Titus Alone

7. Dune

8. The manuscript found in saragossa

9. The Three Musketeers

10. A Scanner Darkly

11. The Man in the High Castle

12. Do Androids dream of Electronic Sheep

13. Ubik

14. Valis, basically almost every book by Phil Dick.

15. Life on the Mississippi.

16. The Garden of Forking Paths

17. Dhalgren

18. The Gods of Pegāna, basically all the fantasy work of Dunsany.

19. The Lathe of Heaven. Anything by LeGuin.

20. Their Eyes Were Watching God

21. The Master and Margarita

22. The Gulag Archipelago

>14. Valis, basically almost every book by Phil Dick.

I can't tell if you mean all of PKD not otherwise mentioned goes in that spot, or if VALIS is every PKD book. Or both.

I meant all PKD not otherwise mentioned, although as he wrote a lot there are a few I don't care for.
The Phantom Tollbooth

The Princess Bride (even better than the movie)

Hard to pick a favourite so I’ll recommend the latest, which I thought was fabulous: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. It has also been turned into a limited miniseries that I am excited to watch. I enjoyed it so much I’ve just started another of her books, The Glass Hotel.
Blindsight by Peter Watts

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

The Quincunx

A Fire Upon the Deep

An Instance of the Fingerpost

#1-4 are: Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, The Cyberiad, by Stanisław Lem, and The Aleph, by Jorge Luis Borges, and Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman. In no particular order.