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Favourite books?

hypercolius

Hi, I wanted to start this thread to share what our favourite books are!

Here are mine:

Favourite overall: Life and Death: Twilight reimagined (Meyer). I love romantic novels. Love, theoretically was also excellent as was Love hypothesis :) 

Favourite non-fiction: Assyria: The rise and fall of the world's first empire (Frahm). This caused a massive, obsessive hyperfocus on learning about Assyria when I'm just an astrophysicist!

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  • in reply to Stuart333

    The HHGTTG series holds a dear place in my heart. I think it resonates with the orthogonal thinker in me.

    I got put off Shakespeare in school. All that analysis of every single line of a poem or a play just seemed so ... unnecessary. He wrote his plays to be enjoyed first time at a live performance, so why did someone think that spending two years trying to read just one of them with forensic attention to detail was a good idea?

    So, after a 35-year hiatus, I decided to give Shakespeare a go again. I picked up Hamlet and just read it from start to finish over the course of a day. (I didn't do Hamlet in school, so this was my first time.) If I didn't understand some words or allusions, I just ploughed ahead and didn't worry about it. The result? I liked it. Really liked it. I liked it enough that I then gave "the Scottish play" a read. I liked that, too (maybe not quite so much). Then I read King Lear (which I did in school) and, well, it seemed a bit flat. It seemed a bit short and one-dimensional compared to how I remembered it. Perhaps all that exegesis in school had ruined it for me, or maybe it had added something extra back then.

    Anyway, the moral of the story: give Hamlet a read and don't worry if you don't understand all the words—it's worth it.