Dad's List of Top Books   

Dad's List of Top Movies

  • Montgomery County Public Library
  • Maryland's Digital eLibrary
  • Project Gutenberg - Books On-line
  • Book of the Month Club 2
  • Abebooks
  • Borders - White Flint Mall
  • Powells Bookstore
  • The Strand Bookstore
  • allibris

  • Top Kids' Books

  • Anything by Mark Twain
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ronald Dahl
  • Little House on the Prarie - Laura Ingals Wilder
  • Watership Down - Richard Adams
  • Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H. - Robert C. O'Brien
  • A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
  • Harry Potter
  • The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Winnie the Pooh & The House at Pooh Corner - A A Milne
  • Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
  • It's NOT the Stork! A Book about Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies... J649.65 HAR
  • Anything that's been banned
  • Newbery Award Winners

    Books for Teenagers

  • The Teenager's Guide to the Real World - Marshall Brain

    Science

  • The Ends of the World - Peter Brannen
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
  • Connections - James Burke
  • Cosmos - Carl Sagan
  • Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud - Robert Park

    Economics

  • The Worldly Philosophers - Robert Heilbroner
  • Making the Most of your Money - Jane Bryant Quinn
  • All the Money in the World; How the Forbes 400 Make and Spend Their Fortunes - Peter Bernstein &Annalyn Swan
  • The Millionaire Next Door
  • The Big Short - Michael Lewis
  • The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use “Plain English” To Rob You Blind - David Cay Johnston
  • Perfectly legal : the covert campaign to rig our tax system to benefit the super rich--and cheat everybody else David Cay Johnston
  • Free lunch : how the wealthiest Americans enrich themselves at government expense (and stick you with the bill) David Cay Johnston

    Nature

  • A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
  • Silent Spring - Rachel Carson
  • Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation - Olivia Judson
  • Ceremonial Time; Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile- John Mitchell
  • Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail - Cheryl Strayed
  • Almost everything written by Stephen Jay Gould
  • Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific - Tim Flannery

    Adventure

  • Eiger Dreams- Jon Krakaeur
  • Into Thin Air- Jon Krakaeur
  • Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe - Laurence Bergreen
  • Brutal Journey: The Epic Story of the First Crossing of North America - Paul Schneider

    History

  • Lies My Teacher Told Me; Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong - James Lowen
  • A History of US(11-Volumes) - Joy Hakim
  • Don't Know Much About History; Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned - Kenneth Davis
  • People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present - Howard Zinn
  • A Cambodian Odyssey - Haing Ngor
  • The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers - Paul Kennedy
  • Guns, Germs and Steel - J. Diamond
  • Collapse - J. Diamond
  • Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty - Daron Acemoglu
  • Pulitzer Prize Winners for History
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_General_Non-Fiction
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Biography_or_Autobiography

    Ethics

  • The Science of Good and Evil - Michael Shermer
  • Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists - Susan Neiman
  • The Meditations- Marcus Aurelius
  • The Origins of Virtue; Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation - Matt Ridley

    Religion

  • Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy...- Jennifer Michael Hecht
  • Why do Bad Things Happen to Good People?- Rabbi Harold Kushner
  • The Tao of Pooh - Benjamin Hoff
  • The End of Faith - Sam Harris
  • The Teaching of Buddah- Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai
  • Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why- Bart D. Ehrman
  • Under the Banner of Heaven- Jon Krakauer
  • Almost everything written by Karen Armstrong

    America's Decline

  • The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers - Paul Kennedy
  • American Theocracy - Kevin Phillips
  • Wealth and Democracy - Kevin Phillips

    Post-Cold War History

  • The Affluent Society- John Kenneth Galbraith
  • The End of History - Francis Fukuyama
  • The Clash of Civilizations - Samuel Huntington
  • The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman's
  • The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein

    Fiction

  • The Arrangement- Sarah Dunn
  • The Rosie Project- Graeme Simsion
  • 1984 - George Orwell
  • Logan's Run
  • Jonathon Livinston Seagull - Richard Bach
  • Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean Auel
  • Warday - Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka
  • Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
  • Almost everything written by Michael Crichton
  • The Man Who Fell to Earth
  • Star Wars - George Lucas

    Humor

  • Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
  • Ascent of Rum Doodle - W. E. Bowman
  • Candide - Voltaire
  • Calvin and Hobbes Comics - Sam Watterson
  • My Horizontal Life - Chelsea Handler
  • Let's pretend this never happened : (a mostly true memoir) - Jenny Lawson

    Books that people always talk about but never read

  • The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
  • The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
  • War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
  • The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon
  • Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville
  • The Best and the Brightest - David Halberstam

    Documents that people talk about but rarely read

  • The Declaration of Independence
  • The Constitution of the United States

    If I were going to be stranded alone on a desert island, I would take one of these books:

  • The Times Atlas of World History
  • Chronicle of the 20th Century
  • Civilizations Past & Present

    A World Between the Covers

    I love books. I counted them all last week, and have 1,327 of them. You can learn new things or find adventure in them. The best can make your heart pound, or bring tears to your eyes. The good ones can make you angry and inspire you. They can open up a new world, or make you see the world in a different way. You'll see friendship, love, and values in new ways. Books are a wonderful escape, better than TV, and almost as addictive as computer games :-)

    I own all the books on this list, and have read every one (except Darwin, Smith, Tocqueville, and Gibbon -- but I've started them, honest!). I'm still working on "Collapse." When I was in school I read the Declaration of Independence (it took about five minutes) and the Constitution (less than an hour). But the Bible took me an entire summer vacation -- I read it just to prove the Jehovah's Witnesses wrong.

    Okay I admit it, I haven't finished Chronicle of the 20th Century. But, hey, I haven't been stranded on a desert island either. That is one huge book! And I haven't really started War and Peace -- I only read the first paragraph.

    Here's a book about books: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, but if you read one book a month, it will take you 83 years to read them all. And suppose there were 1001 movies that you should watch, and you could watch 1 a week -- that would take you 19 years. And suppose there were 1001 places you should visit before you die, and you visited three a year, it would take you over 300 years. It looks like you'll have to budget your time, because time spent reading a book, or watching a movie, is time that you can't spend doing other things, like spending time with your spouse and children.

    I didn't mention Amazon.com because everyone knows about it. Although it started off as a book seller, you can now find just about anything on it.

    Books I've Read

    2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 May 2011

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    Home  Last updated: October 20, 2017