Book Ratings

Finding good books today isn't all that easy. I created this page to record what I've thought of the books I've read. Reading it should help you get an idea of how similar our tastes are. If we like the same things and I've missed one of your favorites, then what are you doing still sitting there on your hands? E-mail me already! Even better, create a page like this and bring civilization closer to a state of perfect literary harmony.

A chronological log of what I've read is on a separate page.

Alpha

If I had limited space for sending my past self a list of authors to pay attention to, these would make the cut.

Douglas Coupland
great Microserfs
good Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
good JPod
good Hey Nostradamus!


Don DeLillo
great End Zone
great Libra
great The Names
great Underworld
great White Noise
great Amazons: An Intimate Memoir By the First Woman to Play in the National Hockey League
good Great Jones Street
good Americana
good Players
good Mao II
good Cosmopolis
good The Body Artist
bad Ratner's Star
bad Running Dog was much less intellectual than the above and much more "plot-centered"/"pulpy". It was still "good," but not really my style. I think this book and Ratner's Star show DeLillo going too far to opposite extremes.


Helen DeWitt
great The Last Samurai


Charles Dickens
great David Copperfield
great Great Expectations


Fyodor Dostoyevsky
great The Idiot
great Demons/The Possessed
great The Brothers Karamazov
great Crime and Punishment
great The Adolescent/A Raw Youth
great The Gambler
good Netochka Nezvanovna
good The Village of Stepanchikovo
good The House of the Dead
good Notes From the Underground
good Short stories
bad The Double is horrible. Anything else is worth reading.


Umberto Eco
great Foucault's Pendulum
great Baudolino
good The Name of the Rose
good The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
bad The Island of the Day Before


Ralph Ellison
great Invisible Man


Neil Gaiman
great American Gods
good Anansi Boys


Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
great The Sorrows of Young Werther
great Faust
good Faust: Part Two
good Elective Affinities


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


Joseph Heller
great Catch-22
great Something Happened
good Closing Time
good Picture This
good Now and Then
good Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man
bad God Knows


Hermann Hesse
great Steppenwolf
great Demian
good Narcissus and Goldmund
good Gertrude
good Beneath the Wheel
good Peter Camenzind
good Rosshalde
bad The Glass Bead Game
bad Siddartha
bad Journey to the East
bad Strange News from Another Star


John Irving
great The Hotel New Hampshire
great A Prayer for Owen Meany
great The Cider House Rules
great A Son of the Circus
great A Widow for One Year
great The Water Method Man
good The World According to Garp
good Until I Find You
good The 158-Pound Marriage
good Setting Free the Bears
good The Fourth Hand
good Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
good The Imaginary Girlfriend


Henry Miller
great Sexus
great Plexus
great Nexus
good Moloch
good Tropic of Capricorn
good Tropic of Cancer
good The Colossus of Maroussi


Thomas Pynchon
great Mason and Dixon
great Gravity's Rainbow
great Vineland
great V.
great The Crying of Lot 49
great Slow Learner
good Against the Day


Philip Roth
great The Human Stain
great I Married a Communist
great Portnoy's Complaint
great Operation Shylock
good Zuckerman Bound
good The Ghost Writer
good American Pastoral
good The Counterlife
good Sabbath's Theater
good The Plot Against America
good Exit Ghost
good The Great American Novel
good The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography
good Letting Go


Salman Rushdie
great The Satanic Verses


J.D. Salinger
great The Catcher in the Rye


Jean-Paul Sartre
great The Reprieve
great The Age of Reason
good The Wall (American collection of short stories)
good Nausea
bad Troubled Sleep


Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
great Illuminatus!
bad Schrödinger's Cat


Lev Tolstoy
great War and Peace
bad Anna Karenina was rather disappointing. It was full of absurd Christian conversions and pointless and detailed descriptions of social activities, without the redeeming qualities of War and Peace.


John Updike
great Rabbit is Rich
good Rabbit Redux
good Rabbit, Run
good Rabbit at Rest
good Licks of Love


David Foster Wallace
great Infinite Jest
great Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
great Oblivion
great Girl with Curious Hair
great A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
great Consider the Lobster
good Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity
good The Broom of the System


Tom Wolfe
great The Bonfire of the Vanities
great A Man In Full
good I am Charlotte Simmons

Beta

These authors are all worth reading.

Douglas Adams
good The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
good The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
good Life, the Universe and Everything
good So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
good Mostly Harmless
good Young Zaphod Plays it Safe


T. Coraghessan Boyle
good World's End


Philip K. Dick
good Radio Free Albemuth
good The Man in the High Castle


E. L. Doctorow
good Billy Bathgate
good The Waterworks


F. Scott Fitzgerald
good Tender is the Night
good The Great Gatsby


Rebecca Goldstein
good The Mind-Body Problem
good The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind
bad Mazel


Graham Greene
good The Power and the Glory


Nathaniel Hawthorne
good The Scarlet Letter
good The Blithedale Romance
good The House of the Seven Gables
good The Marble Faun


Frank Herbert
good Dune
good Dune Messiah
bad Children of Dune


Franz Kafka
good The Castle
good The Trial
good Short stories


Jack Kerouac
good On the Road


Sinclair Lewis
good It Can't Happen Here


Jack London
good John Barleycorn
good The Sea Wolf


Yann Martel
good Life of Pi


Cormac McCarthy
good All the Pretty Horses


Vladimir Nabokov
good The Defense
good Pnin
good Pale Fire
good Invitation to a Beheading
good Lolita
good Nabokov's Dozen
good The Real Life of Sebastian Knight


Brian O'Nolan
good The Third Policeman


George Orwell
good 1984
good Burmese Days
bad Keep the Aspidistra Flying
bad Homage to Catalonia is really journalism and not an attempt at fiction, so don't expect otherwise!
bad Animal Farm


Chuck Palahniuk
good Fight Club
bad Survivor
bad Invisible Monsters


Robert Pirsig
good Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
good Lila


Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
good The Space Merchants


Daniel Quinn
good Ishmael
good The Story of B
good My Ishmael


Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
good God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
good Mother Night
good Slaughterhouse-Five
good Breakfast of Champions
good Hocus Pocus
good Cat's Cradle
good Timequake

Gamma

Some others that are above average

Emily Brontë
good Wuthering Heights


Raymond Chandler
good The Big Sleep


William Gaddis
good Carpenter's Gothic


Milan Kundera
good The Unbearable Lightness of Being


Anita Loos
good Gentlemen Prefer Blondes


Michael Martone
bad Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler's List


Larry Niven
good Ringworld
good The Ringworld Engineers
good The Ringworld Throne


Boris Pasternak
good Doctor Zhivago


Rainer Maria Rilke
good The Diary of Malta Laurid Brigge


Tom Robbins
good Villa Incognito


Ivan Turgenev
good Fathers and Sons
good Short stories
bad Rudin/On the Eve

Nonfiction

I'm not going to bother comparing these books to each other. I'll just say that I found each worth reading.


William Barrett
good Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy


David T. Beito, Peter Gordon, and Alexander Tabarrok
good The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society


Frederick Brooks
good The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering


Fritjof Capra
good The Tao of Physics
bad The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture


Noam Chomsky
good Keeping the Rabble in Line
good Necessary Illusions
good Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order


Richard Dawkins
great The Selfish Gene
great The Ancestor's Tale
good The God Delusion
good A Devil's Chaplain


Jared Diamond
good Guns, Germs, and Steel


Thomas L. Friedman
great The Lexus and the Olive Tree
great The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century


William H. Gates Sr. and Chuck Collins
good Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes


John Taylor Gatto
great The Underground History of American Education
good Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling


Michael J. Graetz
good 100 Million Unnecessary Returns: A Simple, Fair, and Competitive Tax Plan for the United States


Alan Greenspan
good The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World


Jerome Karabel
good The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton


Alec Klein
good A Class Apart: Prodigies, Pressure, and Passion Inside One of America's Best High Schools


George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez
good Where Mathematics Comes From


Susan Lammers
good Programmers at Work: Interviews With 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry


Nick Lane
good Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life


Harry R. Lewis
good Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education


David J. C. MacKay
great Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air


Jerry Mander
good Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television


Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows
good Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update


Geoffrey Miller
good The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature


Richard Nisbett
good Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count


Tom G. Palmer
good Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice


Steven Pinker
good The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
good The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature
good The Language Instinct


William Poundstone
good Fortune's Formula


Elyn R. Saks
great The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness


Eric Schlosser
good Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal


Henry David Thoreau
good Walden


Alexis de Tocqueville
good Democracy in America, Volume I


Colin Wilson
great The Outsider
good Religion and the Rebel
good The Occult: A History
good The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries with Damon Wilson
good Alien Dawn
bad The Age of Defeat


Robert Wright
great Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
great The Moral Animal


Howard Zinn
great A People's History of the United States
good You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
good Declarations of Independence

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