Your Ten Books

[MiddleAgedKen]

1. The Bible
2. The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien -- counted as one work, but especially The Return of the King)
3. The Winds of War (Herman Wouk)
4. War and Remembrance (Herman Wouk)
5. Our Enemy, the State (Albert Jay Nock)
6. Dreadnought (Robert K. Massie nonfiction, not the Cherie Priest novel...though the latter isn't bad either)
7. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
8. Castles of Steel (Massie)
9. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
10. The Anatomy of Victory: Battle Tactics 1689-1763 (Brent Nosworthy)

Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, and Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War might make the list on some days, too.

[oilcrash]

Ender's Game Orson Scott Card - Taught me how to effectively delegate tasks
Starship Troopers Robert Heinlein - Taught me the basics of Command
Art of War Sun Tzu - Taught me more refined strategies of command
Time Enough for Love Robert Heinlein - just thoroughly entertaining
Gust Front John Ringo - Concept of Defense in Depth, organization of a Rout, and the Last Stand
Foundation and Earth Isaac Asimov - The final piece to tie everything together.
Falkenberg's Legion Jerry Pournelle - My favorite of the CoDominium Novels
The Republic Plato - Object Oriented Design mad so much sense after this, so did Hegel.
Sit Down and Shut-up Brad Warner - An Excellent Primer on Zen Buddhism
American Gods Neil Gaiman - For me, an amazingly engrossing read with a protagonist out of his league.

I will also add that I will never turn down some Dashiell Hammett, and Ned Beaumont is one of my heroes.

[dfwmtx]

"Where is Joe Merchant?" - Jimmy Buffet
"20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" - Jules Verne
"History of Underwater Exploration" - ?
"Skinny Legs and All" & "Another Roadside Attraction" - Tom Robbins
"Robinson Crusoe" - Stevenson
"Principia Discordia" Malcalypse the Elder
"The Book of the SubGenius" - Ivan Stang
"Coup D'Etat"- ?
"Small Arms fo the 20th Century"

[Jered]

The Bible
The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater
Starship Troopers by RAH
The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis
The Law - M Frederic Bastiat
The Lord of the Rings
The Devil's Advocate - Taylor Caldwell
The Book of Five Rings - Musashi
The Prince- Machiavelli

I have a feeling that Individualism and Economic Order will be on that list, too.

[Denis]

SKB - could you amend the instructions to say "don't read everybody elses' answers until you've done you own"? I read all the good suggestions, and that totally threw my own train of thought off the tracks...

[Vonz90]

1. The Bible
2. On War - Carl von Clausewitz (if you have a commission, and have not read this book, you are doing yourself a tremendous disservice. I've read it every few years.)
3. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Just a great book)
4. Dialogues - Plato (There is relatively little to gain from Plato's conclusions on anything (IMHO), but learning the process by which he gets there is invaluable. In the end I think the Dialogues is more useful in that regard than the Republic.)
5. The Reason Why - Cecil Woodham-Smith (Dissecting everything that led up to the charge of light brigade.)
6. Reason and Emotion - John Macmurray (Philosophy, hard to sum up, but like Plato I think its biggest value is tracing how he gets where he is getting. I was an atheist when I read this and while it certainly did not convert me, it did get me thinking about religion beyond the dumbed down characterture I was brought up with.)
7. The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara (Gettysburg and all that)
8. Essays - Michel de Montaigne (Once again, more about how than what)
9. Mephisto – Klaus Mann
10. We Were Soldiers Once… And Young - Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway