Geek Books

Sean provides a nifty link to “The Top Twenty Geek Novels”, as collated by…someone, using some kind of criteria. Or something. Sean also disses the notion of bolding items on a list (shock!) and displays a depressing lack of awareness of the fact that “Hip is a state of mind” (horror!).

Anyway, here’s the list of Geek Books, with the ones I’ve read in bold. (Someday there’ll be just a list of totally random stuff, and I’ll bold parts of it.)

1. The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell
3. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip Dick

5. Neuromancer — William Gibson (Actually, I’ve never read this all the way through. But I’ve bounced off the first couple of chapters so many times that I’m claiming it anyway. I just never got into cyberpunk much, even if Neuromancer boasts a stunner of a first sentence.)

6. Dune — Frank Herbert (Gotta get back to this one. I started it once, but I got frustrated because Herbert uses a lot of fictional jargon that got in the way of the story. Yes, there’s a glossary, but I didn’t really like flipping back to the glossary nearly once per paragraph.

7. I, Robot — Isaac Asimov
8. Foundation — Isaac Asimov (Shouldn’t this include the entire Foundation Trilogy?)

9. The Colour of Magic — Terry Pratchett
10. Microserfs — Douglas Coupland
11. Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson (Man, does this book crash and burn in the last four pages. It’s astonishing.)

12. Watchmen — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons (I’m due to re-read this.)

13. Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson (I’ve never had so much fun reading a book whose content I understood at a rate of under fifty percent as I did with this one.)

14. Consider Phlebas — Iain M Banks
15. Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein
16. The Man in the High Castle — Philip K Dick
17. American Gods — Neil Gaiman (Loved it.)

18. The Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson (Actually, this book might be the counterexample to what I say above about Cryptonomicon.)

20. Trouble with Lichen – John Wyndham (This is the one book on this list of which I haven’t heard.)

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