Top 100 Sci Fi books list

From http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_books_rank1.html

 

 

Rank	Author/Editor	Title	Year
1	Orson Scott Card	Ender's Game [S1]	1985
2	Frank Herbert	Dune [S1]	1965
3	Isaac Asimov	Foundation [S1-3]	1951
4	Douglas Adams	Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy [S1]	1979
5	George Orwell	1984	1949
6	Robert A Heinlein	Stranger in a Strange Land	1961
7	Ray Bradbury	Fahrenheit 451	1954
8	Arthur C Clarke	2001: A Space Odyssey	1968
9	Isaac Asimov	[C] I, Robot	1950
10	William Gibson	Neuromancer	1984
11	Philip K Dick	Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?	1968
12	Robert A Heinlein	Starship Troopers	1959
13	Larry Niven	Ringworld	1970
14	Arthur C Clarke	Rendezvous With Rama	1973
15	Aldous Huxley	Brave New World	1932
16	H G Wells	The Time Machine	1895
17	Dan Simmons	Hyperion [S1]	1989
18	Arthur C Clarke	Childhood's End	1954
19	Robert A Heinlein	The Moon is a Harsh Mistress	1966
20	H G Wells	The War of the Worlds	1898
21	Ray Bradbury	[C] The Martian Chronicles	1950
22	Joe Haldeman	The Forever War	1974
23	Kurt Vonnegut	Slaughterhouse Five	1969
24	Neal Stephenson	Snow Crash	1992
25	Niven & Pournelle	The Mote in God's Eye	1975
26	Ursula K Le Guin	The Left Hand of Darkness	1969
27	Orson Scott Card	Speaker for the Dead [S2]	1986
28	Philip K Dick	The Man in the High Castle	1962
29	Michael Crichton	Jurassic Park	1990
30	Alfred Bester	The Stars My Destination	1956
31	Isaac Asimov	The Caves of Steel	1954
32	Frederik Pohl	Gateway	1977
33	Roger Zelazny	Lord of Light	1967
34	Madeleine L'Engle	A Wrinkle In Time	1962
35	Jules Verne	20,000 Leagues Under the Sea	1870
36	Stanislaw Lem	Solaris	1961
37	Kurt Vonnegut	Cat's Cradle	1963
38	Michael Crichton	The Andromeda Strain	1969
39	Carl Sagan	Contact	1985
40	Isaac Asimov	The Gods Themselves	1972
41	John Wyndham	The Day of the Triffids	1951
42	Neal Stephenson	Cryptonomicon	1999
43	Anthony Burgess	A Clockwork Orange	1962
44	Robert A Heinlein	Time Enough For Love	1973
45	Philip K Dick	UBIK	1969
46	Vernor Vinge	A Fire Upon the Deep	1991
47	Daniel Keyes	Flowers for Algernon	1966
48	Kim Stanley Robinson	Red Mars [S1]	1992
49	Walter M Miller	A Canticle for Leibowitz	1959
50	Isaac Asimov	The End Of Eternity	1955
51	Mary Shelley	Frankenstein	1818
52	Kurt Vonnegut	The Sirens of Titan	1959
53	Neal Stephenson	The Diamond Age	1995
54	Iain M Banks	Player Of Games [S2]	1988
55	Jules Verne	Journey to the Center of the Earth	1864
56	L Ron Hubbard	Battlefield Earth	1982
57	Ursula K Le Guin	The Dispossessed	1974
58	David Brin	Startide Rising [S2]	1983
59	Orson Scott Card	Ender's Shadow [S1]	1999
60	Peter F Hamilton	The Reality Dysfunction [S1]	1996
61	Greg Bear	Eon	1985
62	Philip Jose Farmer	To Your Scattered Bodies Go	1971
63	Niven & Pournelle	Lucifer's Hammer	1977
64	Margaret Atwood	The Handmaid's Tale	1985
65	Philip K Dick	A Scanner Darkly	1977
66	Alfred Bester	The Demolished Man	1953
67	Gene Wolfe	The Shadow of the Torturer [S1]	1980
68	Harry Harrison	The Stainless Steel Rat [S1]	1961
69	Arthur C Clarke	The City and the Stars	1956
70	Philip K Dick	The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch	1964
71	Robert A Heinlein	The Door Into Summer	1956
72	Connie Willis	Doomsday Book	1992
73	Michael Crichton	Sphere	1987
74	Robert A Heinlein	Citizen Of the Galaxy	1957
75	C S Lewis	Out of the Silent Planet [S1]	1938
76	Dan Simmons	Ilium	2003
77	Robert A Heinlein	Have Space-Suit - Will Travel	1958
78	Robert A Heinlein	The Puppet Masters	1951
79	H G Wells	The Invisible Man	1897
80	Clifford Simak	Way Station	1963
81	Edgar Rice Burroughs	A Princess of Mars [S1]	1912
82	Ursula K Le Guin	The Lathe of Heaven	1971
83	Alastair Reynolds	Revelation Space [S1]	2000
84	John Wyndham	The Chrysalids	1955
85	Iain M Banks	Use of Weapons [S3]	1990
86	Julian May	The Many-Colored Land [S1]	1981
87	E E 'Doc' Smith	Grey Lensman [S4]	1951
88	Richard Morgan	Altered Carbon [S1]	2002
89	Arkady & Boris Strugatsky	Roadside Picnic	1972
90	Edwin A Abbott	Flatland	1884
91	David Brin	The Postman	1985
92	Clifford Simak	[C] City	1952
93	Greg Bear	Blood Music	1985
94	Audrey Niffenegger	The Time Traveler's Wife	2003
95	John Brunner	Stand on Zanzibar	1969
96	Arthur C Clarke	The Fountains of Paradise	1979
97	Stanislaw Lem	[C] The Cyberiad	1974
98	Theodore Sturgeon	More Than Human	1953
99	Philip K Dick	VALIS	1981
100	William Gibson	[C] Burning Chrome	1986

Reading for Ministry: Literature, poetry, etc. (From Cruciality)

From: http://cruciality.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/what-language-shall-i-borrow/

…I'm wanting to compile a list of suggested novels, plays and collections of poetry as assigned reading for theology students and pastors. And to this end I am soliciting the help of readers of Per Crucem ad Lucem. I'm thinking of work by Geraldine Brooks, John Updike, John Steinbeck, J.M. Coetzee, David Malouf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, Jim Crace, Thomas Carlyle, Francine Prose, Kenzaburō Ōe, Thomas Lynch, George MacDonald, A.S. Byatt, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; and poets like William Blake, John Donne, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, George Herbert, Philip Levine, Sylvia Plath, Anna Akhmatova and John Ciardi.

Here's some additional suggestions to kick us off:

Novels

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
• François Charles Mauriac, The Knot of Vipers
• Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
• Doris May Lessing, This Was the Old Chief's Country 
• Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea 
• Albert Camus, The Fall 
• Albert Camus, The Stranger
• Richard Lischer, Open Secrets
• Elie Wiesel, Night
• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
• Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled
• Anton Chekhov, The Party and Other Stories
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude 
• Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities 
• Liam O'Flaherty, Famine
• Liam O'Flaherty, The Puritan
• Fred D'Aguiar, The Longest Memory
• Bryce Courtenay, April Fool's Day
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
• Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club: A Novel
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
• Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
• Marilynne Robinson, Gilead 
• Marilynne Robinson, Home
• John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road 
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• Patrick White, Voss
• Patrick White, The Vivisector
• Bo Giertz, Hammer of God

 
Poetry/Plays

• William Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem
• Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist: a Poetics of Work 
• Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh
• T.S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays,: 1909-1950
• W.H. Auden, Collected Poems
• James K. Baxter, The Collected Poems of James K. Baxter
• Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged
• Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 
• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
• Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
• W.B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. 1: The Poems
• Les Murray, Learning Human: Selected Poems 
• Les Murray, The Biplane Houses: Poems 
• C.K. Stead, Collected Poems, 1951-2006
• W.S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius 
• Micheal O'Siadhail, Globe
• Micheal O'Siadhail, The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust

 

Some Comments:

 

------------------

Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, the stories of Borges, Twaine's Huckleberry Finn, Melville's Moby-Dick, all of Dickens, all of Kafka, Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, Beckett's Molloy…

And for poetry, I couldn't live without George Herbert, Milton, Blake, Hopkins, R. S. Thomas, Dylan Thomas — and of course Homer's epics, which are amazing and indispensable… And for contemporary poets, I'd have to include Rowan Williams, Kevin Hart, Geoffrey Hill.

For drama, I'd also add all of Beckett's major plays: I reckon it's impossible to understand the 20th century without Beckett. (Plus, he's not only one of the greatest playwrights who has ever lived: he's also the funniest.)

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Though almost all Flannery O'Connor novels are quality, try the little book The Violent Bear it Away, a lesser known and not over-quoted O'Connor piece.

Perhaps such classics as Don Quixote (supposedly Faulkner's favorite) and Les Miserables.

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I would also include under novels: Fyodor Dostoevsky, 'The Idiot'; Alan Patton, 'Cry, The Beloved Country'; Georges Bernanos, 'Diary of a Country Priest'; Anonymous, 'The Way of a Pilgrim'

 

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Barth on Calvin, "I could... spend all the rest of my life just with Calvin."

Calvin is a cataract, a primeval forest, a demonic power, something directly down from Himalaya, absolutely Chinese, strange, mythological; I lack completely the means, the suction cups, even to assimilate this phenomenon, not to speak of presenting it adequately. What I receive is only a thin little stream and what I can then give out again is only a yet thinner extract of this little stream. I could gladly and profitably set myself down and spend all the rest of my life just with Calvin'.

 

 – Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen, Revolutionary Theology in the Making: Barth-Thurneysen Correspondence, 1914–1925 (trans. James D. Smart; Richmond: Westminster John Knox Press, 1964), 101.

 

From: http://cruciality.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/barths-hymn-to-calvin-the-cataract/

Matthew Hentry's "Method for Prayer" online

At http://www.matthewhenry.org/

Psalter Links & Recommendations

  

Lots of Psalters for purchase: http://www.crownandcovenant.com/Psalters_s/31.htm

 

 

Recommended Psalters: 

• The Psalms of David in Metre (with commentary by John Brown of Haddington) (http://www.swrb.ab.ca/newslett/actualNLs/Psalter0.htm)
• 1994 Trinity Psalter
• ***1650 Scottish Metrical Psalter (The Scottish Psalmody or the RPCI split-leaf editions) (See Crown & Covenant link above, International Psalters, The Scottish Psalmody) (The Scottish Metrical Psalter)
• 1973 RPCNA Book of Psalms for Singing
• 1984 Canadian Reformed Churches Anglo Genevan Psalter (Book of Praise | Revised text of the Anglo-Genevan Psalms)
• The Bay Psalm Book
• 1912 Psalter (United Presbyterian Board of Publication): http://books.google.com/books?id=Wm0Cl8tI8KgC&dq=1912+psalter&lr=&as_brr=1&source=gbs_navlinks_s

 

Links to Online Psalters:

 

Psalter.org. Psalms from The Book of Psalms for Singing. Crown & Covenant Publications.

 

 

 

Album:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Psalms-David-College-Cambridge-Willcocks/dp/B0001RVRF4/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1208276555&sr=8-2

 

 

Discussion:

 

http://www.puritanboard.com/f124/psalm-book-do-you-use-why-31707/