Favorite Authors / Books

"The Life of Pi" by Yann Martel. It´s got nothing to do with engineering but it´s a great book. Worth reading (IBSN 1 84195 392 X)

Here are just a few of my favorites:

Erich Maria Remarque - Arch de Triumph

Gunter Grass - The Tin Drum

Mario Vargas Llosa - The War of the End of the World

Mark Kurlansky - Cod

Gotta be...

Alice Through the Looking Glass

Has any book ever caught that seamless mad blending of dream sequences better?

On a more engineering front...

Subsunk; the story of submarine escape. By:, W O Shelford. Type:, English : Book : Non-fiction. Publisher:, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1960 [i.e. 1961] ...

Read it as a kid, heroic in parts heartrending in others.

"Managing Projects In Organizations"

"Power and Politics in Project Management"

"The Prince"

"The Art of War"

"The Handbook of Power Calculations"

I think I'm afraid of you...

I find Ayn Rand's overtly political stuff a yawn , but I enjoyed The Fountainhead. I think it's got some kind of cliched reputation in the States. It mixes interesting stuff about architecture with views on the nature of altruism and similar. A lot of it falls off the edge so to speak , but it works as a whole. Pillars of the Earth weaves a slightly soppy romance saga around medieval Church architecture to make an enjoyable read.

Absolutely any of the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. There are over 25 ( lost count of them now ) in the series.

I once met him at a book signing. I told him that I always take one of his books with me on longer trips and thanked him for keeping me sane.

He stopped signing, looked up and said "Ah, so you think that you're sane, do you ?"

Nice one.

Anything by Asimov...also "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card.

Ender's Game is great, but the rest of the books in the series are terrible.

Agreed.

An Engineer Imagines - The autobiography of Peter Rice

Glass in Architecture - Michael Wiggington

The Little Prince - Antoine de St Exupery

Dune - Frank Herbert

Les Trois Mousquetaires - Alexandre Dumas

Huis Clos - Jean-Paul Sartre

The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler

Casino Royale - Ian Fleming

"Longitude", by Dava Sobel - a good one for the Christmas list.

Ha at last..one I've read...!

Do I get a gold star? (Oh I must've read Casino Royale...even I was 14 once! )

my favorite books. hmmm.....

I'd have to say anything by Robert A Heinlein, second only to the empire trilogy by Asimov.

Anything by Nevil Shute, his real name was Nevil Shute Norway and he was an areonautical engineer who felt his proffessional credibility would be compromised if his peers knew that he was also a novelist.

Asimov: no doubt one of the greatest, not only the SF

very important:

Julian Huxley

Erich Fromm

Konrad Lorenz

Loren Eisele

Bertrand Russell

C.N.Parkinson

Barry Sears

Jared Diamond

Richard Conniff

Have Fun

RHABE

Henry Petroski's books are good, especially for engineers.

For a good fantasy yarn about engineering, I recommend "Crosstime Engineer" by Leo A. Frankowski! There are several more books in the series. I like the way the hero (Conrad Stargard) solves some big problems by using a classical engineering mind-set.