Which one/s should I get?

I've read some, but not all.

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn rand

Ayn rand is/was a loony. Don't bother.

Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein

How I hate people who "grok" things!



Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Brave new World - Aldous Huxley
World out of time - Larry Niven
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
Martian Chronicles - Arthur C. Clarke
Ubik - Phillip H. Dick

All the above are good!

Book Buyer Delimma
These are all very good books, and although I would reccomend them all, you seem to want only one. So, I would reccomend Brave New World by Alduous Huxley. This classic has had a far reaching effect, and the issues it explores are just as important today as they were during Mr. Huxley's time. Also, I would definitely recommend The Brothers Karamazov. Dystovskey does an excellent job in character development, and his psychological dissection of each character's thoughts, feelings, and actions is excellent.

Contrary to Contrex, I would strongly suggest "Atlas Shrugged". You might want to counterbalance it with "Brave New World". You would then have one which is strongly libertarian and one which is strongly authoritarian. ( I shouldn't call it authoritarian. It shows the perils of authoritarianism.)

Personally, I like light reading for travel.

Therefore: Aztec, Stranger in a Strange Land, and/or Catch 22.

Which one/s should I get?
The Huxley, the Heller, the Heinlein, and Martian Chronicles - BTW, that's not Arthur Clarke, but Ray Bradbury.

You have to keep in mind that some of the titles you listed are either enormously long and therefore heavy if hardcover, or cube-shaped with teeny print if paperback.

Atlas Shrugged is not what I'd call airplane reading. A good chunk of the book consists of 50-page speeches (yes, speeches) in which characters expound on things that have already been said by other characters in other speeches.

(Then again, they're not that difficult to spot and avoid: whenever a character with an integrity-inspiring name like Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Antonio sounds like he's going to make a speech, just skip ahead some 50 pages or so; if a character with an incompetent name like Tinky Holloway or Cuffy Meigs appears, you can breathe easily because he won't say anything that isn't mind-numbingly idiotic.)

To get the airplane-friendly version of Atlas Shrugged, I'm tempted to suggest you read Matt Ruff's Sewer, Gas & Electric... it's a trashy cyberbunk novel but there's a wonderful scene in which one of the characters summarizes Atlas Shrugged in about two pages. Ayn Rand is actually a character in the book, and there's another great scene in which someone points out to Rand that her own life didn't exactly live up to (and sometimes flatly contradicted) the standards she set in Atlas Shrugged.

Brave new World by Aldous Huxley should be a pretty good bet because it's solid, good, thought-provoking literature - but it isn't dour or slow to get through or terribly complicated, it reads easily enough and is engaging.

Thanks for your replies.

Ive just realised I have actually tried reading the Martian chronicles about 4 years ago, and didnt like it! So thats that one out of the window.

Sewer, gas, electric... liked the sound of that, apprently its; "Defenently crazy stuff, more waked out than the hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy", interesting.

At the moment Im thinking of Catch 22 or Brave New World, unless you recommend any others.

Thanks again.

Skip the first two, for sure.

Shapless--

Begging to disagree with your assessment of Matt Ruff--he hasn't written War and Peace or the Great American Novel, but he's a genre author who is also thought-provoking.

I read Brothers Karamazov around the time I was eighteen, quite a while ago, and ended up really liking it - but, I remember that for me then it was a little hard to get interested in at the beginning... so not perhaps a good choice to read during plane travel..

I think I'd vote for Catch 22 of those on your list.

"Lieutenant Scheisskopf longed desperately to win parades and sat up half the night working on it while his wife waited amorously for him in bed thumbing through Krafft-Ebing to her favorite passages. He read books on marching. He manipulated boxes of chocolate until they melted in his hands and then maneuvered in ranks of twelve a set of plastic cowboys he had bought from a mail-order house under an assumed name and kept locked away from everyone's eyes during the day. Leonardo's exercises in anatomy proved indispensable. One evening he felt the need for a live model and directed his wife to march around the room.

"Naked?" she asked hopefully.

Lieutenant Scheisskopf smacked his hands over his eyes in exasperation. It was the despair of Lieutenant Scheisskopf's life to be chained to a woman who was incapable of looking beyond her own dirty, sexual desires to the titanic struggles for the unattainable in which noble man could become heroically engaged.

"Why don't you ever whip me?" she pouted one night.




"That Lieutenant Scheisskopf," Lieutenant Travers remarked. "He's a military genius."

"Yes he really is," Lieutenant Engle agreed. "It's a pity the schmuck won't whip his wife."

"I don't see what that has to do with it," Lieutenant Travers answered cooly. Lieutenant Bermis whips Mrs. Bermis beautifully everytime they have sexual intercourse, and he isn't worth a farthing at parades."

"I'm talking about flagellation," Lieutenant Engle retorted. "Who gives a damn about parades?"

Catch 22, by all means.

I didn't say I disliked Matt Ruff. Fool on the Hill is one of my favorites... I try to make a point of reading it every few years. Great swashbuckling fun.

I agree with Noddy. Light reading for plane travel. Escape. Brave New World is not an escape, it's torture.

Have you considered reading something entertaining and a little stupid? It surely helps to get your mind off the turbulence and the wailing babies.

On Heinlein:

Skip Stranger in a Strange Land and go with the Moon is a Harsh Mistress instead; not overlong, light and humorous. Its his best novel on my opinion.

I can never pick from a list. I strongly recommend Larry Niven's Ringworld.