and you'll still have a lot of money left!

the architects studio companion, latest addition. it's awesome. practicing one year and still use it. can bypass trudging through code books all day, and structural manuals. gives great generalizations for architects and designers.

"Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin" by Lawrence Weschler

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"The New York Trilogy" by Paul Auster

"Boundries" by Maya Lin

OK ether -- you beat me to BOTH the Auster and Garcia-Marquez on this one! I'll second both of those and add:

Garcia-Marquez' "Chronicle of a Death Foretold"
William Gass' "On Being Blue"
Galway Kinnell's "Book of Nightmares"
Paul Valery's "Monsieur Teste"
and anything by Borges (Labyrinths, Dreamtigers, etc)

and art/architecture-wise:
Juhani Pallasmaa's "Eyes of the Skin"
Kandinsky's "Concerning the Spiritual in Art"

"Animal Farm" by Orwell
"Dharma Bums" and "On the Road" by Kerouac
"Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy
"Catcher in the Rye" by Salinger
"Tales of Ordinary Madness" by Bukowski
"Howl" by Ginnsburg

just off the top of my head...

"the proper study of manking" isaiah berlin
"ways of seeing" john berger
"zone 6: incorporations" (and the rest of the zone's too)
"hyperspace" michio kaku
"Silicon Dreams: Information, Man, and Machine" robert lucky.........

all books by chuck palahniuk. "lullaby" is my favorite.
in a similar vein - "the contortionists handbook" by craig clevenger.
also, "the dove" by Robin L. Graham

A People's history of the United States by Zinn
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Chambon
The Stand by King
anything by Poe
The Stranger by Camus
Delerious New York by Koolhaas
my guilty pleasure is to pick up anything by Tolkien

The Art of the Long View, Peter Schwartz
The Beer Can by the Highway, John Kouwenhoven
The Portable Thomas Jefferson
Ada, Vladimir Nabokov
Basic Writings, Martin Heidegger
Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco
+arch.books listed on previous thread

hey, you guys read some good books (marquez, kerouac, palahniuk, etc.)
i'll add:

a clockwork orange
1984

and a bunch of others more to come...

Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
Babble Tower, AS Byatt

subliminal7: excellent call on the Crimethinc book, thats an amazing read that I constantly go back to, don't know why I didn't think of it before...

Screw reading!
Flash memory. Bike parts. Videio games. CD's. Dildos (I think). You name it!

song of the dodo - david quammen
studies in tectonic culture - frampton
other criteria - leo steinberg (still the best art criticism i have ever come across)
anything by robin evans

i like to read content while on the porcelain...but it contains wisdom too

::

fear and loathing in las vegas.. insanely funny and scary.
the solitaire mystery and sophies world by joosteen gardner, i think
portrait of an artist as a young man... joyce (sorta difficult, but once you get it you wont stop)
anything john irving.. such greeat stories/characters..anything he writes is entertaining to read

Immortality , Milan Kundera

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Pirsig
Farenheit 451 - Bradbury

I have a theory that says that sometimes the books people say are their favourites, their classics, the ones to be read over and over- are really the books they never read and they hardly understand. My suspicion is confirmed by the fact that it's rare that anyone ever says at a bar "YO, that's exactly what Robin Evans meant when he said: "... and the eye functions much as a casting mechanism in a manner remenicient of mimesis..." At our most relaxed moments, when we are drunk and amongst friends, who the hell ever talks about Robin Evans?? Then again, perhaps we should.

the fountainhead

Demian: Herman Hesse
High-Rise: JG Ballard
Magic Mountain: Thomas Mann
Wind-up Bird Chronicle: Murakami
Species of Spaces: Georges Perec
America: Jean Baurillard
Blasted Allegories: anthology
anything by Robin Evans
anything by Rosalind Kraus
anything by Jose Saramago

Peter Zumthor's Thinking Architecture. Please get it...Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space and Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought (the last i'm still rereading for hte 4th time to understand it completely) :) for an excellent series (there are 4 of them) Arthur C.Clarke's Rama series. Good sci-fi that touches on living, family, history, religion and the unknown. oh..and Zumthor's Thinking Architecture :)

as you can see Amazon are also doing 10% off

the only reason I keep going back to Frampton's 'Studies in Tectonic Culture' is because I keep falling asleep while reading it. Its a great book but its very trying to get through the whole thing.

tao teh ching
Inner architecture must be transformed before you can pass your professional exam.

The River Why – David James Duncan
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving (really anything Irving, as alfredocheese says above)
Skinny Legs and All – Tom Robbins
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Vineland – Thomas Pynchon

I also agree with you Zoe that people often refer to books they WANT to love not books they actually enjoy. These five novels are the kind of book that, if I spot one on the bookshelf while trying to get some housecleaning/take home work done on the weekend, the whole day is shot because I just…can’t….resist….one more page, just that favorite paragraph, again…

Who Cut the Cheese: A Cultural History of the Fart

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1580080111/qid=1101233369/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/002-9173143-7788822?v=glance&s=books

Who knows how to get Peter Zumthor's Thinking Architecture?
I tried a couple of times before, it is out of print. I can never get hold a copy, even though I tried very hard. I heard great reviews about that book.

"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A plug.

I know your gift card is to amazon, Kai, and it's a great gift, but for your other book shopping everyone please try Powell's, the legendary Portland, Oregon bookstore.

It's much more of an independent bookseller, you can often find gently used copies of things, and especially around the holidays they tend to be both quicker and cheaper than amazon.

you can get peter zumthor's thinking architecture by paying around 375 dollars on amazon....or maybe get lucky finding it somewhere else...goodluck.

Thanks a lot everyone, great suggestions, anymore?

"actual air" by david berman

always useful, everyone shits and sometimes there is not toilet facilities available

also gos well with-

Darkhorse Comics translation of Lone Wolf and Cub - spanning 28 volumes of one mans dream to kill everyone in Japan.

LET THE SLAYING BEGIN!

The Stranger, by Albert Kamus

Encyclopedia Americana in my expansive porcelain office.

Same could be said for the newspaper, then

gustav, we are talking about 410000 items with their own short stories. i bet you a carbon fiber sheet there are porcelain hardware :), for your office in this, mmm,.. book. my bookie reads newspapers all the time ( at least he thumbs thru until he gets to the horse racing section).
yes, newspapers are whole different art form altogether. but horse racing is the best.
*i am now gonna walk my dogs and put a nice shirt for the norms coffeshop thanksgiving with tina.

Oh I'm an idiot how could I forget - "Geek Love" by Katherine Dunn!!! The most twisted story ever written, makes Story of the Eye look bucolic. It's about a family of circus freaks whose father DESIGNED them to be freaks, and that's the most normal aspect of the story, as his reasoning is that giving your children a means of income for their entire lives is the best gift a father could give his child. Sounds reasonable!

I got an early fifties encyclopedia. Most articles are written by different people. I find their construct of a reality just as delicious as say Kafka. They manner in which they wrote, the words they used, the construction of sentences, their ideas are better than a Sign-feld show.
It also reminds me of some of the posts here on archinect.
As for newspapers, I only read the horoscopes and the funnies, unless I am having an out of body experience, then I check my stocks in military weapons manufacturing.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream - Thompson
The Rum Diary - Thompson
The Sun Also Rises - Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms - Hemingway
The Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
Franny and Zooey - Salinger
Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction - Salinger
A Good Day for Bananafish (first story in Nine Stories) - Salinger
The Gunslinger - King

all of which are read at least once a year, and frequently thumbed through for comfort

A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander

It's a great reference, despite the totalistic architectural dogma.

the bible and "100 uses of a dead cat."

archi: "for an architecture of reality", michael benedikt

non-archi: "songs of innocence and of experience", william blake

I would say anything by Ballard.

But definitely his latest release of short stories.

1000+ pages (now in paper back) great to read cover to cover, flick through and return to again and again and again.

Same for The Soft Machine (and anything else) by Burroughs. The ticket that exploded

And Invisible Cities (and alot of stuff) by Calvino.

You could get a monster collection of bibles though!

And actually vitruvius offers a lot of great advice.

The Aubrey/Maturin series - Patrick O'Brian - Just blow your whole gift card on these