He was a fun pulp writer, and you can buy collections of his short stories, i.e. this one, although a lot of his pulp stuff isn't science fiction. But avoid Battlefield Earth; flaws that you might tolerate in a twenty-page pulp story (i.e. thin characters and less-than-brilliant style) become a lot less tolerable when you're faced with over a thousand pages of the same.

Unfortunately, I can't give much practical advice on this genre; it's not something I've ever been very interested in. I'll throw out a single suggestion: Harlan Ellison is a talented writer (although not as talented as he thinks), and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is quite famous.

Ah okay.

What about older authors? Stuff from mid 13th-17th century? I have it and read it twice. Love it :D
I don't know how to take that comment.

I was going to recommend the Decameron as an older book, but I see you've already read that. You should also read The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, a weird sort of frame-narrative type thing; it's not 17-th century-style old, but it's weird and interesting (the ending is a letdown, unfortunately), and the author shot himself in the head with a silver bullet blessed by a priest because he thought he was turning into a werewolf, so that's interesting.

Hm ... I guess I haven't actually read that much from that time period. Shakespeare really is quite good, if you've been avoiding him since high school, especially his tragedies (his comedies have lots of pun and wordplay that don't really work well with the way the language has changed). Of course Machiavelli wrote The Prince during the 16th century, and Erasmus' In Praise of Folly is good fun. I assume you've read Canterbury Tales? Of course you should, especially since you enjoyed the Decameron. Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur is hugely influential to the Arthul mythology, but I found it kind of dull, frankly.

Oh hey, and a book that isn't old, but which I forgot to recommend and which everyone should read, is The Master and Margarita, a comic/tragic sort-of-fantasy thing by Bulgakov. Not as good as that, but worthwhile is Moscow to the End of the Line, a surrealistic novel about a Russian alcoholic trying to visit his lover by train; I'm never sure whether it's hilarious or horrifying, but it's certainly an experience.

Rather "extreme" views can be found in the works of Ayn Rand and for the horror part i'd suggest Books of blood by Clive Barker and everything else by him.
And, because i'm aware of the recent twilight hate, the title "Books of blood" has nothing to do with vampires, it's collected short stories about various stuff like dealing with the devil, man eating pigs, horrid sexual themes, old monsters, bizzare old rituals and other stuff, it's not your average horror and the author is quite imaginative.

I Don't now about love craft... but i like

Tony Juniper: Saving Planet Earth
DK: Dinosaurs And Prehistoric Life
Stephen king: The Stand
Michael Crichton: Jurassic Park
Michael Crichton: Time Line
Charles Dickens: Oliver
Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol.

For nonfiction I have enjoyed:
The First Crusade: A New History: The Roots of Conflict between Christianity and Islam by Thomas Asbridge - I skipped at least 3 or 4 different classes at college to finish this book. Completely gripping.

Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson - One of the most comprehensive works on the famous revolutionary.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley
and in the same vein
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable - A recent NY Times best seller, Marable uses a lot of previously unseen archival records to trace the life of Malcolm.

For fiction:
If I have to mention the Dune Saga by Frank Herbert then I shall be the first in this thread I believe (one would assume you already have or read these)

I enjoy a lot of Bernard Cornwell's stuff (Excalibur, etc).

I can't think of anything else right now and I'm too tired to wander into my study.

Seconded.

If you want to perfect your book collection with horror, you should also stock on the Holy Trinity of weird tales: Lovecraft (mentioned), Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith.

First am hearing of the Kink James Version...lol

based on your collection, you need...
Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha Living Christ
Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That
http://www.jcf.org/new/index.php?categoryid=83&p9999_action=details&p9999_wid=64
one that might be the most fun to read right now,
Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen
and based on the other suggestions of Robert Wilson I will prescribe you go straight to Prometheus Rising, there is plenty of time to have fun with the rest when inside the matrix

Everyone has Harry Potter...like the Gideons give out bibles, don't keep Harry Potter in a box apart from the rest of your tomes.

Science Fiction? Well, there are the 'big three': Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein. I prefer Clarke of the three, but all are worth reading.

Iain M. Banks is a must, IMO, as is Frank Herbert (and not just the Dune series, although those are 'must reads' for sci fi as well).
Lois McMaster Bujold did some great sci fi some years back.
Dan Simmons' Hyperion books are great reads.
Neal Stephenson is another good choice.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"Rage," Stephen King
The God Delusion
The Prince
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Midnight's Children
Mein Kampf
The Foundation series

Oh.....that's why.

You seem to have an interest in religious texts, so let me share one of my favourite resources with you: The Internet Sacred Text Archive. It's a bit like Project Gutenberg, but specifically focused on religious texts and on scholarly works about them. I frequently go there, browse around for something that looks interesting, read the first chapter or so, and if I'm hooked, I order a hard copy from a bookstore. I even bought their CD archive just to support them.

If you're curious about Eastern religion and spirituality, Alan Watts does the best job I've ever read of explaining it in a no-bullshit fashion that would be palatable even to a hardened atheist. He clears away enough of the mystical clutter that a westerner can understand what's going on here, but he does so without "killing" the spiritual content of the message - his works are a love letter, not an autopsy. Plus, the dude is just funny.

Glad to see RAW and Discordianism getting so much love on the GOG forums! Hail Eris!

Along similar lines, Alan Moore's "Promethea" is the weirdest, most mind-blowing comic book you will ever read. Anyone who likes RAW's reality-bending, structure-defying novels should check it out. (Moore cites RAW as one of his major influences, BTW.)

As for Lovecraft, Penguin sells a good three-book series that collects almost all of his horror stories. (I believe the titles are "The Dreams in the Witch-House", "The Thing on the Doorstep", and "The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories".) If you're a completionist, you'll also want to pick up "The Horror in the Museum" (a collection of horror stories ghost-written by Lovecraft) and "Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos" (which collects some of the most important non-Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos stories). If that's still not enough Cthulhu for you, you start running out of quality material pretty quickly, but here are a few collections I found decent:
-"Disciples of Cthulhu" has a couple of decent stories, though most of them are dreadful. (I haven't read Disciples II, but general consensus is that it's a dud.)
-New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos: better-than-average quality stories, and a few gems.
-Dead But Dreaming is widely considered one of the better Mythos collections, though personally I preferred the sequel, Dead But Dreaming 2.
-Someone already mentioned Ramsey Campbell - his early stuff is just painfully awful, but his later work improved a lot. "Cold Print" collects most of his Mythos stuff, but honestly, I'd recommend reading his (technically) non-Mythos novel "Hungry Moon". The plot doesn't quite hang together and the ending is a complete cop-out, but it has enough really effective scenes to be worth the read. And the Lovecraft influence is still obvious.
-I'm not a big fan of Chaosium's "Cycle" collections as a whole, but two of them ("The Antarktos Cycle" and "The Hastur Cycle") had some decent selections that surprised me.
-Some of the short stories in the Delta Green novels are pretty good, though the one full-length novel I read ("Denied to the Enemy") didn't hold up nearly as well. "Dark Theatres" has the only story I've read since "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" that actually managed to make Deep Ones scary again.
-Avoid anything by August Derleth. I have huge respect for the man for helping to make Lovecraft a household name, but he wrote some of the worst Mythos stories I've ever read (apart from Brian Lumley, that is... who pulled off the incredible bad-writing feat of Mary-Suing the Cthulhu Mythos!) Beware of collections of Derleth's work that are sold under Lovecraft's name (such as "The Watchers Out of Time") - Derleth finished up some of Lovecraft's stories that were incomplete at the time of Lovecraft's death, but they're more Derleth than Lovecraft, and thus more suck than good.

And since we're talking Lovecraft, I'll finish by mentioning the only book I've yet found that is honestly, and in all seriousness damaging to the reader's sanity: "Lonesome Squirrel", the autobiography of Steven Fishman, unofficial librarian of the Church of Scientology back in the 1980s. I found that if I read more than a couple of chapters at a time, I would honestly start to feel like my mind was coming unhinged, and everyone I showed the book to reported the same effect. One friend described it as follows: "It's like that challenge where you try to drink four litres of milk. You think you should be able to do it, but at a certain point your body just says "Nope, I'm done here" and starts vomiting it back up."

So... I guess I'm not recommending the book exactly, but if you're like me and just can't resist the incurably weird, then Lonesome Squirrel is a shining example of it. The whole thing is available for free online here.

Thanks for the site link, looks awesome :D
And thanks for the information as well.

I'd recommend for you the following books in an attempt to find something that goes well with your current collection AND is science fiction:

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
by Ursula K. Le Guin

Quote from wikipedia: "The story explores many ideas and themes, including anarchism and revolutionary societies, capitalism, individualism and collectivism, and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis."

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Ethan of Athos
by Lois McMaster Bujold

Most of the book is an OK criminal novel but especially the society of the planet Athos is really noteworthy and interesting.

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Starship Troopers
by Robert A. Heinlein

Wikipedia quote: "The overall theme of the book is that social responsibility requires being prepared to make individual sacrifice. Heinlein's Terran Federation is a limited democracy, with aspects of a meritocracy in regard to full citizenship, based on voluntarily assuming a responsibility for the common weal. Suffrage can only be earned by those willing to serve their society by at least two years of volunteer Federal Service."

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Endymion
and
The Rise of Endymion
by Dan Simmons

A fantastic story about the worth of life and death. Two of my absolute favourite books.

TBH, I find Iain Banks' work rather dull.

Greg Bear's [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_(Greg_Bear)]The Way[/url] series is excellent! I'd recommend The Forge of Time, and Anvil of Stars, too.

David Brin's Earth is also rather good - it predicted email spam and technologies we now have....
Uplift series of books should be given a read, too.

Alastair Reynolds' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alastair_Reynolds#Bibliography]Revelation Space[/url] series is very good.