I am amazed that after four pages in this thread no one has included the aviation works of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Having an engine failure in a stick and fabric airplane on a mail run, landing off field, and finding the beauty of it all.... That is a true Flyer.

Darker Shades of Blue: The Rogue Pilot

Helmet For My Pillow

Strong Men Armed

D-Day

Pegasus Bridge

Animal Farm

1984

Henry David Thoreau's, Walden.

A bit of a dense read, but a true classic.

Good suggestion, as is his essay on civil disobedience.

Some of the best writers challenge many of the things in which we have been indoctrinated since birth and never bothered to question, or been allowed to question.

:) I just read The Little Prince. It was amazing. Put my "grown-up" self in check.

The Captain by Jan de Hartog

Read this a couple years ago: novel about an ocean-going tug captain, but very much about "captains" in general, regardless.

Twain's THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER

The last Twain novel, the old man had some interesting ideas.

Richard Bach. But I've only read Biplane. The rest of his books are probably as good.

The Map of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska <--- Good book about Alaska flying. The Nun story was particularly a sad reminder of the subsidized flying and how natives abuse the system.

Lone Survivor I was totally disappointed by. Plenty of other better SF books out there.

U.S. astronauts Frank Borman and James Lovell read "Roughing It" aloud to pass the time aboard NASA's Gemini VII, a 14-day-long Earth orbital mission in December 1965. Borman recalls reading the book during an on-camera interview in the 1999 PBS-TV (USA) television program "Nova: To the Moon". wiki



Roughing It by Mark Twain - Project Gutenberg