I love to read Heinlein. My favorite quote is "An armed society is a polite society". My favorite books are "Time Enough for Love" and "To Sail Beyond the Sunset".
But he has this strange thing about having sex with his mother.
I loved Time Enough for Love (the mom stuff aside), Glory Road, and Job. Job just got me - about the impermanance of material things and the eternal nature of love.
"Time Enough For Love" is my favorite, and far deeper than most people often get. The style of that book is literally (and to me, very obviously intentionally) on epic religious canon, and appears to have been patterned on Judaic mythology more specifically. In essence, he wrote a "Bible" built upon the axioms of his philosophy, and actually wrote it in the traditional style of such things. Great stuff.
Because of this, if there was ever a book that he wrote that could serve as the basis of a religion, TEFL would be it. Incidentally, my father is a theologian with a strong background in the Judaic religious mythology (read: "pre-Christian"), and I grew up hearing about the stories and characters. It is one of the primary reasons I recognized the close mappings.
Actually, the Lazarus Long attraction to Maureen isn't what people think it is. The role model for Maureen isn't his mother, but his wife of many years, his perpetual sounding board, and in his own description "all around genius", Virginia (right down to the red hair...)
the infowarrior