Inspired actually by this thread, although I am sure it has been asked before I wanna know everyone’s top 5 favorite books of all time.
Don’t separate them by genre, year, author, or any of that stuff. I want your top 5 straight up.
I will start!
Catcher in the Rye (unoriginal I know, but this book spoke to me)
Crime and Punishment (Catcher…but in Russia)
Tess of the D’urbervilles (hardest book I ever read, but loved every minute)
Messiah (Modern book about a serial killer who thinks he is Jesus)
Watership Down (You have any idea how hard it is to properly explain this book after you mention it’s about bunnies?)
Honorable mentions to: Rebecca, Great Gatsby, Shade’s Children and many others
This is harder than I thought, especially since there are so many books that I still want to read. I’d like to think that some of them will eventually find their place in my top five. But for now:
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
On Heroes and Tombs by Ernesto Sabato (this is out of print in English but very worth tracking down)
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
How to Be Good, Nick Hornby
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
[ol][li]Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban[/li]
[li]Independent People by Halldor Laxness[/li]
[li]The Master of Hestviken by Sigrid Undset[/li]
[li]Hunger by Knut Hamsun[/li]
[][]The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist[/ol]
My favourite books aren’t any kind of classics or my local equivalent of “The Great American Novel” because I usually find those kinds of things unbearably dull.
So mine are:
Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn - Tad Williams
Maskerade - Terry Pratchett
The Princess Bride - William Goldman
The Truth - Terry Pratchett
The Belgariad - David Eddings
Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat’s Cradle
Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
A pretty predictable list, I guess. I also put down Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies for fifth place before settling on Gatsby.
“Another Roadside Attraction” Tom Robbins
“One Flew Over The Cukoo’s Nest” Ken Kesey
“Misery” Stephen King
“At The Mountains Of Madness” H.P. Lovecraft
“A Short History Of Nearly Everything” Bill Bryson
It’s embarrassing how many of the classics (classic classic and modern-day classics) I haven’t read, including many listed here, so don’t take my list as thinking any of these are better than many of the above-mentioned books, since I have no basis for comparison. That said, the books I’ve enjoyed the most are:
On Wings of Eagles by Ken Follett – the amazing and riveting story of how Ross Perot hired ex-Green Berets to train his executives to execute a prison break to rescue his employees who’d been imprisoned without charges in Iran, just before the official “Iranian Hostage Crisis”.
Kane & Abel by Jeffrey Archer, and the sequel, The Prodigal Daughter. Thank Og he wrote a sequel, because I did not want the first book to end!
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. There really aren’t any words I could write to give this book its justice. Simply stunning.
Master of the Game by Sydney Sheldon. I literally couldn’t put this book down – stayed up all night reading it and went to work bleary-eyed the next day.
Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett. DEATH and cats. It just doesn’t get any better than that.