Let’s see - only 5?
In no particular order:
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith
Rebecca - Daphne DeMorney
All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
Love In The Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Hmmmm…these change a lot depending on my moods, like “favorite opera” and “favorite pasta shape.”
And several of my top picks have already been picked, like Three Men in a Boat, The Man Who was Thursday, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Maltese Falcon, and The Grapes of Wrath.
Well, here’s a mixed bag of five fresh ones, alphabetically by author:
Nelson Algren; The Man With the Golden Arm
Mikhail Bulgakov; The Master and Margarita
Joris-Karl Huysmans; A Rebours (variously translated as Against Nature or Against the Grain)
James Jones; From Here to Eternity
Herbert Read; The Green Child
The World According to Garp by John Irving
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Like a Hole in the Head by Jen Banbury
All twentieth-century. What d’ya know.
Hey, that Jen Banbury book is damn good, isn’t it?
Neat. You and I are probably the only ones who’ve ever read it, aside from Banbury’s Mom, of course.
Probably. Well, I did buy it as a present for nearly everyone I buy presents for. As long as it was in print, anyway…
Great Expectations * by Charles Dickens
To Kill a Mockingbird * by Harper Lee
The * Pugratorio * by Dante Alighieri (and yes, I * know * it’s not really a novel, and only part two of a trilogy, and I haven’t read it in the original Italian, and this is cheating on so many levels it’s not funny. I can’t help it. It * feels * like a novel.)
Was * by Geoff Ryman
Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World * by Jonathan Swift
Ahem. I meant * Purgatorio * of course.
*Huckleberry Finn
East of Eden
A Confederacy of Dunces
Watership Down
I, Claudius*
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Catcher in the Rye
Mists of Avalon
Macbeth
Jordi/ Lisa and David
My sister from the black lagoon (no it is not a childrens book OR a goosebumb book!)
Granted I’ll probably think of something I like better than one of these within the next ten minutes, but at the moment, my top 5 are:
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Rebecca, Daphne Demaurier [sp?]
Well, this is a series, but The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King. If that’s cheating, then The Waste Lands, of that series.
The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald
Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky
Lolita, Nabokov
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (a trilogy, I know - one five books long, no less - but I can’t even guess at how many times I’ve read every page in them)
I’m not sure what #5 would be…
The Women In White, Wilkie Collins
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Novel With Cocaine, M Ageyev
Confedaracy of Dunces, John Kennedy O’Toole
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Gerge Orwell
With an honourable mention to The Diary Of A Madmen And Other Stories by Nikolai Gogol which is a collection of short stories.
Lolita - Nabokov
The Secret History - Tarrt
Moby Dick - Melville
The Remains of the Day - Ishigura
Last Orders - Swift
That was tough choosing only 5
Admittidly not particularly erudite but here goes:
Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Murder Must Advertise - Dorothy Sayers
Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Catch-22
Slaughterhouse-Five
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
the Titan/Wizard/Demon trilogy by John Varley
Tom Robbins’ Still Life With Woodpecker used to be one of my favorites but now I’m more partial to Jitterbug Perfume
Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
The End Of The Affair - Graham Greene
The Riddle Of The Sands - Erskine Childers
Wilt - Tom Sharpe
Of Mice And Men - John Steinbeck
Hi,
How do you just pick five :)?
I don’t make any claims to literary expertise either, and I think my choices are rather eclectic. I decided to split them up into two sections- great stories and great dialogue.
Great Stories- Pretty standard fare…
*The Chronicles of Narnia * C.S Lewis
The Witching Hour by Ann Rice
*The Stand * by Stephen King
*Gone with the Wind * by Margaret Mitchell
*Of Mice and Men * by John Steinbeck
ok… one more I can’t leave out
*Nop’s Trials * by Donald Maccaig- a dog book for grownups.
Great Dialogue (good stories too)- sorry my list overan on this one LOL- I couldn’t pick my favorites out of my three favorite authors.
Trainspotting , Maribou Stork Nightmare , Acid House Irvine Welsh- I know thats three…
Pride & Prejudice , Persuasion by Jane Austen
*Lonesome Dove * and Dead Man’s Walk by Larry McMurtry
I did read Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, and being a redhead from a large family of redheads, I could appreciate the remark but other than that I found the writing style too goofy on the whole.
Here’s five, not necessarily best, not necessarily “Great Literature”, but novels I come back to again and again…
Birds of America by Mary McCarthy
The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
My Idea of Fun by Will Self
Cruddy by Lynda Barry
Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King