My list of this keeps changing, but at the moment, off the top of my head, my list is (in no particular order):
A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving The Corrections by Jonathan Frantzen A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
Anyone else like to share their list? I’m thinking this might be a good thread to pick up reading tips.
Vanity Fair-William Makepeace Thackeray
I, Claudius–Robert Graves
Crime and Punishment-Fyodor Dostoevski
Light in August–William Faulkner
Barchester Towers–Anthony Trollope
It’s really difficult to name just five, so the books I named are novels that I’ve read several times and gotten something new out of them every time, but I could just as easily and fairly name many other sets of 5 novels as “my favorites.”
I have no qualification to rate these as literature. They are just the novels of which I have the most favorable and lasting memories.
Geek Love Katharine Dunn
The Last Confession of Mabel Stark ? Keough
Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
Chicken Every Sunday Rosemary Taylor
As soon as I post I will think of 3 others that I should have said instead.
I will limit myself to single novels - thus no trilogies or The Chronicles of Narnia.
The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain Crime and Punishment, by F. Dostoveskey The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth ( I thought I was the only one to make it through all 1500 pages)
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (note: this is primarily due to a quote from this book Redheads are either demigods or potential demigods or something to that effect.)
House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
The Trial - Franz Kafka
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevski
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Man Who was Thursday - GK Chesterton
Of course, this ignores series such as The Chronicles of Narnia, the Foundation series, and the Hitchhiker’s Guide, as well as stories like those of Poe and Saki.
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
A Soldier of the Great War - Mark Helprin
oh, almost forgot (sorry to go over the limit, but…)
The Regeneration Triology: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road - Pat Barker
Life and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
The Princess Bride by William Goldman masquerading as S. Morganstern
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Witching Hour by Anne Rice