I, too, had arrive at five by listing the books I’ve read most often:
East of Eden, John Steinbeck (Of all the epic-scoped books I’ve read, this is my favorite.) Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor (I grew up in a small town; Keillor nails it.) The Cider House Rules, John Irving (In a bookstore a couple of hours ago, I picked up their copy of this just to read the line “Good night you princes of Maine, you kings of New England!”) Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (This book is a course in characterization.) Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls (My fourth-grade teacher read it aloud to my class; I’ve read it numerous times since then – and the tears come each time as well. It’s probably the book that started my interest, and toward a career, in writing.)
I’m 39. Honorable mentions to Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls, but all of which I’ve read just once (so far). It’s interesting to note the many mentions of John Irving in these lists.
Catch-22, Joseph Heller (and I’m reading with interest the lists of anyone who also names it, because we probably have similar tastes)
The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway
Watership Down, Richard Adams
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
The Brothers K, David James Duncan
Definitely hard to narrow it down. Without even trying, here’s a second five that I love almost as much as the first five:
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving The Secret History, Donna Tartt New Grub Street, George Gissing Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome The Time-Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
And this isn’t even touching on Kazuo Ishiguro, Diana Wynne Jones, Connie Willis, P.G. Wodehouse…damn.
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Dragon’s Egg by Robert Forward
Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope
Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
Estilicon, who chose Barchester Towers, I won’t argue with your choice, but Orley Farm, The Claverings and The Vicar Of Bullhampton are as wonderful and on any given day so are another half dozen of Trollope’s works. It’s like trying to choose your favourite amongst your kids.
And I’m having a hard time deciding on #5… John Irving’s A Widow for One Year? Gaiman & Pratchett’s Good Omens? Austen’s Persuasion? One of a couple of books by Anne Lamott? Gone With The Wind? The Phantom Tollbooth?
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
Double Star, Robert A. Heinlein
Little Fuzzy, H. Beam Piper
Yes I know that the Narnia story is several books, but I look at it as one story.
I considered putting the Bible on the list but to me it’s sort of in it’s own category… I don’t read it for entertainment, but for guidance.
Little Fuzzy is my favorite work by Piper, although I don’t dislike any of his stuff. It’s what I’d give a young person who might be interested in getting into sci-fi. Double Star is the same, for Heinlein. But The Moon is a Harsh Mistress nearly crowded it out.
To Kill a Mockingbird is the book I was forced to read in high school, and couldn’t believe I would like.
I’ve read all but the last of the “Barsetshire Series”. Unfortunately I was never able to buy (this is Argentina after all), the last book.
The same happen with the other books you mention. I’ll keep then in mind if, with luck, I travel to the states later this year.
You are wrong. Would you care to recommend an specific book?
I haven’t read much of her oeuvre, because I have to be in a particular mood for both Thirkell and Trollope, but I have The Brandons, Marling Hall, and Cheerfulness Breaks In, and greatly enjoyed each.
(If you don’t know, Thirkell wrote a series of novels (29 of them!) set in Trollope’s Barsetshire county, but set in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. The ones I’ve read have been, by and large, absolutely wonderful, and very much in the Trollope vein.)
RikWriter:
No, I was just limiting myself, since there’s no way I can compare favorite novels to favorite non-fiction books.
Glad to see I’m not the only English Passengers fan around here… it’s definitely a sleeper (in that it’s not [yet] as popular as it deserves to be) but well worth checking out.
…next time I’m asked, any of A Prayer for Owen Meany, Watership Down, Snow Crash, Huckleberry Finn, and Sagan’s Billions and Billions (or his Demon-Haunted World) could make the cut…
Shakespeare’s plays Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello, Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye all fall into this category for me.
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
The Stand by Stephen King
Helter Skelter by Vincent Buliousi
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
[ol]
[li]Lord of the Rings[/li][li]The Godfather[/li][li]Babbit[/li][li]Les Miserables[/li][/ol]
After that too many choices: Shogun, The Old Man & the Sea, The Stand [a real ending would moved it to third place!]
I’ll try to get some in here that haven’t been mentioned:
The Dollmaker by Harriett Arnow – Gertie Nevels is my all-time favorite fictional character.
The Dram Shop by Emile Zola – I love Gervaise. The only reason I’m holding off on reading Nana is because of the way she treated her mom (Gervaise). Selfish bitch.
Morality Play by Barry Unsworth. I read a lot of historicals and this one, along with Kristin Lavrandsdattar do a great job conveying the importance of religion and the church to medieval people. It was a real eye-opener.
Kristin is #4.
#5 – gotta get Stephen King in here, so The Stand.
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, Piers Paul Reid. My first BIG OBSESSION, I read this thing constantly in the third and fourth grades.
Guinness Book of World Records, Norris and Ross McWhirter (sp). From the age of 6 to 19, I religiously bought a copy each year and read it over and over… I cried when I heard that Ross was killed by the IRA and I worried that the books were going to end (I was 9). I now only buy a new one every 5 years or so.
The Dune series, Frank Herbert. Dune was really the first book where I caught a sense of the author behind it.
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. A lot of you have problems with this book. C’est la vie.
History of the World, by J.M. Roberts. Nobody, and I mean nobody, can distill 7,000 years of civilization into 500 concise, fact-filled pages like the British. Roberts was an Oxford don, so he was particularly well-suited for this task.
The above books were chosen from all the rest because they all have the following in common:
I’ve owned multiple copies.
These books have been re-read God knows how many times. I knew my Guinness books so well that I recognized which records were new from the previous year without checking. I actually tested this one day with my sister - I got the latest (I must have been 11, 12) and she and I went through the books (she had last years, I had the latest) and I would read the records, telling her if this one was different from the one she was reading*.
I went through at least a year-long period where the book(s) were picked up at least every-other day, and they are still on my shelf (Except for Alive).
Each of these books have been on my shelves for at least a decade, if not longer. I’ve had a copy of Dune since high school, which was cough 25 years ago cough.
Books that didn’t make the cut:
The Story of Civilization, vol 1-11, Will and Ariel Durant. The Prize, Daniel Yergin.
Harry Turtledove’s Timeline 191 series (South wins the Civil War and the effects upon subsequent history). The Stand, Stephen King. Also, It.
*I don’t think I ever confessed to such a display of uber-geekery before, but this is the Straight Dope Message Board, OK? Y’all understand, right?
