Are you a bookworm?

[Zebraa]

Can you list a few books that you absolutely fell in love with?

I need a new book to love.

I'm in dire need of recommendations as I don't read the back of books.

[FiveGoMadInDorset]

Paula - Isabelle Allende

[notnowbernard]

To Kill a Mocking Bird

It really touched me. Beautifully written

[FiveGoMadInDorset]

Notes on an exhibition - Patrick Gale
Marley and Me
Penguins stop[ed play ( about cricket)

[MatNanPlus]

Tess Gertisen has a cracking series out in Tesco £5 each following a Female Homicide Detective.

[babs10000]

revolutionary road - richard yates - a modern masterpiece to compare with Fitzgerald

[FiveGoMadInDorset]

Just read The Shakespeare Secret which is an above average thriller.

[babs10000]

Mmmm life is too short to waste on average don't you think?

[FiveGoMadInDorset]

OK it kept mme engaged while running a B&B with a 2.5 DD and a week old baby.

[babs10000]

what's the best book you've ever read? give me a steer?

[Dottoressa]

Line of Beauty - Alan Hollingdale. I should have hated this book; on the face of it, it couldn't be further removed from my own beliefs. However, I thought it was truly wonderful. I didn't want it to end, ever. I saw it on TV afterwards, and it didn't begin to do it justice - it is so beautifully written...

I also loved Music and Silence (Rose Tremain), and I like (though don't love) the Scotland Street books (McCall Smith).

The other one that stands out in the last ten years for me is Hardy's Return of the Native (a real page-turner).

[solidgoldbrass]

Can I have a little more info about your likes and dislikes? Do you prefer historical novels? If so I strongly recommend Diana Norman (try The Vizard Mask or Catch of Consequence)
If you like sharp funny thrillers you can't beat Christopher Brookmyre (Country of the Blind is probably his best but All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye is good fun especially as the heroine is a 46-year-old grandmother who kind of turns into a female James Bond...)
If you like crime novels then you could try Mo Hayder but only if you are not easily upset as some of the things she thinks up are reaaaaaalllly disturbing: if you prefer cosier crime there is a great fun series by Leslie Meier (the Lucy Stone books) which are American-cosy, set in a luvverly little small town where the murders are always getting solved by this housewife-and-mother type - but they actually pack a bit of a feminist punch along with it.
If you like sci-fi of the more thoughtful alternate-world sort then I absolutely and utterly recommend Gwyneth Jones for the Bold As Love series. I have just reread the 5th one and enjoyed it even more this time (have to say that they are better the 2nd time around because the plot and the ideas are so complicated).

What was the last really good book you read?

[Dottoressa]

The problem with reading something like Line of Beauty is that everything you read afterwards seems shallow and poorly written, even when it isn't. I read voraciously, and I have not yet found anything that touches it.

It is also a reminder to me why I am never going to be a really great fiction writer, no matter how hard I try!

[FiveGoMadInDorset]

Jasper Fforde

[babs10000]

Oh my god return of the native is one of my fave books ever..loved in the line of beauty on tv..tried folding star but actually found it too gay..

Need to try Tremain - have youread Carol Shileds?

[babs10000]

Oh my god return of the native is one of my fave books ever..loved in the line of beauty on tv..tried folding star but actually found it too gay..

Need to try Tremain - have youread Carol Shileds?

[SixSpotBurnet]

Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton

[babs10000]

have you read George Eliot? Middlemarch and Silas Marner are sublime

[babs10000]

Hnagover square amzing but slaves of solitude even better

[babs10000]

rosamund lehman anyone? And George Orwell 'Coming up for air'.

[FiveGoMadInDorset]

The Raj Quartet

[3Ddonut]

Being Dead - Jim Crace
The Loop - Nicholas Evans
If nobody speaks of the remarkable things - John McGregor
An Equal music - Vikram Seth
Life on the refigerator door - Alice Kuipers
Ferney - James Long

Also enjoyed, the other boleyn girl - phillipa gregory and two caravans - marina lewskya

[cathcat]

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Firethorn by Sarah Micklem
anything by David Mitchell
Don't lets go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
anything by David Sedaris/Augusten Burroughs.

[babs10000]

I capture the castle is brillinat.

Somerset Maughan
HE Bates
Rumer Gooden

[solidgoldbrass]

Again, not knowing your tastes but if you want something more literary than mass-market fiction here's a random selection of my favourites..
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis (not recommended if you don't like grossness or violence but it is interesting)
The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (this was the original Gothic potboiler, it's hard work but at the same time it's gloriously overblown melodrama and fun to read to see how much/how little has changed in fiction over the centuries)
The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks - this is one of the very few books that made people come up and speak to me on the Tube to say they had read it too.
To Kill A Mockingbird (I had to read this at school, liked it, forgot about it, read it again as an adult and it's one of those books that always makes me well up)

The Da Vinci Code (OK OK I am kidding. And I haven't read it in full myself, only a few pages and chucked it down in disgust at quite how bad it was - and I have quite a fondness for trash fiction).