To ask what are your top ten favourite books?

1. Pride and Predudice
2. What Katy Did
3. What Katy did Next
4. The Secret Garden
5. Dracula
6. Wolf Hall
7. The Importance of being Earnest
8. A Room with a View
9. Anna Karanina
10. The lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

I'm struggling to get it down to 10 but in no particular order, these would be in the list:

The colour purple, Alice Walker
The yellow wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The secret history, Donna Tartt
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
Behind the scenes at the museum, Kate Atkinson
Giovannis room, James Baldwin
84 Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff
All quiet on the western front, Erich Maria Remarque

Then two from here:

Pied Piper, Nevil Shute
The garden of evening mists, Tan Twan Eng
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
The crow road, Iain Banks
Stoner, John Williams
Fatherland, Robert Harris
Any Human Heart, William Boyd

In no particular order

1. The Count of Monte Cristo
2. Beartown
3. Rebecca
4. David Copperfield
5. The Remains of the Day
6. To Kill a Mockingbird
7. Crime and Punishment
8. The Kite Runner
9. Stoner

1. The Master and Margarita
2. A Confederacy of Dunces
3. Wuthering Heights
4. Burial Rites
5. Lolita
6. Nausea by Sartre
7. Blue Eyes, Black Hair by Marguerite Duras*
8. Little Birds by Anaïs Nin
9. Nearly anything by Charles Dickens

*This is pretty niche - I read it on a university course. If I re-read it now I'd probably be like wtf. Amazing when you take the time to understand it though.

And how did I forget Precious Bane??
10 books is not enough!!

As an English Literature student 30 years ago, there was quite a lot of discussion about which modern authors would be the Classics of tomorrow. The same discussion probably still continues today.
John Le Carre was seen as a potential contender. My A Level English Literature teacher didn’t like his style but she thought that Graham Greene would be a contender. If I could add another book to my list it would be The End of the Affair. The premise is brilliant: please God, save him (her affair partner), and I*ll give him up forever. And then he survives…

In no particular order, except for Steinbeck. I love all of his books but particularly East of Eden.

East of Eden - Steinbeck
The Overstory - Powers
Disgrace - Coetzee
Cry the Beloved Country - Paton
Stoner - Williams
The Bell Jar - Plath
The Jump-off Creek - Gloss
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Dillard
Mink River - Doyle
Things Fall Apart - Achebe

And the short story “To Build a Fire” by Jack London is great too.

Don’t Mr Disraeli Caryl Brahms & SJ Simon

@RustyBear I read that years ago and I’ve never heard it mentioned by anyone. Thanks for the reminder.

Oh bloody hell, forgot the Harry Potter books, the narnia books, jack reacher books and lovely to see Milly Molly Mandy mentioned by pp.

My list is based on the books I’d happily read again and again.

1. The works of Jane Austen, especially Emma, P&P and Persuasion
2. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
3. the works of the wonderful Douglas Adams
4. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
5. Anything by Bernice Rubens with particular reference to Mr Wakefield’s Crusade & Every Man For Himself
6. Middlemarch by George Eliot
7. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
8. Collapse by Jared Diamond - an extraordinary non-fiction book exploring why certain historic civilisations may have ended (mostly self-inflicted?) Someone knowingly chopped down the last tree on Easter Island; someone waited till the end of their life for a boat of supplies from the home country that never came..
9. The works of Agatha Christie but particularly Nemesis - the work of a writer at the height of her powers
10. The Handmaid*s Tale - possibly one of the most important books of our time

In Memorian - Alice Winn
The chocolat books - Joanne Harris
Still Life - Sarah Winman
The Lewis Trilogy - Peter May
The Women - Kirstin Hannah
Cleopatra & Frankenstein - Coco Mellors
In the middle of middle America - David B Lyons
Eddie's Bastard - William Kowalski
The Spoils Of Time Trilogy - Penny Vincenzi
All this I will give to you - Delores Redondo

This is my most recent top 10 apart from the penny Vincenzi trilogy which I first read around 25 years ago and I read it every 5 years. I read around 60-70 books a year. I'm 52, so have read quite a lot since I was six years old lol.

OMG - I had forgotten Kinsey Millhone. Thank you - I get to discover them all over again 😀

Aww, I had a box set of Milly-Molly-Mandy. And I wrote to the publishers and they sent me a list of all the Chalet School books as I wanted to collect them all in order ❤️

I always wanted to go to boarding school in the Alps, not a Yorkshire comprehensive.

Also — loved The Good Terrorist - Doris Lessing
Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie
all the Iris Murdoch novels esp The philosopher’s pupil
The reluctant fundamentalist- Mosim Hamad

Ooooh this is a cracking thread OP! Thank you!

Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
Murder is Easy by Agatha Christie
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
The Hunger Games Trilogy (not including the Ballad of Songbird and Snakes, and I've not read Sunrise on the Reaping)
Sneaky 11th for Middlemarch

I had an excellent reading year last year so I am musing on whether Whalefall by Elizabeth O'Connor and I Who Have Never Know Men by Jacqueline Harper should make the list too.

Also I think most have interpreted this as novels but Educated by Tara Westover and The Diaries of Anne Frank also rank very highly for me

Wuthering Heights - E Brontë
Emma - Austin
Tess of the dUrbervilles - Hardy
Never let me go - Ishiguro
Brick Lane - Monica Ali
Norwegian Wood - Murakami
Narnia series - CS Lewis
Elsewhere - G Zevin
Nothern Lights trilogy - Philip Pullman
Hamnet - Atwood

Ooh, you mentioned The Trouble with Lichen. I love John Wyndham but I prefer The Kraken Wakes, The Day of the Triffids and Web.

This is hard as if I like an author, I read everything they've ever done so then picking one book is really hard! So here goes:

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R. R. Tolkien
2. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
3. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
4. Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
5. The Game of Thrones series (technically A Song of Ice and Fire) by G.R.R. Martin
6. Magician by Raymond E. Feist (and all the rest)

1. Angela Carter's books - The Bloody Chamber
2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Good to see The Chronicles of St Mary's coming up 🙂

So many good books out there, I mostly read sets so:
The Power of Five series by Anthony Horowitz.
all of the vampire books by Charmaine Harris.
anything by Maureen Lee(my favourite are the pearl street ones)
most books by Stephen King (The Stand is my favourite)
i know not everyone likes these but I absolutely love the Twilight books.
Most books by Tolkien.
Most books by Patricia Cornwell.
A Dangerous Fortune by Ken Follett.
Ask for Andrea by Noelle W Ihli.
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

Yes, Barbara Pym was a wonderful writer with subtle comic insight. I like Jane & Prudence, partly for a scene where (if I’m remembering correctly) an eligible male enters a scene carrying an oversized marrow…

I agree. No bad ones so far. Maybe some I wouldn’t read again ( I do love to reread) and that would be the worst I felt. Although I wouldn’t read Pet Cemetery again because I found that so disturbing.

Everything by Guy Gavriel Kay.. particularly The Lions of Al Rassan and Under Heaven.
All of Red Rising by Pierce Brown
Bernard Cornwall’s Winter King series (Arthurian) and also Giles Kristin’s Arthur books.
All of Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire series
Space by James Michener
I could go on… and on.

1. A Kind Of Loving - Stan Barstow
2. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
3. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
4. The Casual Vacancy - J.K. Rowling
5. 20,000 Streets Under The Sky - Patrick Hamilton
6. Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
7. A Short History Of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
8. The Seduction Of Mrs Pendlebury - Margaret Forster
9. The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
10. She May Not Leave - Fay Weldon

A thousand splendid suns- khaled hosseini
migrations - Charlotte Mcconaghy
the goldfinch- Donna tartt
the great gatsby - f Scott Fitzgerald
kala - Colin walsh
Never let me go- Ishiguro
Where the crawdads sing
Water- John boyne

also love the Washington Poe series but they’re more of a quick enjoyable read than a profound love

The Hanging Tree – David Lambkin
The Ecliptic – Benjamin Wood
The Lacuna – Barbara Kingsolver
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Adventures of Sally – PG Wodehouse
These Old Shades/Venetia – Georgette Heyer
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase – Joan Aiken
The Armourer's House - Rosemary Sutcliffe
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood – Rebecca Wells
State of Wonder – Ann Patchett