What is the best book you have ever read?

Shatters, I have just finished the grapes of wrath. Unbelievably powerful. Like being punched repeatedly in the head. It's haunting me too.

Oh Joan I loved A Fine Balance too. In fact I think it's time for another read

A very difficult question... Certainly near the top of my top five would have to be The Sparrow Mary Doria Russell. It's about Jesuits and aliens and just says so lunch about the human condition. It's beautiful and gripping.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, because it is so readable and such a good story, describes horrible events accurately (I assume) but somehow doesn't seek to burn them into your brain in a way that lesser books might do for effect (I'm looking at you Rupert Thomson ), and at the end of it I looked at the world differently and I hope with more humility.

I have a few -

The Grapes of Wrath- Steinbeck
Behind The Scenes At The Museum-Kate Atkinson
The End Of The Affair- Graham Greene

Mine would have to be something by John Irving, and would probably go for A Prayer for Owen Meanie ......

Yes, yes to Primo Levi's the Periodic Table. And TKAM is definitely a perfectly realised world, I think the same of P&P (although didn't Austen think it was too light and happy and perfect). One Hundred Years of Solitude is pretty amazing. I haven't reread Middlemarch since I was in my early 20s but at the time it certainly felt like a big and complex novel. Maybe I should start rereading all those classics I loved at that age.

Favourites? Wilkie Collins is my current crush (some of the best female characters I've ever read), and Margaret Attwood.

Salinger's Catcher in the Rye

V good formula, Meg.

So the one's I listed are 'best' but 'favourite' would also include 'Ballet Shoes' and 'Miss Pettigrew' Lives for a Day (for sheer, feel good escapism), the Harry Potter books (which have many flaws but I can't help loving them) and yes to LOTR.

I think of 'best' books as being those where not a word is out of place and you can't imagine the world existing without every word of them in it.

'Favourites' are those that may be flawed but you love them anyway.

So in 'best' I would include:
Catch-22
The Maltese Falcon
Down And Out In Paris And London
The Big Sleep
If This Is A Man, or The Periodic Table

And in my 'favourites' I would have the likes of:
Infinite Jest
Mason & Dixon
Foucault's Pendulum
Stone Junction
The Lord Of The Rings (my ultimate comfort read!)

Requiem For a Wren by Neville Shute
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

Best: Catch-22 is pretty hard to beat.

Favourite: that's way tougher...

Alan Bennett's "the clothes they stood up in". It's a tiny, tiny book but absolutely describes human frailties to a tee. I love this book.

These threads all turn into "favourite books" threads. It doesn't matter if the OP is about the best book, must-read books, or whatever.

Tales of the City
Therapy by David Lodge
This Book will Save your Life by A M Homes
The Last Resort by Alison Lurie

Best is different from favourite though, isn't it?

I have read many extraordinarily well-crafted books, but they wouldn't be my favourites, because often even in a less well-written book there will be a particular scene or character that strikes a chord with you, and stays with you long after the final lines have been read.

I'd say something by Mantel, Winterson, Barnes or Lessing as the best.

Finn Family Moomintroll as my favourite!

This thread is going to cost me a fortune on amazon! Can you stop now please :)

Impossible to choose just one, but on a scale of complexity, brilliance, and sheer intellectual satisfaction, these would probably make top three:

(in no particular order)

Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco
Anathem - Neal Stephenson
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

I'm reading Anna Karenina at the moment. It's very good, but "the greatest novel ever written" it ain't, imho.

Too many.

As a youngster, it was the Little House on the Prairie books.

As a teen I progressed onto spy stories and blockbusters, I would say The Day of the Jackal was my favourite in that era.

Then, perhaps in no particular order, Wild Swan, The God of Small Things, Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island, I'm sure there are more.

An impossible question but I agree with One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest as it was so rewarding after such a difficult first 80-100 pages. Also loved To Kill A Mocking Bird but only as an adult.

Oddly, my favourite book as a child was Day Of The Triffids. And my fav horror book was Misery. But there's so many, arghhhh.

I've always loved The She Devil but my absolute favourite is any of the Harry Potter books - I've read them all about 20 times. (Feel quite embarrassed admitting that.)
No other book has had such an escapism effect on me.

Gosh. Just found out Alan Garner published a new book in 2012. Off to Amazon.

Yes think Room was the best book I have read ....
bit of a head fuck when you realise the small space they live in and the boy thinks it is the world :(
Made me feel upset when the bastard who trapped them left them with no lights .... imagine living in darkness with no escape :(

I read the Cleft within a few months of having DD, who was the most placid, at ease baby. She came nearly 3 years after DS, who came out raging and at odds with the world. I think that's why I identified with it so much, it was an interesting time for me.

The Stone Book Quartet by Alan Garner