What are your 5 favourite books of all time?

SmallLegs - Please read Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" and Philip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly", if you haven't already.

And come over to the 50-Book Challenge thread. We need more sci-fi fans like you

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lional Shriver
11/23/63 - Stephen King
The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets - Eve Rice
King of Torts - John Grisham (actually,ANYTHING by John Grisham)
Valley of the Dolls - Jacqueline Susan

Jane Eyre - C Bronte
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
The God of Small Things- Arundhati Roy
Little Town on the Prairie - Laura Ingalls Wilder

Very hard! - but I based it on books I return to. Which are very few.

Favourite books of all time - interesting way of putting it. I'm going to go for books that aren't 'the best' but that I go back to again and again just for the pleasure of them.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Flying Finish by Dick Francis
A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer
A Small Pinch of Weather by Joan Aiken (particularly The Weather Ship which I think of most days as a metaphor for what I aim to do at work, and The Serial Garden)
Trollope by Victoria Glendinning

A few years ago I would have put a lot of Mitford books in this list but not now. things do change.

The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
Writing Home - Alan Bennett
Notes on a Scandal - Zoë Heller

Strongly recommend the 50 books in a year thread over on adult fiction btw. Read that and your tbr pile will soon be taller than you are.

Yes indeed .

A Fine Balance
Testament of Youth
Half of a Yellow Sun
A Sara Paretsky - maybe Hardball
A Sound of Chariots

That was difficult.

I forgot to add The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

I love her books shall swap with Of Mice and Men can't we have a top 10

Absolutely impossible to choose but the 5 I always have to hand are:
Jane eyre
Persuasion
A little love song
Mistress of Rome
Dracula

My copies of all of these have been read and re read to within a inch of their lives.

Rivals
The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets
The Secret History
Life after Life
All the Susan Howatch books, particularly the Starbridge series
The Night Circus
Frenchman's Creek

I'm going to stop there.

The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Nine Tailors - Dorothy L. Sayers
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

That was SO hard... and I keep thinking I've missed something out, which I will (of course) remember as soon as I hit "post".

Katedotness, I loved Csardas.

The Children of Green Knowe

Thank you for the reminder.

For me
The Cryptonomicon
Iain M Banks anything from the Culture series
The Golden Apples of the Sun Bradbury
Valis by P.K. Dick
And Snowcrash.

Although now I feel bad missing out William Gibson.

To Kill A Mockingbird
The Blind Assassin
Strangers on a Train
Rebecca

And probably something by Marian Keyes but I can't make up my mind which one.

I'd argue Austen and dickens are lighter than Margaret Atwood! Dickens books mostly started out serialised (Victorian soaps ).

If I'd been allowed 10

Wuthering heights
Behind the scenes at the museum
The great gatsby
Color purple
The white queen

Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
The Forsyte Saga - John Galsworthy
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
La Bete Humaine - Emile Zola
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky's

Really hard to decide!

Martin Millars 'Lonely Werewolf Girl' (series, I am cheating a bit)
Steven Kings 'IT' (terrifying)
Eva Rice 'The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets' (utterly charming)
Jane Austens 'Pride and Prejudice'
All the Harry Potters!

Csardas by Diane Pearson
September by Rosamunde Pilcher
Absolutely anything and everything by James Herriot, wonderful stories.
The Dalbeattie Street stories by Robert Douglas. About the families living in a Glasgow tenement after the Second World War.
The Harry Potter series, I read them from beginning to end three times in a row a couple of years ago.
The Agatha Raisin and Hamish MacBeath series by M C Beaton, quick reads, I can do a book a day.

Impossible to choose 5 that I would stick to but the following come to mind:

Notes on a scandal
The handmaid's tale
A midsummer night's dream
Lord of the Rings
Pride and Predjudice

Also, loved the Wool trilogy recently and Persepolis

I'm sure I'm like a lot of people when I say that this thread makes me realise how little I read anymore and how i need to get back into reading! I used to read loads!

I have the time to read whilst I am on the train to and from work - I really need to just start doing it, instead of wasting time online.

The Red Tent - Anita
Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood
Angela's Ashes - Frank MCourt

Anything by James Herriot. I really do think all his work is a brilliant example of how good, well written simple prose can be so enjoyable to read.

Once DS is old enough to sit still for two minutes i intend to read him a mixture of James Herriot, Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton

Not sure of a fifth. Will come back to you.

Would love to put Dickens/Austen/Shakespeare but honestly reading for pleasure for me is more lighthearted.

The books I think I've gone back to most are:

Johnny Got His Gun
The Three Musketeers
Shogun
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Legion

The Stand
The Cider House Rules
Rebecca
The Thorn Birds
A Fine Balance

There are many more, and these can change. However, I can't see anything taking over The Stand.

I love a thread like this. Gives me lots of ideas.

Mine are:

Catch 22
The Hobbit
The Farseer books (Robin Hobb - a cheat here because there are a few of them but if I had to choose I think I'd say the last two)
The Witches books by Terry Pratchett - so hard to choose from any of them but I guess Wyrd Sisters (although the last TP book was brilliant)

I've got so many others that I think I'll leave it there.