The best book you’ve ever read?

[ICECream821]

There we go! Sorry if there is a thread like this…but what’s the best book you’ve ever read? Or I guess the book that left you thinking about it for days after?

For me I would say The Kite Runner

The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons is the book I can go back to again and again.

Chase the Moon - Catherine Nicolson. Just a beautiful love story. Haven't been able to stop reading it through the years.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1946056.Chasethee_Moon

A Thousand Splendid Suns was just wonderful.
5 People You Meet in Heaven made me think.
Childhood book - Famous Five series, I must have read those a thousand times!

We have always lived in the castle by Shirley Jackson

Absolutely brilliant in many ways. Please please read it, it’s a short book so won’t take you long but you will be so glad you read it.

Also just finished I Am Legend and it is definitely up there in the top ten.

@DonLewis

Gosh, just one book?

The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer both by Barbara Kingsolver.

The Handmaid's Tale the Maddadam Trilogy all by Margaret Atwood.

Birdsong Sebastian Faulks.

I can't choose between the Allende books.

1984 Orwell

Michael Pollan The Botany of Desire

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See.

What I loved by Siri Hustvedt

Julian Barnes: Arthur and George

Curtis Sittingfeld American Wife

Sarah Waters books.

Paula McClain The Paris Wife

Elizabeth Gilbert The Signature of All Things

And my new discovery? Ann Patchett. Loved, loved loved Bel Canto

I loved the Pairs Wife and now hate Ernest Hemingway with a passion.

Just shows you how personal taste in books is though, I’ve read through the thread and

Hated Donna tartt - battled through the goldfinch waiting for it to get good

Couldn’t be doing with tripping up over the dialect written phenetically in wuthering heights (and I’m from Yorkshire!) . Put it down about twenty pages in because it felt too much like hard work to be fun

Haaaaaated Never Let me Go - just 100% didn’t get it

Each to their own of course!!!

Love this thread.

All time favourite is The Crimson Petal and The White by Michel Faber, I just love that book.

@Sgtmajormummy

I love wide-ranging books with large casts so I enjoyed A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth and The Frederica Potter Quartet of books by A.S.Byatt. I read the quartet in the wrong order when I was in my 30s. I’m looking forward to reading them all again when I retire!

@DonLewis they made a film of Bel Canto with Julianne Lewis as the opera singer. Not a patch on the book, obviously.

I love the Frederica books. I don’t know many people who have read them.

@mynameiscalypso

Middlemarch. I didn't want to read it as it seemed so long and boring but it's just amazing. I convinced both my skeptical parents to read it too.

Yes, if I could only pick one it would probably be Middlemarch with To the Lighthouse nipping at its heels.

I must try Remains of the Day again. I have enjoyed several Kazuo Ishiguro books but I bought The Remains of the Day in audiobook format and have repeatedly fallen asleep in first chapter or two.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. Love everything about it. Read it so many times.

I also love anything by Gillian Flynn (annoys me she hasn't released a book in ages and Lisa Jewell. A new discovery is Stacey Halls, I adored both The Foundling and The Familiars. I'm excited to read Mrs England next.

Jane Eyre
To Kill a Mockingbird
A Fine Balance
Fingersmith
Grapes of Wrath

It’s impossible to pick just one, but if I have to: I really, really love Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell. The characters are astonishingly well written.

Mammoth hunters by Jean Auel

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg
Feasting Fasting by Anita Desai
The Magic Toy Shop by Angela Carter

The Boudicca series by Manda Scott
LOTR
Anne of Green Gables series
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet
Sarum by Edward Rutherford
111.22.63 by Stephen King

I loved the JoJo Moyes trilogy ‘Me before you’ ‘Me after you’ and then ‘Still me.’

I read shantaram off the back off recommendations and personally found the second half dreadful. Birdsong is fantastic. My fave is The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. It's a fantasy trilogy and is phenomenal - still waiting for the damned third book though!

Ones that have stayed with me
Unless Carol Shields and other books by her
The Shipping news..often think of that
The Poisonwood Bible and other books by Kingsolver
All Steinbeck
Portrait of a Lady
Great to see my favourites on other lists
From my childhood Anne of Green Gables series
Good Night Mr Tom
I am David

@Thirtyrock39

Mine is not very well known :- blood sugar by Suzannah Dunn It's a coming of age type book about a group of friends - starts in 1981 when they're in sixth form and every chapter is the following year over the next decade and catches up with what they're doing - it's brilliant

I've read that!

All the Harry Potter books 🙈

Stephen King The Stand, although perhaps don’t read that now 😕

I’ve now gone back to see other peoples picks and I’m pleased to see I wasn’t the only one to say Pillars of the Earth (try Sarum guys, you’ll love it).

Yes this is so good! Life among the savages is another great Shirley Jackson and isn't too long

Snowchild.
LOTR
War Lord Chronicles

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
I love fantasy and the above is ‘the best of the rest’ after LotR.
I also love Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels which have such strong female characters.