To ask what the best book you've ever read is?

[AtlasShrugged]

As above really. Inspired by the worst book thread running at the moment. What's the best book you've ever read? And why?

IT

The Catcher in the Rye

1984

Impossible to say but here are some that have withstood rereading:

100 Years of Solitude
The Oldman and the Sea
Things Fall Apart
1984
The Emperor of Maladies
Song of Solomon
Thinking Fast and Slow
Hamlet
Catch 22
The Stranger
Leaves of Grass
The Doll's House
Their Eyes Were Watching God

Dr Zhivago
Anna Karenina
Life of Pi
Midnights children

Also-- Too Big to Fail and When Genius Failed...

Half of a Yellow Sun
The Old Man and the Sea

Life of Pi-- yes!!

Wuthering Heights

LOTR
Memoirs of a Geisha
Dune

The Book of Strange New Things - Michel Faber's space dystopia blew my head off. Extraordinary that the same man wrote bonnet-buster Crimson Petal & the White.

Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn - the ultimate misery memoir, very, very insightful and finally extremely cheering about recovery from one's nearest and dearest

My Family and Other Animals - laffs eternal

Fingersmith

Everything by every Mitford

Birdsong
All The Light We Cannot See

Oh and The Stand - have to get a King book in there...

@LondonGirl83 the dolls house.. is that m.j Aldridge?

Loved the first book, was less impressed but the second so put off buying the doll's house which is the third. But if it's worth a reread then it's certainly worth a first read

The Catcher in the Rye
Matilda
1984
The Grapes of Wrath
Catch 22

Doll's House is a play by Ibsen. We had to read it in school and its amazing.

the lost art of letter writing by menna van praag is truly exquisite.

Funny how many of these have appeared in the other thread. Interested The Goldfinch, for instance and is my most hated book, but others love it.

As already mentioned, my all time favourite is A Thousand Splendid Suns. Fantastic read, and I learnt so much from it.

Dead Souls by Gogol

My sentence on the Goldfinch made no sense. Not sure how it ended up like that.

Lots already mentioned.
The Night Circus
The Red Tent
Perfume

The Kite Runner

Oh dear, I can't pick just one! These are my favourites.
The Woman in White
Pride and Prejudice
Birdsong
Wild Swans
A Fine Balance
A Suitable Boy
The Garden of Evening Mists

Pride and Prejudice is the book I read the most often.
Spies by Michael Frayn is haunting.
Loved The Secret History the first time I read it, the second time not so much.

If I absolutely had to choose only one it would be "The Sun Also Rises" Ernest Hemingway - fantastic prose and the most poignant ending

Or "Brideshead Revisited" - also good prose and poignant but in a different way

The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom

'All endings are also beginnings, we just don't know it at the time'