The best books you've ever read

[JustNotFunAnymore]

Following on the from the other thread
where someone asked what the most ridiculous thing you've read in a book was. (And therefore ruining anything on my wish list 😂)
I want to know what the best book you've read is. What book I must read soon.

I'm partway through 'Becoming' by Michelle Obama. I got it as a sample and after two or three chapters had to buy it on my kindle. It's so good. She writes really well.

Ooh, that was a bit garbled where's the edit button when you need it.

@Twotinydictators

I've read ridiculous amounts of books over the years, nothing particularly highbrow, but my favourite five stories are:

Jodi Picoult - My Sisters Keeper
Alex Garland - The Beach
Alexander McCall Smith - No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
Lionel Shriver - We Need To Talk About Kevin
Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones

I've read all these and enjoyed them

Adding on

Daughters of Eve
The Handmaid's Tale
The lost art of keeping secrets

Nothing really to add as so many books and authors I love have been mentioned. I'm posting so I remember to come back for reference later.

On my goodness - The Stand is amazing. I couldn't put it down.
The Far Paviions by M M Kaye.
Atonement
Anything by Margaret Forster, difficult to get hold of these days.

The Silent Patient!

@Puddingypops

Memoirs of a geisha- Arthur brown The count of Monte Cristo - Dumas Clan of the cave bear- Jean m auel The whole shardlake series by CJ sandsome THE STAND BY STEPHEN KING

and everything else by Stephen king hahaha he is a genius

I too love Stephen King, The Stand has always been my favourite and yes, I do like the 4 part series. It’s one of the few King adaptations where I can see why they made the changes to adapt it to screenplay.

I’m longing to reread the Dark Tower series, (the later ones I only read once) but although all the books are here somewhere it could take a long time to find them.

Insomnia was the one that got me addicted.

Isabelle Hope by Christine Coltman

[quote Puddingypops]@TheBlueStocking you dig that happy crappy?[/quote]

Everything by Barbara Pym, Anne Tyler and Barbara Kingsolver. Hôtel du Lac by Anita Brookner. Joanne Harris’s novels set in France and her other series set in a school. Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, Tortilla Flat and Sweet Thursday are all very very funny but often sad too. The Secret History, as so many people have said.

@BalloonSlayer, I read The Ogre Downstairs when I was 9. I'm now in my 40s and can still remember how good it was! (Wouldn't that make an excellent TV series, a la His Dark Materials?)

Anything by Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, but particularly A Fatal Inversion, A Dark Adapted Eye, The House of Stairs, Simisola.

The Collector - John Fowles

The Shadow of the Wind

Oh and yes to Bill Bryson ( I may have been that person in hysterics reading him on the train as mentioned by a PP), also Adrian Mole and M R James.

The Day of the Triffids -John Wyndham.

Lots of great books but i am amazed that Jane Austen has been mentioned so little, especially Pride and Prejudice which i thought was hugely popular.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey 👌

I have quite freewheeling taste in books, but my absolute favourites are:

The God of Small Things
Middlemarch
East of Eden
Any Human Heart
We need to talk about Kevin
The Corrections
I am Pilgrim
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy

Also absolutely loved Music and Silence - Rose Tremain.

Aaagh can't believe I forgot my absolute no. 1 - The Blind Asassin by Margaret Atwood. I love all her stuff but especially this one.

I’m taking ‘best’ as how we felt about them at the time we read them, so:

Marian Keyes - is it ‘Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married’? I can’t even remember the plot, but it was the first chick-lit I ever enjoyed, so it stays with me for that reason.

Read a lot of everything while working in a second-hand bookshop or 4.

Susan Howatch: the Starbridge series. Also The Wheel of Fortune.

Stephen King: The Stand, Insomnia, Christine.

Elizabeth George: A Great Deliverance, A Traitor to Memory, Well-schooled for Murder and most other early ones.

Dan Simmons: The Fires of Eden, The Terror.

Macbeth.

Barbara Vine - all of them.

God I could go on for ages

And that’s not even starting on books I read as a child... Jan Marks ‘They Wait and Other Stories’ stands out massively but there are so many others.... wanders off to Amazon.

Lolita, Nabokov
1984, Orwell
Strangers on a Train, Highsmith
The Price of Salt, Highsmith
The Magic Mountain, Mann
Buddenbrooks, Mann
Wuthering Heights, Brontë
The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald
Bonjour Tristesse, Sagan
Notre Dame, Hugo
Frankenstein, Shelley
House of Ghosts, Allende
Effi Briest, Fontane
The Metamorphosis, Kafka
Simone, Feuchtwanger
Gone with the Wind, Mitchell
The Royal Game, Zweig
Anne Frank's Diary
The Cider House Rules, Irving
The Perfume, Süßkind
Angela's Ashes, McCourt

@OnlyToWin

Star of the Sea - Joseph O Connor (if I remember correctly)

Really gripping.

This was my favourite recent read. Funnily enough I switched on Radio 4 today at about 3pm and they had Part 1 an excellent adaptation of it. Also, The Overstory is very memorable.

These are the ones I find myself still thinking about years after I first read them, or I happily reread as often as I can. Most have already been mentioned.

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Anna Karenina, Tolstoy

Atonement, Ian McEwan

Thursday Next series, Jasper Fforde

Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell

Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean Dominique-Bauby

A Thousand Paper Birds, Tor Udall

Wicked, Gregory Maguire

@melisma

Aaagh can't believe I forgot my absolute no. 1 - The Blind Asassin by Margaret Atwood. I love all her stuff but especially this one.

Yes! Not a quick read, but excellent.

My favourite book ever is The Stand by Stephen King.

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Anything by Philip Roth
Ditto Graham Greene
John Updike Rabbit trilogy
Any Vonnegut
All Jane Austen
Count of Monte Cristo
Decline and Fall
Cold Comfort Farm
To kill a mockingbird
Anything by Gogol but especially Dead Souls
All John le Carre
All Len Deighton
Donna Leon Brunetti books
Camilleri Montalbano books
The Goldfinch

I don't read much non-fiction but I loved They Marched Into Sunlight

Placemarking I must reread the secret history, I remember disliking it but no idea why.