What books do you think are essential reading?

[JazzerMcCreary]

I’m turning 29 tomorrow. I’ve decided that as I’ve either done or have no interest in doing the typical ‘pre 30 bucket list’ activities, I’m going to try to read 30 new books over the next year.

So tell me, what books would be on your list?

Lots of the above, with an emphatic YES to A Fine Balance and Half of a Yellow Sun.

Also, with a random rummage through my brain:
The Portrait of a Lady
The Golden Gate (Vikram Seth)
The Mortdecai Trilogy (Kyril Bonfiglioli)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
The London Pigeon Wars (Patrick Neate)
Middlemarch (much more fun than you might think)
Our Mutual Friend
The Way We Live Now
Pretty much anything by Elizabeth Strout
State of Wonder (Ann Patchett)
The Fitz and the Fool books by Robin Hobb.

Kate Atkinson: "Not the End of the World". Some of the most brilliant short stories I've ever read.

Many of mine have been mentioned already but here goes

Wolf Hall
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
The Woman in White
Rebecca
The Professor and the Housekeeper
The Quincunx
Shuggie Bain
Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell
Stardust
Life after life/ A God in Ruins
The Box of Delights
Rebecca
Emma
I am Legend
The Stand

Year of Wonders
Room
Cloud Atlas
The Bone Clocks
The Remains of the Day
Oryx and Crake

@ScribblyBaller "If this is a Man" haunts me.

I second the wind up bird chronicle, or any marakumi. Other favourites include:
Wild swans
Shantaram
Half a yellow sun
Thousand splendid suns
Poison wood bible.
Shadow in the wind

Recent reads that I couldn’t put down (but massive tear jerkers) were:
Shuggie Bain
A little life
Perks of being a wallflower

Slave by Mende Nazer

There was a film about it not long ago but it didn’t reflect what was in the book properly

Bleak House
Frankenstein
Jude the Obscure
Alias Grace
The Penelopiad
The Blind Assassin
Our Mutual Friend
Wuthering Heights
Persuasion
Fingersmith
In the Company if the Courtesan
Wolf Hall
The Goldfinch
The Law and the Lady (first female detective!)
Triomf
Cloud Atlas
IT

A man named Ove

Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones (Its a children's book but I read it twice I loved it so much). She also wrote Howl's Moving Castle which is great too.

Adult books 'Starter for 10' by David Nicholls is hilarious and I read it in a weekend I loved it that much.

Also good is The Beach by Alex Garland and The Blue by Lucy Clarke if you like stories about people in their early twenties who go travelling.

Happy by Derren Brown is really uplifting

Hey Nostradamus by Douglas Coupland. I read a lot and this one always stays with me.

Depending on your tastes, I’d read everything by Terry Pratchett

The Vanishing Half. I loved it so much and I am hard to please.

The Road
The secret life of bees
Before the coffee gets cold

An Interview with a Vampire by Anne Fine is also good

If you are into fantasy (but not high fantasy) then Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles are my favourite books of all time. I could read them over and over again. Pre-warning though- the final book of the trilogy hasn’t been released (and fans have been waiting a long time for it).

Sorry meant Anne Rice not Anne Fine 😂

On the Beach- Neville Chute
Down and out in Paris and London - George Orwell
Castaway - Lucy Irvine
A Monks Guide to a Clean House and Mind - Shoukei Matsumoto

I always always recommend people to read A Prayer for Owen Meany. They hardly ever do though, unfortunately! I can’t describe how brilliant it is.

If you like books, which you presumably do, then the “Thursday Next” novels by Jasper Fforde are really good fun. I think the first one is The Eyre Affair.

If you’ve not read any of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, then maybe one of those? I wouldn’t recommend the first one, but “Mort” is a good start I think, or “Guards! Guards!”

The Moonstone or The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

Also
His Dark Materials trilogy Philip Pullman
Wool trilogy - Hugh Howey

www.oreilly.com/library/view/sed-awk/1565922255/

But maybe that's just me...

Anything by Mave Binchy.

Wide Sargasso Sea
Rebecca
Vurt
Neuromancer
Midnight's Children
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I once stumbled across 'Endurance' by Alfred Lansing in a bookshop and I thought it was amazing (and not too long).

For fiction I would say Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, easy read and just conjures up so many feelings.

I Claudius and Claudius the God.
Night Watch by Terry Pratchett.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

Lord of the Rings
Pride and Prejudice
Othello

My top10 books

• Crime and Punishment - Dostoïevski
• Master and Margerita - Boulgakov
• The last of the Soviet - Svetlana Alexievitch (all her books actually but founf this one especially compelling)
• A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
• The Demon - Hubert Selby Jr
• One day in the life of Ivan Denisovic - Soljhenitsyn
• The Gray House - Mariam Petrosyan
• A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
• Behind the scenes at the Museum - Kate Atkinson
• In Cold Blood - Truman Capote

Aaaand let me add another one:

• Pet Semetary - Stephen King