To ask what are your top ten favourite books?

[Theda13]

I’m looking for recommendations, and thought this thread may be of some help to others too.

Mine are:

1. The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price
2. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
3. The Book Thief by Markus Kusak
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
6. Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian
7. The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
8. 1984 by George Orwell
9. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
10. Carol by Patricia Highsmith

Current favourites - some classics and some I just love

The Great Gatsy
Jekyll & Hyde
Pride & Prejudice
The Beesting
Demon Copperhead
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Of Mice And Men
The End of the Affair
The Comedians
The Third Man
The Kite Runner

I keep seeing other peoples lists and changing my mind!

Great thread for recommendations!

@busybusybusy2015

Oh definitely!

My children’s book list would include:

The Hobbit, Watership Down & Tiffany Aching series (already mentioned)
The Dark is Rising series
Harry Potter
Goodnight Mr Tom 😭😭
A Monster Calls
The Chronicles of Prydain
How I Live Now
The Secret Garden

So nice to see We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves on someone else's list. I just adored that novel but no one I know has quite the same passion for it.

I loved we are all completely besides ourselves! Great shout. If you liked that a lot I'd recommend trying I'm thinking of ending things. I thought it had a similar vibe.

Currently, in no particular order:

Lolita - Nabokov
The Sound & The Fury - Faulkner
Lincoln in the Bardo - Saunders
And the Ass Saw the Angel - Cave
Geek Love - Dunn
Great Expectations - Dickens
A Tale for the Time Being - Ozeki
Klara and the Sun - Ishiguro
Beloved - Morrison
The Little Prince - De Saint-Exupery

Extras (cause I don’t like rules):
Child of God - McCarthy
Hangasman - Jackson

Bonus: short story collections:
What I Talk About When I Talk About Love - Carver
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed - Enriquez

Oh yes, I loved that one too. And I Capture the Castle and Cold Comfort Farm. keep seeing things on other people's lists that I want to add to mine.

Oh, I have The Silver Sword saved on my kindle app. I loved the series so much when it was on television many, many years ago. I was very young and it was the first story to make me cry!

In no particular order:
A Year in Provence
The boy in the striped pyjamas
Call Me Elizabeth
Black Beauty
The Greek Village series
The midnight library
The handmaid's tale
The testaments

So many but these came first in random order. I used to be a voracious reader from a young age. Now I struggle to concentrate at times which makes me sad.

In no particular order:
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
The Magus - John Fowles
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
The Passage - Justin Cronin
A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Shadow of the Moon - MM Kaye
An Infamous Army - Georgette Heyer
Tom's Midnight Garden - Philippa Pearce

A Little Princess was one of my childhood favourites - gorgeous book! Nice choice

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is one of my favourites too. It narrowly missed out on 10th place for me.

Ah - I forgot to add my eleventh: Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes. I don’t like all her books but that one is head and shoulders above the rest. An extraordinarily well written novel.

Dickens: David Copperfield
Evelyn Waugh: The Sword of Honour
Patrick Fermor: A Time of Gifts
Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That
P. G. Wodehouse: Right Ho Jeeves
Anthony Burgess: Enderby
Iris Murdoch: The Sea, The Sea
Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point
Virginia Woolf: Orlando
Oscar Wilde: Dorian Gray

I studied I know why the caged bird sings for a level, amazing book

Oh can we have more than 10? I also adore Rachel’s Holiday
also The Godfather

I’m cheating and coming back with an extra.

All my Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews.

Inside Mr Enderby? The first one in the series?

Pride and prejudice - Jane austen
emma - Jane Austen
pursuit of love - Nancy Mitford
rebecca - Daphne du maurier
jamaica inn - Daphne du Maurier
a tale of two cities - Charles dickens
Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
far from the madding crowd - hardy
the blind assassin - Margaret Atwood
Age of innocence Edith Wharton

1. A Far Cry From Kensington - Muriel Spark
2. Love in a Cold Climate - Nancy Mitford
3. The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler
4. Flights - Olga Tocarczuk
5. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
6. Damon Runyan's short stories
7. The Door - Magda Szabo
8. Emma - Jane Austen
9. Manhattan Beach - Jennifer Egan
10. Lady Eustace's Diamond - Anthony Trollope

I love lots of book series and authors mentioned here - Kinsey Millhone, Barbara Pym, Poirot, etc but these are the single books I'd choose

I’m several chapters into Anna Kareinina at the moment, admittedly I’m finding it rather intimidating!

Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurty
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The Magic Toy Shop - Angela Carter
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout
The Magic Faraway Tree books - Enid B
Wuthering Heights - EB
Anne of Green Gables
Please Kill Me - Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil
Keep the Aspidistra Flying - Orwell

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We Need To Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
Nights at the Circus - Angela Carter
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart
The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

Yes, the first one is the best. It’s the one most like a novel. To me, Burgess is more of a poet than a novelist, and the Enderby books are explosions of language - firework displays of brilliance. It’s no coincidence that he was a great Joyce scholar.

I tend to think of trilogies as just one book though - as with Waugh’s Sword of Honour or Ford’s Parade’s End. I even think of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time as a single book.

The Quiet American - Graham Greene