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

For a very brief time I used to go to a book club (sadly I moved away). It’s like here, so many different views of good books. I find it really interesting.
I don’t know how to pick 10 other than the ones that made me feel strongly…

Consider Phlebas - Iain M Banks
The Time Travellers Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulkes
Anything by Bill Bryson which isn’t about travel
Katherine - Anya Seton
God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Subtle Knife trilogy plus all the others that came after! Philip Pullman
Precious Bane - Mary Webb
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
Hitchhikers series
Discworld series - Terry Pratchett
American Gods - Neil Gaimen
Wolf Hall trilogy - Hilary Mantel

and now I’m over 10!

The darling buds of May , how could i have forgotten to add this to my list !
I absolutely devoured the whole 5 books ,absolutely wonderful i now need to read them again.
Also love The crimson petal ..

1. A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness
2. The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo - Steig Larsson
3. Rebecca- Daphne de Maurier
4. Flowers in the Attic - Virgina Andrews
5. Dracula- Bram Stoker
6. Where the Crawdads Sing- Delia Owens
7. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
8. The Island - Charlotte Hislop
9. The Book Theif

10.The Binding - Bridget Collins

So many more.....
Hilary mantels Wolfhall series
Dan Brown Di Vinci Code
The Witch Finders Sister Beth Underdown
The miniaturist- Jesse Burton
Me Before You - Jojo Moyes

And I love all the Thursday Murder Club books by Richard Osman

It’s so hard to chose 10 🤣

Anything by Stephen King, my favourite of his is the Dark Tower series

Flowers in the attic series

Hunger Game series

The Host

Harry Potter

Maze runner series

Enders Game (and follow on books) This series I found very thought provoking.

Jack Reacher books.

I love Oranges are not the only fruit ,so well written but so sad .

What Could Possibly Go Wrong, Chronicles of St Mary’s Jodi Taylor (These could actually be my top 15 books, but WCPGW is my favourite)
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
Emma Jane Austen
Leave it to Psmith PG Wodehouse
The Domestic Revolution Ruth Goodman
Don’t Mr Disraeli Caryl Brahms & SJ Simon
Murder Must Advertise or The Nine Tailors (can’t choose) Dorothy L Sayers
The Cricket Term Antonia Forest
The Night of the Twelfth Michael Gilbert
The Trouble with Lichen John Wyndham

I finished my list and realised I hadn’t included any Terry Pratchett, but I probably wouldn’t have been able to choose just one anyway.

I agree, I have to do a Stephen king followed by a couple of another genre. The dark tower series is fantastic. I don't think there's any stand out bad ones for me though

In no particular order, and including favourites from my childhood…

Project Hail Mary
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Death On The Nile
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban
The Neverending Story
The Running Grave
Memoirs Of A Geisha
Three Men In A Boat
Outlander
The Martian

The Hanging Tree – David Lambkin
The Ecliptic – Benjamin Wood
The Lacuna – Barbara Kingsolver
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Adventures of Sally – PG Wodehouse
These Old Shades/Venetia – Georgette Heyer
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase – Joan Aiken
The Armourer's House - Rosemary Sutcliffe
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood – Rebecca Wells
State of Wonder – Ann Patchett

A thousand splendid suns- khaled hosseini
migrations - Charlotte Mcconaghy
the goldfinch- Donna tartt
the great gatsby - f Scott Fitzgerald
kala - Colin walsh
Never let me go- Ishiguro
Where the crawdads sing
Water- John boyne

also love the Washington Poe series but they’re more of a quick enjoyable read than a profound love

1. A Kind Of Loving - Stan Barstow
2. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
3. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
4. The Casual Vacancy - J.K. Rowling
5. 20,000 Streets Under The Sky - Patrick Hamilton
6. Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
7. A Short History Of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
8. The Seduction Of Mrs Pendlebury - Margaret Forster
9. The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
10. She May Not Leave - Fay Weldon

Everything by Guy Gavriel Kay.. particularly The Lions of Al Rassan and Under Heaven.
All of Red Rising by Pierce Brown
Bernard Cornwall’s Winter King series (Arthurian) and also Giles Kristin’s Arthur books.
All of Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire series
Space by James Michener
I could go on… and on.

I agree. No bad ones so far. Maybe some I wouldn’t read again ( I do love to reread) and that would be the worst I felt. Although I wouldn’t read Pet Cemetery again because I found that so disturbing.

Yes, Barbara Pym was a wonderful writer with subtle comic insight. I like Jane & Prudence, partly for a scene where (if I’m remembering correctly) an eligible male enters a scene carrying an oversized marrow…

So many good books out there, I mostly read sets so:
The Power of Five series by Anthony Horowitz.
all of the vampire books by Charmaine Harris.
anything by Maureen Lee(my favourite are the pearl street ones)
most books by Stephen King (The Stand is my favourite)
i know not everyone likes these but I absolutely love the Twilight books.
Most books by Tolkien.
Most books by Patricia Cornwell.
A Dangerous Fortune by Ken Follett.
Ask for Andrea by Noelle W Ihli.
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

Good to see The Chronicles of St Mary's coming up 🙂

Ooh, you mentioned The Trouble with Lichen. I love John Wyndham but I prefer The Kraken Wakes, The Day of the Triffids and Web.

This is hard as if I like an author, I read everything they've ever done so then picking one book is really hard! So here goes:

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R. R. Tolkien
2. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
3. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
4. Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
5. The Game of Thrones series (technically A Song of Ice and Fire) by G.R.R. Martin
6. Magician by Raymond E. Feist (and all the rest)

7.Stephen King books - can't pick a fav

1. Angela Carter's books - The Bloody Chamber
2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

10. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - by Douglas Adams (and HHGuide as well, obviously)

Wuthering Heights - E Brontë
Emma - Austin
Tess of the dUrbervilles - Hardy
Never let me go - Ishiguro
Brick Lane - Monica Ali
Norwegian Wood - Murakami
Narnia series - CS Lewis
Elsewhere - G Zevin
Nothern Lights trilogy - Philip Pullman
Hamnet - Atwood

Ooooh this is a cracking thread OP! Thank you!

Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
Murder is Easy by Agatha Christie
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
The Hunger Games Trilogy (not including the Ballad of Songbird and Snakes, and I've not read Sunrise on the Reaping)
Sneaky 11th for Middlemarch

I had an excellent reading year last year so I am musing on whether Whalefall by Elizabeth O'Connor and I Who Have Never Know Men by Jacqueline Harper should make the list too.

Also I think most have interpreted this as novels but Educated by Tara Westover and The Diaries of Anne Frank also rank very highly for me

Also — loved The Good Terrorist - Doris Lessing
Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie
all the Iris Murdoch novels esp The philosopher’s pupil
The reluctant fundamentalist- Mosim Hamad

Aww, I had a box set of Milly-Molly-Mandy. And I wrote to the publishers and they sent me a list of all the Chalet School books as I wanted to collect them all in order ❤️

I always wanted to go to boarding school in the Alps, not a Yorkshire comprehensive.

OMG - I had forgotten Kinsey Millhone. Thank you - I get to discover them all over again 😀

In Memorian - Alice Winn
The chocolat books - Joanne Harris
Still Life - Sarah Winman
The Lewis Trilogy - Peter May
The Women - Kirstin Hannah
Cleopatra & Frankenstein - Coco Mellors
In the middle of middle America - David B Lyons
Eddie's Bastard - William Kowalski
The Spoils Of Time Trilogy - Penny Vincenzi
All this I will give to you - Delores Redondo

This is my most recent top 10 apart from the penny Vincenzi trilogy which I first read around 25 years ago and I read it every 5 years. I read around 60-70 books a year. I'm 52, so have read quite a lot since I was six years old lol.

My list is based on the books I’d happily read again and again.

1. The works of Jane Austen, especially Emma, P&P and Persuasion
2. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
3. the works of the wonderful Douglas Adams
4. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
5. Anything by Bernice Rubens with particular reference to Mr Wakefield’s Crusade & Every Man For Himself
6. Middlemarch by George Eliot
7. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
8. Collapse by Jared Diamond - an extraordinary non-fiction book exploring why certain historic civilisations may have ended (mostly self-inflicted?) Someone knowingly chopped down the last tree on Easter Island; someone waited till the end of their life for a boat of supplies from the home country that never came..
9. The works of Agatha Christie but particularly Nemesis - the work of a writer at the height of her powers
10. The Handmaid*s Tale - possibly one of the most important books of our time

Oh bloody hell, forgot the Harry Potter books, the narnia books, jack reacher books and lovely to see Milly Molly Mandy mentioned by pp.