Top five teenage books of all time

[Bink]

Here's mine:

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding [cheating by doing two]
Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
Julia Strachey, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
Jack Kerouac, On The Road
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Funny how many of these are American, whereas our children's books (on the other thread) are very Brit-centric.

(Otherwise, I've got a bet on how many times the Brontes come up.)

Early teenage but I must admit I loved Judy Blume's 'Are you there God, it's me Margaret?'

Rumer Godden, The Greengage Summer
Dodie Smith, I Capture The Castle
Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind
Christiane F, Wir Kinder Vom Bahnhof Zoo
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse

Later teenage I loved Emma, Valley of the Dolls, Lord of the Rings, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, To Kill a Mocking Bird, Therese Desqueroux, Therese Raquin.

Flowers in the attic
Caerpet baggers
Wuthering H
Lolita
fear of Flying
story of o (spot the theme here)
beastly beatitudes of belthazar b

Books everyone read when I was at poncy boarding school; not what I would recommend for my daughters! Yes, and hard to pick five winners from this lot..you can tell my age though.

If I had to pick a plucked out of air top 5:

Beastly beatitudes (so clever; made me want to be a writer)
Wuthering H (evocative)
I capture the castle (sweet but with bite)
Les Grandes Meulnes (dodgy spelling)(french yoof)
Life on an African Farm (smell the dust)

Oh God - forgot the cornish sagas - demelza or whatever, Poldark, taht was it
Thornbirds
Far Pavillions (hated it but everyone read it, so I did too)
Lilian Beckwith (ditto)

gggl, you've reminded me not just of Poldark, but also of the interminable RF Delderfield and also Hugh Walpole's Herries series.
AND all of Daphne du Maurier of course

Bloody hell! I have an ancient set of Beautiful Just! etc somewhere in the attic

Oh, I remember "I am David" - loved it.

I read all the Judy Blumes and Virgina Andrews as a young teenager - 12/13. Very thrilling at the time. Flowers in the Attic was in the school library and there was always a mad rush to see if it had been returned. Not quite school library material though, eh? Utter trash with hindsight!

Aged 16ish I absolutely loved "Of Human Bondage" and "Jude the Obscure".

There were so many, I read constantly - not anymore though.

hah!

hey marina, I was in a bordeaux bookshop the other day and in the rather good english section a woman was asking the assistant for a book on australia that gave her the feel of the country and its writers before she went.....

They gave her the Thornbirds.

I waited till she was at the till and suggested peter carey. She took the peter carey.

Well done. Coleen McCullough is massive, Jerry Lewis style, in France though, isn't she (unlike Pierre Carey).

I reckon cos books are so expensive here, people buy the doorstoppers to get value for money.

I forgot Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice

Inspired by Fennel, perhaps it is time now for that late adolescent/early 20s list?

My main one was Betty Friedan (Feminine Mystique, not her more recent things which really, time-of-lifely, I really ought to be getting on to ...)

Edith Wharton
Henry James
William James
Virginia Woolf ++++++

(total cheating now, listing by author)

Should this be a separate thread?

Oh yeh Rosa all the Hesse books. Steppenwolf!
Narziss and Goldmund! Siddharta!

But this is late adolescent/ early 20s stuff for me.
How very well read some mnetters are.
[Writes down list furtively and resolves to read more.]

The other around-the-cusp-of-the-20s thing for me was starting to read contemporary writing - I am quite sure it was all dated canonical stuff before then. I first did the Booker shortlist around that age (Midnight's Children, Rites of Passage etc.) In a no-shit-Sherlock connection, this equates to me first having the money to buy books rather than being dependent on library.

When did all of you start reading contemporary things?

I was in a secondhand bookshop today and saw another staple author of my teens - AJ Cronin. There were loads of them in the school library for some reason - The Stars Look Down etc.

Early 20s I was working my way through the unversity library - I would pick an author and then plough my way through their complete works - Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates, Trollope, George Eliot (took me a while to get over my A-level dose of Silas Marner and discover ALL her other books are way better), Elizabeth Gaskell, Flaubert, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Taylor, William Trevor, Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien are the authors I can remember discovering at university.
And funnily enough most of those are the books I have been reading and rereading for the past 20 years.

Late teens: Anna Karenina, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, the Brontes, Barbara Pym plus many Italians.
Early 20s:

• Joseph Roth (Flight without end, the radetsky march). don't think he is that well known in the UK, I think he's one of the greatest writer ever.
• Daniel Pennac, the Malaussene saga.
• PG Wodehouse, lot of.
• Elias Canetti
• Raymond Carver
• Patricia Highsmith

• lots of Italians

To kill a mockingbird
Pride and Prejudice
All Jean Rhys, though I didn't understand them at the time
Christopher Isherwood's Mr Norris and Goodbye to Berlin
Brideshead Revisited

I remember reading a lot of trash

Wilbur smith
R F Delderfield
Danielle Steele
Judy BLume
Maeve Binchey
James Herriot
Agatha Christie -ok not too trashy
Whoever wrote the Tilly TRotter series

ashamed now but did love some /jeffery archers and Thorn Birds.....

Is the thornn birds the one with the priest? I read it when I was quite young, say 12. I liked it as well

it was fab ...trash but good trash

Early 20s I was trudging through a LOT of French literature, not all of it well taught
Standouts were Rabelais and Georges Perec's La Vie Mode d'Emploi. Also Racine and Corneille. You can see why one is performed nowadays and one is not.
Whenever possible I instead read all of Armistead Maupin, John Updike, Wilkie Collins, Joan Wyndham, Margaret Forster...