What is the best book you have ever read?

[Toni2011]

I'd love to know which books really stick in people's minds. Any genre, any author.

Life of Pi - the only book I have ever finished reading and really wished that it was true

Some of my favourite books...

The Life of Pi

Cloud Atlas

Gilead - can't remember the author but a lovely book

The Idiot by Dosteovsky

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

They are my top 5!

Germinale is the only book where I can't remember what I did for the half hour after finishing it. Jude was shocking, but that was something else.

But I don't think anyone would beat Dickens for me for an absolute treat, like the equivalent of a five star luxury hotel with every wish granted of a book...

Rebecca West, love her too.

Tender is the Night - F Scott Fitzgerald, and/or A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre.

Earth's Children series by Jean Auel

The Womens' Room - Marylin French

I used to love Anya Seton's books when I was in my teens - particularly "Avalon" and "Katherine".

Wilfrid Owen's poetry.

A Prayer For Owen Meany
The Grapes of Wrath
Most of Bill Bill Bryson
Oranges are not the only fruit

Bookmarking to read :)

What an impossible question to answer... describing "the best", I mean.

Here are few that stuck in my mind though... and reasons why:

Therese Raquin by Emile Zola - definitely not the best I've read, ludicrously over-heated but OMG how it carries you along. Unsympathetic characters, graphic sense of place, fantastic ratcheting up of tension. What a page turner. 20 years since I read it though and there is a horrible episode of animal cruelty which now I am owned by cats, would disturb me today far more than when I originally read it and it was nasty enough then.

Got to go, will add some more later.

Brick Lane by Monica Ali. Not a word out of place.

Midnights Children was incredible but very intense to read.

The Kite Runner and A thousand Splendid Suns both incredible, powerful stories that stay with you long afterwards.

Not a chick lit fan at all so for something lighter I love Christopher Brookmire, incredible Scottish author of the most wonderfuly black comic thrillers. Def helps if you're Scottish when reading them mind you!

Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald

Read it when I was 20 and had the world at my feet.

Oh, and I like Phillip Roth.

The Bone People - Keri Hulme

Very hard to pick just one, but if I had to then this would be it. When I finished it, I went back to the beginning and read the whole thing again, straight away.

I'm a compulsive reader - haven't put my Kindle down since I got it for Christmas. Almost impossible to choose just one - but if I really had to say - The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett. Cheating a bit - there are 6 books in the series.

The Book Thief by Markus Zuszak

www.amazon.co.uk/Not-So-Quiet-Stepdaughters-Women/dp/093531282X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296687361&sr=8-1

Found it jajas

I think it is possibly my favourite book ever.

Perfume. Patrick Suskind. Haven't seen the film. I know it would disappoint me.

I always answer Perfume by Patrick Suskind on the regular "what book did you hate" or "what book could you not be bothered to finish" bookie threads we have.

It seems to polarise people, that one.

The lovely bones, 5 people you meet in heaven, my best friends girl, stephen king or dean koontz for the thriller value... The LOR trilogy, i am a twilight-a-holic too and loved the host by stephenie meyer.

I have just finished reading The Book Thief and LOVED it!!

Still Missing by Chevy Stevens was fantastic read aswell!!

There are loads more too...

Lots of these - Midnights Children, Suitable Boy, Behind the Scenes..., Possession, The Women's Room.

Can I chuck in The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles and Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd?

Oh yes, forgot about The Book Thief, another wonderful story that def let me see WW2 from the ordinary germans perspective

for ease, i collated the list so far -

The Woman In White / Wilkie Collins
David Copperfield / Charles Dickens
Brooklyn / Colm Toibin
Hons and Rebels / Barbara Comyns
Too many mothers / Roberta Taylor
The Unconsoled / Kazuo Ishiguro
The Wasp Factory / Iain Banks
The Grapes of Wrath / John Steinbeck
Cloud Atlas / David Mitchell
A Small Island / Andrea Levy
The Blind Assassin /Margaret Atwood
My Antonia / Willa Cather
Hawkesmoor / Peter Ackroyd
Restoration / Rose Tremain
Therese Raquin / Emile Zola
Possession / AS Byatt
Complete works of William Shakespeare
Beloved / Toni Morrison

Mrs Dalloway / Virginia Woolf
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Greengage Summer / rumer godden
Daddylonglegs / Jean Webster
I capture the castle / Dodie Smith
The Stars my destination / Alfred Bester
The Secret History / Donna Tartt
Cat's Eye / Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Rings / JRR Tolkein
Bleak House / Charles Dickens
Exodus / Leon Uris
Holocaust / ??
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay / Michael Chabon
Hunting Midnight / Richard Zimmler
To kill a mockingbird / Harper Lee
The Quincunx / Charles Palliser
Gormenghast Triology / Mervyn Peake
The Snow Leopard / Peter Matthieson
Revolutionary Road / Richard Yates
The Book Thief / Markus Zusak
The Industry of Souls / Martin Booth
The History of Love / Nicole Krauss
The God of small things / Arundhati Roy
Never Let Me Go / Kazuo Ishiguro
Middlemarch / George Eliot
Parade's End / Ford Madox Ford
Song of Soloman / Toni Morisson.
The Edible Woman / Margaret Atwood
Cold Comfort Farm / Stella Gibbons
Ghostwritten / David Mitchell
Birdsong / Sebastian Faulkes
A Very Long Engagement / Sebastien Japrisot
All Quiet on the Western Front / Eric Maria Remarch
English Passengers / Matthew Kneale
The Debt to Pleasure / John Lanchester
Behind the Scenes at the Museum / Kate Atkinson
The Worst Journey in the World / Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Life of Pi / Yann Martel
The Secret History / Donna Tartt
The Unbearable Lightness of Being / Milan Kundera
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy / Douglas Adams
Perfume / Patrick Suskind
The Handmaid's Tale / Margaret Atwood
Brideshead Revisited / Evelyn Waugh
The Cleft / Doris Lessing
Anna Karenina / Leo Tolstoy
The Bronze Horseman trilogy /Paullina Simons
The Great Gatsby / F Scott Fitzgerald
A suitable boy - Vikram Seth
Emma - Jane Austen
The Kite Runner / Khaled Hosseini
Their Eyes Were Watching God / Zorah Neale Hurston
Fall On Your Knees and As The Crow Flies / Anne Marie MacDonald
Lucky Jim / Kingsley Amis
The Man In The High Castle / Philip K Dick
Wolf Hall / Hilary Mantel
Gibbons Decline And Fall / Sheri S Tepper
Unreliable Memoirs / Clive James
Lolita / Vladimir Nabokov
Line of Beauty / Alan Hollinghurst
Wild Swans / Jung Chang
Harry Thompson's biography of Peter Cook
The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman / Laurence Sterne
The scarlet letter / Nathaniel Hawthorne
Scarlet & Black / Stendhal
Master and Margarita / Mikhail Bulgakov
An Evil Cradling / Brian Keenan
Midnight's children / Salman Rushdie
The red badge of courage / Stephen Crane
The Nun / Diderot
The Dispossessed / Ursula le Guin
His Dark Materials triology / Philip Pullman
Three Men in a Boat / Jerome K Jerome
The Lovely Bones / Alice Sebold
The Hours / Michael Cunningham
Purple Hibiscus / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Half of a Yellow Sun / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Gilead / Marilynne Robinson
The Idiot / Dosteovsky
Tess of the D'Urbervilles / Thomas Hardy
Tender is the Night / F Scott Fitzgerald
A Perfect Spy / John Le Carre.
Earth's Children series / Jean Auel
The Womens' Room / Marylin French
Avalon & Katherine / Anya Seton
A Thousand Splendid Suns / Khaled Hosseini
A Prayer For Owen Meany / John Irving
Most of Bill Bill Bryson
Oranges are not the only fruit / Jeanette Winterson
Brick Lane / Monica Ali
The Bone People / Keri Hulme
The Lymond Chronicles / Dorothy Dunnett
Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War (Women & Peace) / Helen Smith
Still Missing / Chevy Stevens
The Sheltering Sky / Paul Bowles
Brazzaville Beach / William Boyd