Tell me your absolute number 1

[mrssunshinexxx]

Favourite book doesn't matter what genre ... 2018 resolution get off my phone and get my head in books again I used to love reading.... thanks in advance

@BeatriceJoanna. You have been reading it longer than I have then, and I think I first got it over 20 years ago - I’ve just had a look at my copy and it is a battered black swan edition from 1991.

Yes to Katherine deserving better! However I think I liked the fact that there was no pretence that life is perfect, the happily ever after was complicated which felt authentic.

Didiusfalco is in homage to Lindsay Davis’ Roman detective Marcus Didius Falco. The Silver Pigs is excellent.

Out of interest as you have such excellent taste is there anything else you love, just in case I haven’t read it?

Favourite author is Jane Austen, closely followed by PG Wodehouse.
Favourite book is more difficult, probably either Agatha Christie’s autobiography or John Aubrey’s Brief Lives.
If it has to be a novel, as most people seem to have interpreted it, then probably Mary Wesley’s The Camomile Lawn.

Huge fan of Anton Lesser here! Yay! I love coming across other AL devotees.

@Didiusfalco I've never read the Falco books - I really should. I only know them from the Radio 4 dramatisations. In The Silver Pigs the aforementioned Anton Lesser breathes "I want you to stay" (to Helena Justina) in such a way that I am reduced to a quivering jelly every time I listen to it.

as you have such excellent taste Well, of Trapido's other novels, I am very fond of Noah's Ark. I also like Kate Atkinson: Behind the Scenes at the Museum and particularly Emotionally Weird. I know a lot of people on here don't like that one but I love it. Strangely, I wasn't as keen on Human Croquet which lots of people seem to rate.

Otherwise, I'm a Trollope fan (Anthony not Joanna) especially the Barsetshire and Palliser novels and some Dickens, in particular, Little Dorrit. I love George Eliot's Middlemarch but don't get on so well with her other novels.

I really should be quiet now. You will have gathered it's a terrible mistake to ask me about the books I like, I can go on for hours!

The thirteenth tale
Jane Eyre
Little boy lost
The night circus
The book thief
All Kate Morton books are easy to get lost in
Memoirs of a geisha

Probably On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill. Every time I read it I notice something I have missed previously.

Oh and the bell jar & a thousand splendid suns! Too many! I'm now browsing amazon on all the great recommendations x

A Fine Balance
Cutting for Stone

Any Anita Shreve, Carol Shields or Ann Patchett

Why be happy when you can be normal? - Jeanette Winterson

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (snap, pallisers!)
The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte
Green Dolphin Country, by Elizabeth Goudge

Bilgewater - Jane Gardam I think but hard to decide. Off to look up all the others people have suggested might be the kick I need to stop messing around on here and get reading again.

Jude the Obscure
Serpent War books by Raymond Feist
Wizards first rule by Terry Goodkind
Outlander
WHeel of Time by Robert Jordan

Mine aren’t high literature but my favourites are:

Harry Potter (I couldn’t leave this off as I’m a huge fan)
Little Women
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series
The Clan of the Cave Bear series by Jean M Auel

I’m always reading something so love this thread and now have lots of books to try 🙂

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Pride and Prefudice - Jane Austin
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

Those are the three that get a yearly reread.

Others that have stayed with me and/or that I return to:

The Assasination of Margaret Thatcher - Hilary Mantel. I adored Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies too, but they’re huge, and this collection of short stories really blew me away with her talent.

Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood - the only book I’ve ever immediately started reading from the beginning again as soon as I’d finished it, because I missed ‘Grace’s’ voice

The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingslover

The World According to Garp - John Irving, a lot wrong with this book I suppose but I love it still.

The House of Spirits - Isabelle Allende

Stuart a life backwards by Alexander masters. Made me laugh out loud and cry

The Pillars of the Earth

The Hearts Invisible Furious - on Audible . Oh go this book made me laugh and cry! Just wonderful

Favourite book ever has to be
Ender's game - Orson Scott Card. So much detail, such a clever plot and so much empathy for the main character.
After that there is
Jane Eyre
Cat's eye
Rebecca
Gone with the wind
A thousand splendid suns
Mansfield Park
Behind the scenes at the Castle Museum

Whoever recommended Now I Know - YES! I loved this so much when I was a teenager and can always go back to it.

I've just read How to Stop Time by Matt Haig and loved it but all time favourites probably Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway, the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch and Oranges are not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

For comfort reading -
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (in fact any novels by Miss Pym)

The Stand.

Devoured it at 13 and 're-reading' via Audible 31 years later.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghase
Middlesex by Geoffrey Eugenides
Elinor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann

Oh and The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce by Paul Torday

Neal Stephenson - The Baroque Cycle
Dorothy Dunnett - Game of Kings
Wolf Hall

My list is much too long, I really tried to cut it but it just got even longer! Even so there are quite a few I'd like to steal from some of the lists from other posters. I wouldn't know how to choose one, what if I was in the mood for Wodehouse but I only had the James's on hand?
Jane Austen Emma
Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographies
Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep
Colette The Claudine Novels
Charles Dickens Bleak House
Marguerite Duras The Lover
Jenny Erpenbeck End of Days
Robert Graves I, Claudius and Claudius the God
Vasily Grossman Life and Fate
Marlen Haushofer The Wall
Christopher Isherwood Mr Norris Changes Trains
Henry James Washington Square
Nella Larsen Passing
Olivia Manning The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy
Nancy Mitford The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate
Alice Munro short stories
Cookie Mueller Walking through clear water in a pool painted black
Grace Paley short stories
P.G. Wodehouse all of Jeeves and Wooster
Dorothy Richardson Pilgrimage series
Joseph Roth The Radetsky March
Dorothy L. Sayers all of Lord Peter Wimsey
Bruno Schulz The Street of Crocodiles
Gertrude Stein Three Lives
Leo Tolstoy War and Peace
Edmund White The Beautiful Room is Empty
Isabel Wilkerson The Warmth of Other Suns

Jayne Eyre (fell in love with this when we studied it for GCSEs!)

Harry Potter (of course)

Shadow of the savernake (book I found on kindle, first novel by the author I think. Time travel romance, so good)